W.J. Hanegraaff

How magic survived the disenchantment of the world

Abstract This article argues that the process described by Max Weber as the ‘disenchantment of the world’ is compatible with the continued vitality of ‘the occult’ in contemporary western culture. Focusing on the example of ‘hermetic’ magical traditions in western culture before and after the pivotal period of the Enlightenment, the article analyses the relation between continuity and change in the development of these traditions from three angles: their theories of magical efficacy, the nature of their practices and the ways in which magicians seek to legitimate magic to the wider society as well as to themselves. The discussion demonstrates that the transformation of magic under the impact of modernization and secularization resulted in the paradoxical phenomenon of a ‘disenchanted magic’. The article concludes by proposing a theory that explains why it is actually quite natural for magic to have survived the disenchantment of the world.

Beyond the Yates Paradigm: The Study of Western Esotericism between Counterculture and New Complexity

The study of western esotericism finds itself in the middle of a process of academic professionalization and institutionalization2. Before addressing some problems connected with this development, and as an introduction to them, I would like to draw a parallel which may seem surprising at first sight. It is well known that the turbulent period of the 1960s produced, among many other things, the so-called sexual revolution: a complex social phenomenon with wide-ranging effects, including the emergence of the academic study of sexuality and sex-related problems in the context of new disciplines such as gender studiesj. While this revolution has not led to the sexually liberated culture once predicted by its defenders, it did succeed in breaking the social taboo on sex as a subject of discussion, in the academy and in society as a whole4. New disciplines such as gender studies have flourished since the 1960s, and there can be no doubt that any attempt to curtail or suppress scholarly discussion and research related to sexuality would nowadays be rejected by academics as an unacceptable infringement on intellectual freedom. Parallel to the sexual revolution, the countercultural ferment of the 1960s produced a popular revolution of religious consciousness, with widespread interest in western esotericism as one of its major manifestations5. As will be

Textbooks and introductions to Western Esotericism

This article reviews the presently available supply of textbooks and introductions to the new academic field of study known as ‘Western esotericism’. By analogy with computer software, the author refers to the early ‘religionist’ phase of research in this domain as ‘Western esotericism 1.0’. He argues that Antoine Faivres small French textbook L’ésotérisme (1992) marked the beginning of a more satisfactory upgrade that might be referred to as ‘Western esotericism 2.0’ and remains dominant in teaching and research today. A critical review of textbooks and introductions representative of this second phase of academic professionalisation reveals a number of structural problems and weaknesses (‘bugs and design faults’) that need to be corrected in order for the field to complete its adolescence and reach academic maturity. To accommodate the needs and new perspectives of the upcoming generation of scholars in this field, it is therefore time for an upgrade to ‘Western esotericism 3.0’.

The power of ideas: esotericism, historicism, and the limits of discourse

This article is a response to the reviews by Giovanni Filoramo, Olav Hammer, Bernd-Christian Otto, Marco Pasi, and Michael Stausberg of Wouter J. Hanegraaffs book Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. The author attempts to clarify his view of the relation between history and theory, and between intellectual history and discourse theory in particular; he provides a summary of his motivations for writing the book and of its main argument; he concludes by addressing a number of theoretical issues raised by the respondents.

