What Is Esotericism? Does It Exist? How Can It Be Understood?

Abstract

The term “esotericism” has been used by practitioners since the late 18 century to describe non-hegemonic ideas and practices. The ideas behind this term were mainly Christian ideas – or ideas from other sources (e.g. “pagan” ones), interpreted by Christians. In the 20 century, the term esotericism became a scientific concept in Western Europe and North America, following a theological path which was opened in the 17 century. This cultural relativity limits the possible application of this term to other regions, cultures or language traditions and claims to determine possible semantic, pragmatic or functional equivalents from a critical perspective. Consequently, there is no culturally invariant “essence” of “esotericism”. Each concept applied to “esotericism” contains only possible – not mandatory – features and involves normative decisions. If one uses such a “toolbox” of features, a comparison of different phenomena or traditions is only possible with regard to specific features or a group of features. Consequence: Concrete definitions of esotericism apply only to concrete fields of research –which means: Different definitions of esotericism will overlap. They will have family resemblances but never be identical. Since our concepts of esotericism will always be different, intercultural comparison will remain difficult. However, scholarly research must resist (over-)simplification when it comes to interpreting reality. 1 The Religionist Problem of “Esotericism” The term “esotericism” (which will henceforth be used mainly without quotation marks) is a relatively recent production of the history of the English language. Comparable results are found for the other languages of Western Europe. This term first appeared in German in 1792 in a text on the “esotericism of the Order” of the ancient Pythagoreans, but remained extremely rare for a long time. It only began to take off in the last two decades of the 19 century. 1 I would like to express my sincere thanks to Yves Mühlematter, Dimitry Okropiridze and Julian Strube for their critical reading and helpful hints. 2 Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, “Historische Esoterikforschung, oder: Der lange Weg der Esoterik zur Moderne,” in Aufklärung und Esoterik, vol. 3, Wege in die Moderne, ed. Monika NeugebauerWölk et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 41. Open Access. ©2021 Helmut Zander, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664270-002 This also applies – as shown by a cursory glance at the books scanned by Google on the Ngram platform – to related and, at the same time, competing terms such as occultism or hermeticism. The adjectives for these three terms are much older and date back to Antiquity. This innovation in terms is not of secondary importance, because their history – as expounded upon by Reinhard Koselleck in the “Begriffsgeschichte”– makes one thing very clear: whenever a new noun appears, there are intellectual and social reasons for its creation, which, for the historian, contain important indications of mental or ideological changes. The traditional counterargument considers new terms to be irrelevant because the object (here: esoteric practices or ideas) exists long before the term (here: esotericism). Even if this argument were true – which I deny as a general rule – this would not eliminate the tension between signifiant and signifié – between term and object – because a term is always coined in a specific time and context. Therefore, two developments can only be understood in a given context: What exactly is meant by a term? And, above all: Why did a term have to be “invented”? Why did it not already exist (although, as the counterargument would have it, the object had already existed for some time)? A more precise reconstruction of the history of the term “esotericism” and of kindred terms, is difficult to achieve because users of the terms since the end of the 18 century have not taken great care to define them. However, though detailed historical research on the history of the semantics of occultism, hermeticism and esotericism is lacking, some semantic fields can be roughly outlined. Around 1900, the term occultism, which appears as a noun around the middle of the 19 century in France (presumably first used by Eliphas Lévi), had many 188