Afterword: Outlines of a New Roadmap

Abstract

We opened this volume by observing that esotericism scholars’ scope is undergoing a phase of geographical, cultural, and demographic expansion. With these developments comes the need for theoretical andmethodological reflection. As scholars are now once again inquiring about esotericism in a global context—not as part of a phenomenological comparative program, but as a critical historical undertaking—it has become clear that some of the field’s core assumptions and key terminology must be rethought. The chapters of this book have demonstrated this need in a number of different ways, and put theoretical tools and existing scholarly literatures on the table that would help the field succeed at the task. If there is one central assumption that rises above all others, due to its centrality to the field and the way its consequences make themselves felt on a number of different issues, it is the Eurocentrism embedded in the notion that esotericism is specifically “Western.” Chapters in this book have drawn on a number of scholarly literatures that critique this issue in different but compatible ways, notably postcolonial studies and global history (Strube, 2021), decolonial approaches (Villalba, 2021, Page and Finley, 2021), and critical race and whiteness studies (Bakker, 2021). The chapters demonstrate that, contrary to some polemical framing that has now become fashionable even in the field of esotericism, these approaches are not out on an iconoclastic mission to demolishWestern civilization and denigrate its values: they are about doing historical and social-scientific work in a theoretically andmethodologically more substantiated way. This means taking into account the complexities and contingencies, the ambiguities and contradictions, and the ruptures and continuities of the historical developments that have shaped not only understandings of “Western civilization,” but of “esotericism” as well. Decades of scholarship have demonstrated how diffusionist assumptions about the unilateral spread of Western knowledge have obstructed our understanding of such complexities and still play a crucial part in present-day scholarly and political polemics. What we have called the “diffusionist reaction” to global approaches in the study of esotericism is exemplary not only of the neglect but also of the outright misrepresentation of such insights, and also illustrate a lack of (self-)reflection on the positionality of those who, today, carry out historical or socialscientific research on esotericism. In this sense, we hold that the structural analysis of biases and power inequalities that is of major concern for post-