Occultism

Religion, the Occult, and the Paranormal (4 volume reprint series with Routledge), 2015

The first volume of Religion, the Occult, and the Paranormal is concerned with how people have interpreted experiences of a religious, occult, or paranormal nature, and the approaches that scholars employ in order to study such phenomena, which are often elusive and difficult to locate in the various frameworks that people accept as ‘reality’. Wouter Hanegraaff has noted that, "[i]n studying religion, scholars are dependent on believers expressing their awareness of a meta-empirical reality in empirically perceptible ways (words, images, behaviour etc.) but, qua scholars, they do not themselves have direct access to the meta-empirical … [M]ethodological agnosticism is the only proper attitude" (1995: 101). Yet many scholars involved in the study of esotericism and paranormal experiences are themselves ‘insiders’ to one or other tradition or practice, a phenomenon that has bedevilled the academic study of religion, in which a significant number of scholars have been theologically motivated. So, as Hugh Urban has asked, how do ‘outsiders’ study secret or restricted traditions, and does the intimate and closed nature of the teacher-pupil relationship result in the conundrum that ‘if one “knows,” one cannot speak; and if one speaks, one must not really “know” ‘ (Urban 1998: 210)? An unsolved question is, ‘Must the study of all non-normative experience involve the scholar as participant?’ Another important underlying issue concerns the connections between the three terms, ‘religion’, the ‘occult’, and the ‘paranormal’; how closely are they related? It is possible to situate them on a continuum, with religion at one end, signifying official, sanctioned non-normative experiences, the occult (which simply means ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ and is the Latin-derived equivalent of the Greek-derived term ‘esoteric’) in the middle, and the radically de-institutionalised, individual and ‘unofficial’ experiences of the paranormal at the other end? Antoine Faivre, an early and influential scholar of Western Esotericism, posited a six-point definition of esotericism: 1) ‘[s]ymbolic and real correspondences … are said to exist among all parts of the universe, both seen and unseen’ (1994: 10); 2) Nature is experienced as alive and pulsating with energy; 3) the use of imagination to identify and utilise mediations between the material and spiritual worlds; 4) the transmutation of the individual initiate of esoteric wisdom, from a lower to a higher state; 5) the use of concordance, where attempts are made to ‘establish common denominators between two different traditions or even more, among all traditions’ (1994: 14); and 6) the transmission of esoteric knowledge directly from teacher to pupil. This model has been questioned, but it marks the occult and esoteric out as distinct from both organised religion (such as Roman Catholicism) and deregulated spiritualities (such as the ‘New Age’).

2015

The legacy of the Enlightenment is increasingly contested in the twenty-first century. It is undeniable that secularisation has gained ground as institutional Christianity retreated from the public sphere, but since the mid-twentieth century the supernatural (a close relative of religion, but one liberated from the traditional and institutional aspects of that phenomenon) has been resurgent in the West (Hanegraaff 2003). The early sociologist of religion Max Weber (1864-1920) identified ‘the disenchantment of the world’ (die Entzauberung der Welt) as the retreat of belief and participation in spirit-filled nature and traditional Christian religion, and the advance of science, despite the fact that its certainties failed to satisfy the moral and existential questions of, ‘[w]hat shall we do and how shall we live?’ (Weber 2001[1948]: 143). In the West, the Christian churches have trenchantly resisted the notion that ‘religion’ (which is traditional, legitimate, respectable and represents God and the miraculous) might have anything in common with unauthorised manifestations of the supernatural (the occult and the paranormal, now mainstreamed as prominent discursive motifs in popular culture). Following Weber, Keith Thomas in his seminal work, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) asserted that magical and supernatural beliefs no longer had traction in modern society. He contended that intelligent, modern people no longer believed in astrological systems, divination, ancient prophecies, ghosts, or fairies (Thomas 1971: ix). Yet recent scholarship in the social sciences (in particular, Religious Studies) has revealed this disclaimer to be an assertion of professional boundary maintenance. Both embattled religious institutions in secular modernity, and the modern secular state itself, with its exaltation of science and technology, can be viewed as being under siege by the unsanctioned and powerfully renascent occult and paranormal. The paranormal is immensely popular in contemporary culture, and includes both Christian (angels) and non-Christian supernatural phenomena (ghosts, witches). Indeed, as Jeffrey J. Kripal has stated, it is ‘our secret in plain sight’ (Kripal 2010: 7).

