New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism
December 3, 2020
D. Burns
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...
New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism
December 3, 2020
L. Saif
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...
New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism
December 3, 2020
Keith E. Cantú
Hardly anyone would doubt that history is full of charlatans. However, the situation becomes much trickier when dichotomies like “real” vs. “fake,” “genuine” vs. “fraudulent,” or “authentic” vs. “inauthentic” become applied not just to individuals or institutions but wholesale to entire objects of study, such as musical genres, regional cuisines, or in our case modern occultists who have...
New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism
December 3, 2020
J. Strube
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...
New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism
December 3, 2020
M. White
“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...
New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism
December 3, 2020
M. Villalba
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...
New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism
December 3, 2020
H. R. Page, Stephen C. Finley
The essays in Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There is a Mystery” … (Finley, Guillory and Page, 2015) inscribe the broad contours for trans-disciplinary examination of esoteric thought and practice in the Africana world. Having established the preliminary groundwork for a new field— Africana Esoteric Studies (AES)—the stage is set for exploration of the ways in which...