Reconstructing “Religion” from the Bottom Up

This article claims to uncover the core problematics that have made the debate on defining and conceptualizing “religion” so difficult and argues that this makes it possible to move beyond radical deconstruction towards re constructing the concept for scholarly purposes. The argument has four main steps. Step 1 consists of establishing the nature of the entity “religion” as a reified imaginative formation . Step 2 consists of identifying the basic dilemma with which scholars have been struggling: the fact that, on the one hand, definitions and conceptualizations do not seem to work unless they stay sufficiently close to commonly held prototypes, while yet, on the other hand, those prototypes are grounded in monotheistic, more specifically Christian, even more specifically Protestant, theological biases about “true” religion. The first line of argument leads to crypto-theological definitions and conceptualizations, the second to a radical deconstruction of the very concept of “religion.” Step 3 resolves the dilemma by identifying an unexamined assumption , or problematic “ blind spot ,” that the two lines of argument have in common: they both think that “religion” stands against “the secular.” However, the historical record shows that these two defined themselves not just against one another but, simultaneously, against a third domain (referred to by such terms as “magic” or “superstition”). The structure is therefore not dualistic but triadic. Step 4 consists of replacing common assumptions about how “religion” emerged in the early modern period by an interpretation that explains not just its emergence but its logical necessity , at that time, for dealing with the crisis of comparison caused by colonialist expansion. “Religion” emerged as the tertium comparationis — or, in technically more precise language, the “pre-comparative tertium ” — that enabled comparison between familiar (monotheist, Christian, Protestant) forms of belief and modes of worship and unfamiliar ones (associated with “pagan” superstition or magic). If we restore the term to its original function, this allows us to reconstruct “religion” as a scholarly concept that not just avoids but prevents any slippage back to Christian theology or ethnocentric bias.

Leaving the Garden (in search of religion): Jeffrey J. Kripal's vision of a gnostic study of religion

Jeffrey J. Kripal burst upon the scene of the study of religion in 1995, with a monograph on Ramakrishna that won the AAR’s prize for ‘‘Best First Book’’ in the history of religion and went on to become extremely controversial among Hindus both in India and the United States. The scandal of this book, Kali’s Child (Kripal, 1995), was that Kripal not only insisted on the inextricable connectedness between mysticism and eros, but concluded that Ramakrishna’s famous ecstatic and visionary experiences were essentially homoerotic in nature. The controversy over Kali’s Child, including vehement demands for censorship and hate mail/hate-sites addressed to the author, demonstrated the inherent tension and potential conflict between the modern academic study of religion as a pursuit based on free intellectual inquiry, on the one hand, and demands for political correctness in view of the sensitivities of religious believers and practitioners, on the other. The relation between these two perspectives or commitmentsdscience and religion, for shortdhas obviously become ever more relevant and urgent in the post-9/11 world, and is one of the main topics of reflection in The Serpent’s Gift. Had Kripal been simply a psychoanalytic reductionist of the old school, then it would have been easy enough for concerned Hindus to apply a familiar ‘‘occidentalist’’ logic, and dismiss him as just another representative of a stereotypical Western rationalism with no concern for, and no real understanding of religion, mysticism, or spirituality. The puzzling thing about Kali’s Child and all his later books, however, is Kripal’s evident sympathy for mysticism and his

Hermes in the Academy: ten years' study of western esotericism at the University of Amsterdam

Table of Contents - 6[-]PREFACE - 8[-]Part 1. History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents: Origins and Development - 10[-]The Birth of a Chair - 12[-]Ten Years of Studying and Teaching Western Esotericism - 18[-]Part 2. Glimpses of Research - 32[-]The Pagan Who Came from the East: George Gemistos Plethon and Platonic Orientalism - 34[-]Astrologia Hermetica: Astrology, Western Culture, and the Academy - 51[-]The Modernity of Occultism: Reflections on Some Crucial Aspects - 60[-]Mathematical Esotericism: Some Perspectives on Renaissance Arithmology - 76[-]Danish Esotericism in the 20th Century: The Case of Martinus - 92[-]Part 3. Studying Western Esotericism in Amsterdam - 104[-]On First Looking into the Halls of Hermeticism - 106[-]An Unlikely Love Affair: Plato, the Netherlands, and Life after Westotericism - 108[-]Heterology in Amsterdam: The Academy Takes the Other Out to Dinner - 110[-]The Copenhagen Connection - 112[-]If You Seek - 114[-]Part 4. Western Esotericism in International Perspective - 116[-]From -the Hermetic Tradition to -Western Esotericism - 118[-]From Paris to Amsterdam and Beyond: Origins and Development of a Collaboration - 124[-]Western Esotericism in the United Kingdom - 130[-]From Talk about Esotericism to Esotericism Research: Remarks on the Prehistory and Development of a Research Group - 136[-]Seven Epistemological Theses on Esotericism: Upon the Occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the Amsterdam Chair - 144[-]Hermes and his Students in Amsterdam - 150[-]CONTRIBUTORS - 158[-]REGISTER - 160

