New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism最新文献

{"title":"Double Toil and Gender Trouble? Performativity and Femininity in the Cauldron of Esotericism Research","authors":"M. White","doi":"10.1163/9789004446458_011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446458_011","url":null,"abstract":"“Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” Thus chant the three potion-brewing witches ominously in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (4.1.10–38). The witch’s cauldron is a fitting starting point for an exploration of (Western) esotericism, gender, and femininity. Boiling and brewing, poisoning and stewing, have gendered connotations, evoking the labor of house chores—socially coded as feminine—and the historically misogynistic stereotype of the witch that has been subject to feminist reworkings in modern esotericism and Paganism (Hanegraaff, 2002). The witches’ song—and the stirring of a proverbial pot or cauldron—conjures the idea of trouble. Analytically, troubling or causing trouble can mean challenging taken-for-granted categories—surface and core, dominance and subjugation, female and male. The queer associations of the term “trouble” are epitomized by Judith Butler’s paradigmatic work of queer theory, Gender Trouble (1999). The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of women’s studies or women’s history as a distinct academic domain, with feminist scholars bringing attention to the obscuration of women’s historical contributions to culture and society. Over time, this corrective focus on women gave way to analyses of masculinity and femininity as socially constructed. As highlighted by JoanW. Scott (1986), the growing preference for the term “gender” over that of “women’s studies” in academia reflects an understanding that neither women’s nor men’s social experiences happen in isolation. Simone de Beauvoir’s (1987, p. 267) famous declaration that “[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” epitomizes the view that what is perceived as feminine and masculine is socially constructed, rather than the outward manifestations of some natural, gendered essence. A distinction between physical sex and social gender allowed feminist scholars to theorize the roles and expectations attached to masculinity and femininity as separate from the supposedly “natural” bodies they were projected onto. From the 1990s on, postmodern and poststructuralist interventions have challenged this division, with scholars of queer theory—a paradigm emerging from the intersection of gender and gay and lesbian studies—highlighting the link between the construction of sex, gender, and sexuality. The term queer is often used to indicate configurations of gender and sexuality that displace het-","PeriodicalId":185269,"journal":{"name":"New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121134951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards the Study of Esotericism without the “Western”: Esotericism from the Perspective of a Global Religious History","authors":"J. Strube","doi":"10.1163/9789004446458_004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446458_004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter holds that the demarcation “Western” is a significant shortcoming of the study of esotericism. While it has helped to draw the contours of an emerging field in its earlier stages, it has by now become an impediment to its further establishment. As most scholars would agree, “Western” is a historically contingent and highly volatile concept that is as much ideological as geographical. While the same holds true for many concepts with which scholars operate, other fields of study have long gone through a difficult and often tedious process of self-reflection and critical debate to deal with this challenge. Such debates have by no means been absent from the field of Western esotericism, but so far they have yielded limited and overall unsatisfying results. As discussed in the introduction to this volume, Wouter Hanegraaff has recently suggested conducting research on esotericism as a corrective to “those radical theorists who are so eager to deconstruct ‘Western culture.’” This research, unlike “postmodern” approaches, “is best done with a minimum of theoretical baggage, at least at the outset, because the prime objective consists in listening to what the sources have to tell us instead of imposing our own ideas on them” (Hanegraaff, 2019, p. 151, original emphasis). Surely one does not have to be a “radical” to recognize the need for a critical approach to notions such as “Western culture,” and neither does one have to be lost in “postmodern” theory to maintain the impossibility of simply “listening” to what the sources have to tell.What Hanegraaff designates as an excess of postmodern radical theory are insights that have been established, on the basis of strong arguments and sound research, in other fields and disciplines, some of them fairly conservative, for several decades. Instead of driving a wedge between the chimera of postmodern radical theorists and those who allegedly do empirical history by listening to the sources, the main plea of this chapter is for an open dialogue that encourages a plurality