Latour constructs a plurality of ontologies by distinguishing various modes of existence with their own type of existent. One of these modes of existence is religion, which involves invisible “beings of religion.” Latour criticizes both psychological and (onto)theological interpretations of such beings. He distinguishes between psychogenic beings that constitute the self, and beings of religion...
This article explores pub psychic nights in Britain. The audience of these events are predominantly working- class women who gather in local pubs and social clubs to participate in spirit communication led by a medium and/or psychic. Drawing on qualitative data from 16 interviews and four participant observations we examine the social and spiritual significance of these events for the audience,...
This case study contributes to ongoing debates about religious comparativism by focusing on the emergence of the notion of “esoteric” as a de facto comparative category since the seventeenth century. Scholars have so far restricted their studies to a preconceived “Western esoteric corpus” that limited our view on the majority of source material. This obfuscated the fact that notions such as...
This article will problematize shamanism as an analytical category and challenge it through a critical reading of scholarship about the area that has attracted scholars and travelers in search of Siberian shamanism— Sakha Sire [Sakha: ‘Sakha Land’], currently known as the Sakha (Yakutia) Republic. The term ‘shaman’ entered European and then global imaginations and vocabularies through the...
The article focuses on the interpretation of environmentalism in the categories of implicit esotericism. Referring to the existing tradition of treating environmentalism as a case of implicit Calvinism, the author points to some limitations of this view and emphasizes the significance of the Romantic reinterpretation of the Western esoteric tradition and its role in the history of...