The first volume of this series has equipped us with the methodological tools for examining the occult and paranormal. The second has shown us that these themes have been present since the earliest times. This third volume of the Religion, the Occult, and the Paranormal provides examples of some of the rich diversity of ideas, practices and groups engaged in various ways with these supernatural considerations. Occult practices and ideas around the paranormal are found within each of the major world religions, often in connection with the more mythical aspects of those traditions. Bibliomancy, or divination using books, thrives within many forms of Christianity, Islamic theology is resplendent with jinns that can intervene in everyday life, and no process is more mysterious than the divinatory practices that foretell the next Dalai Lama in the “Yellow Hat” school of Tibetan Buddhism. Some of the chapters presented herein will explore just some of those crevices in South Asian religions

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...

Aries, 2014

Book review of Arthur Versluis, Lee Irwin, and Melinda Phillips (eds.), Esotericism, Religion, and Politics (Minneapolis, MI: New Cultures Press 2012).

Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2002

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

ed.). Occult Traditions. Colac: Numen Books, 2012. 308 pp. ISBN: 978-0987158130. $29.95.

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

2002

Not many books deserve the epithet fascinating, but this is one of them. Excluding the encyclopedic and reference works edited by J. Gordon Melton, Philip Jenkins's book may be the most comprehensive recent study of new religious movements in North America, and it brings an invaluable historical perspective to this topic. Religious innovation, far from being a novelty of the post-1960s era, appears here as an enduring feature of American religions. Mystics and Messiahs adds to Jenkins's impressive oeuvre, including books on the social construction of serial homicide, the symbolic politics of designer drugs, child pornography on the Internet, pedophilia among Catholic priests, moral panics related to child molestation, and right-wing political movements in America, not to mention a history of the United States and a history of Wales. Wicca. Jenkins interweaves his discussion of these groups with a treatment of "anticultism" in all its variants: anti-Catholicism, anti-Freemasonry, anti-Mormonism, opposition to Christian Science, the 1970s cult scare, the 1980s furor over Satanic ritual abuse, and cult deprogrammers. Baptists, Catholics, Evangelicals, Methodists, and Presbyterians often provide points of comparison, and Jenkins notes that many groups now regarded as mainstream were once decidedly marginal.

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Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, 2008

Among spiritual developments that overlap with Spiritualities of Life and are of growing interest is that of esotericism. This article examines the changing relationship between esotericism and Christianity from the nineteenth century. Under the impact of secularisation, this relationship changed from one in which esotericists identified themselves as Christians and made use of Christian symbolism and terminology to one in which many esotericists, influenced by secular modes of thinking and eventually free to express themselves as they saw fit, sought to expound their philosophy and beliefs in 'scientific' language. The historical study of Western esotericism would be greatly enriched by sociological studies; and sociological studies of New Age spirituality, neo-paganism, contemporary magic, New Religious Movements, and so forth, would be greatly enriched by making use of the insights gained in the historical study of Western esotericism.

American Historical Review, 2005

UPDATE: This paper has been edited and published in two journals: 1) Theosophical History Vol. XIX Issue 1, January 2017, pp. 5-37 and 2) Heredom - Vol. 24 Below is the original abstract for the paper when I first uploaded it to Academia.edu: This is an unpublished paper written in 2014 that was apparently lost by the journal to which it was submitted. Although the research for this paper served as the foundation for a section in Chapter 2 of my book A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Vol. 1: White American Muslims before 1975 (Brill, 2015), the present essay contains a few pieces of information not included in the book. Also, this essay contains references to another unpublished essay I wrote (‘Kenneth R.H. MacKenzie’s “Papers on Masonry” and the Spread of Islamic-Identity Organizations in the U.S. and England in the Late Nineteenth Century’), which was supposed to be released in an edited volume that has been put on hold indefinitely. Much of the research for that essay was used in Chapter 4 of A History. Finally, it should be mentioned that I have not edited the present essay since the time I originally submitted it, so it may contain some writing and research flaws.

In: Kurt Almqvist & Louise Belfrage (eds.), Hilma af Klint: The Art of Seeing the Invisible, Stockholm 2015.