of approaches, which will transcend the confines of Western esotericism and has the potential to initiate a fruitful dialogue with other fields. This is especially relevant because, as will be seen, previous criticism of the “Western” demarcation has provoked what I refer to as the “diffusionist reaction,” which depicts esotericism as a European “export” to the rest of the world.","PeriodicalId":185269,"journal":{"name":"New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115352522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rejected Knowledge Reconsidered: Some Methodological Notes on Esotericism and Marginality","authors":"E. Asprem","doi":"10.1163/9789004446458_008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446458_008","url":null,"abstract":"The notion that esotericism is a form of rejected knowledge has come back in style since the publication of Wouter J. Hanegraaff ’s Esotericism and the Academy in 2012. The association of esotericism with heterodoxy, deviance, opposition, and marginalization is itself old news: it has been a standard trope in insider discourses at least since the nineteenth century, and has also featured in earlier scholarly approaches to the field. In its strictest formulation, the new rejected knowledge model differs from these earlier approaches in important ways. Its central claim is that the historiographical category of “esotericism” emerged from heresiological writings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which for the first time imagined a diverse set of “heterodoxies” that we now associate with the category as “related currents.” However, I will argue that the new rejected knowledge model also comes in an inflated version, in which the distinction between the historiographic concept (“esotericism”) and its subject matter becomes blurred. The strict version represents an important contribution to the conceptual history of “esotericism.” The inflated version, by contrast, introduces a host of problems that range from how groups and individuals are represented, to how we analyze and explain the data, to how esotericism is legitimized as a relevant field of study in the academy.","PeriodicalId":185269,"journal":{"name":"New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism","volume":"130 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125283290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Interpretation Reconsidered: The Definitional Progression in the Study of Esotericism as a Case in Point for the Varifocal Theory of Interpretation","authors":"D. Okropiridze","doi":"10.1163/9789004446458_013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446458_013","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter sets out to explore and resolve a philosophical problem, which is at the core of each and every act of interpretation, no matter the subject. Scholarship on esotericism will serve as a case study for the conundrum of opposing interpretations, which—regardless of the intellectual effort—cannot be squared due to their incommensurability and cannot be applied adequately due to their individual necessity. Once the simultaneous incommensurability and individual necessity of the interpretational directionalities in question is understood, a philosophically coherent outline of their side-by-side application emerges, helping the study of esotericism—and by extension the study of any given entity—to a clearer and broader comprehension of the respective subject of inquiry. The first segment starts out with the definitional progression in the study of esotericism, by selecting the approaches advanced by Antoine Faivre, Wouter Hanegraaff, Michael Bergunder, and Egil Asprem. The argument made here consists in the observation that interpretations of esotericism fall into two categories; one assumes that our interpretation results from esotericism showing itself to the interpreter while the other suggests that our interpretations are socially negotiated projections. The second segment argues that these two fundamental modes of interpretation can be thought of as fundamentally irreconcilable directionalities of interpretation. The implication is that the incommensurability at the core of the interpretational endeavormust be understood philosophically in order to arrive at a clear understanding of esotericism. The third segment explores the rationale behind the simultaneously incommensurable and individually necessary directionalities of interpretation, emphasizing the need to reject attempts of forcibly synthesizing both approaches as the fusion of one with the other is logically impossible, leading to contradictions and a fragmentary appreciation of the interpreted subject. The fourth segment provides a philosophically reflected theory of interpretation, which refrains from a hierarchical ordering of the two incommensurable directionalities, allowing for an analysis of esotericism that continuously oscillates between one and the other option, in order to arrive at an optimal understanding of the subject. The fifth and last segment summarizes the argument and offers","PeriodicalId":185269,"journal":{"name":"New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism","volume":"239 