Alan Moore's Promethea : Countercultural Gnosis and the End of the World

Alan Moore’s Promethea (1999 to 2005) is among the most explicitly “gnostic,” “esoteric,” and “occultist” comics strips ever published. Hailed as a virtuoso performance in the art of comics writing, its intellectual content and the nature of its spiritual message have been neglected by scholars. While the attainment of gnosis is clearly central to Moore’s message, the underlying metaphysics is more congenial to the panentheist perspective of ancient Hermetism than to Gnosticism in its classic typological sense defined by dualism and anti-cosmic pessimism. Most importantly, Promethea is among the most explicit and intellectually sophisticated manifestoes of a significant new religious trend in contemporary popular culture. Its basic assumption is that there is ultimately no difference between imagination and reality, so that the question of whether gods, demons, or other spiritual entities are “real” or just “imaginary” becomes pointless. As a result, the factor of religious belief becomes largely irrelevant, and its place is taken by the factors of personal experience and meaningful practice.

Imagining the unconscious [Review of: A. Nicholls, M. Liebscher (2010) Thinking the unconscious: nineteenth-century German thought]

Whether one believes it to have been ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’, there is broad agreement that the origins of the unconscious are to be found in German intellectual culture. This collective volume discusses some of the main nineteenth-century authors who have contributed to the history of conceptualization and analysis of the unconscious, or are believed to have done so: from the Weimar classicists, especially Goethe, to the German Idealists, especially Schelling and Schopenhauer, to less famous figures such as Carl Gustav Carus, Eduard von Hartmann, Gustav Theodor Fechner, as well as Friedrich Nietzsche and, finally, Sigmund Freud. In their introduction, the editors pay lip service to the pioneering standard work published by Henri F. Ellenberger in 1970, but in fact they appear to be pursuing a philosophical rather than a historical agenda, and one that is dominated by Freudian models to the virtual exclusion of any other twentieth-century psychologists. In their introduction, the editors make a point of warning against the ‘teleological’ fallacy in historiography, and approvingly quote Elke Völmicke’s warnings against the anachronistic procedure of projecting Freudian assumptions back into the past: in order to avoid this ‘cardinal sin of the history of ideas’ (94), which was committed by Freud himself to begin with, pre-Freudian sources should always be seen ‘in their own independent historical and philosophical contexts’ (22–3). One could not agree more with this clear rejection of what is traditionally known as ‘whiggish’ or, more recently, as ‘present-centred’ (sometimes ‘presentist’) historiography. It is therefore all the more disappointing that, in fact, most authors in this volume, including one of the two

Western esotericism in Enlightenment historiography: the importance of Jacob Brucker

Johann Jacob Brucker was born in Augsburg on January 22, 1696, and studied philosophy and theology in Jena. According to a contemporary biographer, his herculean labours on the history of philosophy were at least partly therapeutic: in addition to a weak physical constitution, Brucker suffered from heavy attacks of melancholy, and only by studying very hard could he distract himself from his fears and depressions. Jacob Thomasius traced all pagan philosophies to their origin in the teachings of Zoroaster: it was from Zoroastrian sources that had emerged platonism, aristotelianism, epicureanism and so on. Brucker plays a pivotal role in the history of the study of our field: his work represents the historical moment at which the memory of these various currents and ideas was still intact among intellectuals; but at the same time, it laid the foundations which allowed this memory to be marginalized by later generations.Keywords: Jacob Thomasius; Johann Jacob Brucker; Zoroastrian sources