The Occult among the Aborigines of South America? Some Remarks on Race, Coloniality, and the West in the Study of Esotericism

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