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124628917","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Occult among the Aborigines of South America? Some Remarks on Race, Coloniality, and the West in the Study of Esotericism","authors":"M. Villalba","doi":"10.1163/9789004446458_006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446458_006","url":null,"abstract":"In recent discussions about its global dimensions, esotericism is conceived as a “Western European” phenomenon “spread” or “diffused” from Western Europe to the rest of the world. This can be seen in Wouter Hanegraaff ’s notion of a “globalization” of esotericism, by which “originally European esoteric or occultist ideas and practices have now spread all over the globe” (2015, p. 86); in Henrik Bogdan and Gordan Djurdjevic’s proposal to understand how “occultism changes when it ‘spreads’ to new environments” (2013, p. 5); in Granholm’s statement that “often ‘Western culture’ is used to denote a ‘European culture’, which has spread beyond Europe” (2013, p. 18); or in Juan Pablo Bubello’s perspective on esotericism in Latin America that presents the idea of a “diffusion of Western-European esotericism in the New Continent in the sixteenth-nineteenth centuries” (2017, p. 39). In contrast, I argue that esotericism is not a Western European phenomenon spread to the New Continent, as it did not originate exclusively in Europe. Rather, its emergence can only be fully comprehended in light of the conquest of America. While the scope of this article can hardly suffice to fully elaborate this argument, I provide examples from the conquest of the Anáhuac, later known as Mexico, shedding new light on both the nature of the phenomenon and the historical context of its emergence. In the first part of this article, I show how aborigines educated in Castilian institutions produced modern esoteric discourses grounded in Platonism to resist the colonization of their past and integrate it in a European historiography of salvation. In doing so I briefly describe the result of this in modern Mexico, what I term a racial prisca theologia in the cultural movement known as the “Mexican Renaissance” (1920–1925). Second, I show how the aforementioned diffusionist perspectives are grounded in a misleading Eurocentric premise, making it difficult to address these issues in a productive manner. By denying the Iberian modernity and isolating Europe from its colonial context, this practice conceives modernity (and esotericism) as an exclusive intra-European phenomenon (that would later spread), giving no role to non-European “others,” and most importantly to the Iberian Peninsula, in its constitution. Further exploring the context of its","PeriodicalId":185269,"journal":{"name":"New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125673615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Receptions of Revelations: A Future for the Study of Esotericism and Antiquity","authors":"D. Burns","doi":"10.1163/9789004446458_003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446458_003","url":null,"abstract":"There is no study of “esotericism” (hereafter referred to without scare quotes) in which the literature and legacy of the ancient Mediterranean world do not play a primary role.1 To take several examples, the so-called Yates paradigm derived from Frances Yates’s celebrated work Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition may be understood as not just relating a history of a neglected Renaissance philosopher and practitioner of magic, but the reception and revival of ancient Platonism and Hermetism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Yates, 1964). The Yates paradigm has also been formative to Wouter Hanegraaff ’s many studies on (Western) esotericism, a history of modern “rejected knowledge” which deals in some way with the “gnosis” experienced by ancient philosophers making claims to eastern wisdom, a phenomenon called “Platonic Orientalism” (see below). Kocku von Stuckrad, meanwhile, has employed the term esotericism to denote wider cultural discourses that deal with themediation of secrecy, concealment, and revelation of “absolute knowledge” in both antiquity and modernity, central topoi of which include Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Jewish mysticism (von Stuckrad, 2010; esp. von Stuckrad, 2015). “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Specialists in the study of Mediterranean antiquity have already for some time been debating the difficult status of roughly the same body of ancient evidence (Burns, 2015b, p. 103). In early twentieth-century scholarship, one reads of a kind of “occult syncretism” of the later Roman empire, exemplified in Neoplatonic theurgy, a “spineless syncretism” which was “sucking the life-blood out of Hellenism,” in Eric Robertson Dodds’s memorable phrasing (Dodds, 1947, pp, 58–59). John Dillon’s classic textbook The Middle Platonists closes with an appendix on what he loosely termed the “Platonic Underworld,” i.e. Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and the Chaldean Oracles, viz. Neoplatonic theurgy (see below).2 Garth Fow-","PeriodicalId":185269,"journal":{"name":"New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125829604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Afterword: Outlines of a New Roadmap","authors":"E. Asprem, J. Strube","doi":"10.1163/9789004446458_014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446458_014","url":null,"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-","PeriodicalId":185269,"journal":{"name":"New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117220874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“That I Did Love the Moor to Live with Him”: Islam in/and the Study of “Western Esotericism”","authors":"L. Saif","doi":"10.1163/9789004446458_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446458_005","url":null,"abstract":"In recent years, the field of “Western esotericism” has been confronted by problems related to the cultural and regional demarcations it has adopted. This field is based on a longue durée narrative that underplays non-“Western” currents, including ones which, through appropriation or reactions to them, constitutedmajor sources for it. One of themost immediate arguments against the use of the qualifier “Western” and an essentialized “West” is European entanglements with Islamdom. This article tackles the ambiguous place given to Islam in the narrative of “Western esotericism” and the wider intellectual and historical complex that feeds the exclusionary tendencies expressed by the “Western” in “Western esotericism.” It begins by providing a historical background of the West versus East divide in order to grasp the genealogy of the discourse and locate the problems resulting from an esotericism labelled as “Western.” Two major components of this narrative within which Islam is usually evoked are then highlighted: first, the sanitization of orientalist perspectives, and, second, the reliance on perennialist sources, especially the writings of Henry Corbin. Finally, the article recommends, on one level, a reflective global approach that takes into account the agency of non-Western actors in the globalization of values and concepts in modern and pre-modern eras, thus allowing us to engage in more suitable comparative practices in the study of esotericism. On another level, I have argued elsewhere that an Islamic esotericism (bāṭiniyya) has a long history dating back to the ninth century at least, based on principles, epistemological paradigms, and social orientations, conceptualized and negotiated (Saif, 2019). I demonstrated there, as I do here, that this esotericism had—and still has—connections with the currents discussed in the study of “Western esotericism,” especially through the Traditionalists and Sufism.","PeriodicalId":185269,"journal":{"name":"New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism","volume":"26 9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132422016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Esotericism’s Expanding Horizon: Why This Book Came to Be","authors":"E. Asprem, J. Strube","doi":"10.1163/9789004446458_002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446458_002","url":null,"abstract":"The academic study of esotericism is currently undergoing a phase of expansion and diversification. This is true whether we look at the topics, geographical regions, and subject languages of new research projects in the field, at the disciplines involved in its study, or the demographic composition of its scholars. The past decade has seen monographs, anthologies, and journal special issues on topics such as African-American esotericism (","PeriodicalId":185269,"journal":{"name":"New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125477498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Do Jade Eggs Tell Us about the Category “Esotericism”? Spirituality, Neoliberalism, Secrecy, and Commodities","authors":"S. Crockford","doi":"10.1163/9789004446458_012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004446458_012","url":null,"abstract":"While the literature on esoteric texts from antiquity through to the contemporary era is growing, there has been comparatively little written so far about material objects in esotericism and the economic conditions in which they are embedded. The products of contemporary spirituality are a starting point in this chapter, used to interrogate characterizations of the “commodification” of spirituality in neoliberalism, and the consequences this has for definitions of the category “esotericism.” Focusing on scholarly arguments that esotericism is characterized by secrecy and rejected knowledge, I question how this applies in the context of global spirituality. Sociological theories of secrecy suggest how secrecy operates to enhance elite claims to power and elevated status. In the context of neoliberalism, claims to secrecy can be leveraged to make substantial profits. Previous definitions of esotericism have occluded this aspect of spirituality because they have failed to reckon with the power relations and economic relations in the field. By examining the material products through which contemporary esotericism has been commodified, the elitism inherent in the category is made overt.","PeriodicalId":185269,"journal":{"name":"New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127346339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}