Demons in the Academy Papers

8/2/2019 Demons in the Academy Papers

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Phoenix Rising Academy is an independent academic institution based in the UK. Its three main

objectives are to promote the Academic Study of Western Esotericism by offering flexible and

accessible study options via online learning, and courses designed to provide accurate information

at entry-level. Secondly, to comprise a scholarly think-tank dedicated to developing an integrated

and interdisciplinary approach to these topics, and thirdly, to explore the practical implications of

esoteric models of thought for modern society in terms of their educational potential.

The Demons in the Academy session was convened due to our perception that issues relating to

methodology in the study of esotericism called for further dialogue. Integrated approaches have

been long established in many other areas of the humanities and social sciences, from art and

performance to ethnographic and behavioural perspectives. Thus the proscription of all but the

most critical and rational methodologies necessarily fails to do justice to such a topic of study.

Our premises and objectives are threefold:

I. To open channels of dialogue between the academic and practitioner communities in

the hope that it will be of mutual benefit.

II. Currently the study of Western Esotericism is only available at the highest academic strata.

We wish to make it available and accessible to individuals for whom it is a way of life, or anarea which they wish to learn more about without being obliged to attain the highest

academic levels. In addition we wish to work towards promoting its reintegrstion in the

overall corpus of cultural and historical study in the educational mainstream.

III. Given the multiple interconnections between the esoteric traditions and a number of

disciplines, spanning both the arts and the sciences, it is our conviction that they can offer

new paradigms and perspectivess from which to view multiple, societal, and other issues.

Hence the need for interdisciplinary dialogue which we wish to facilitate.

DEMONS IN THE ACADEMY, AAR 2011 1 www.phoenixrising.org.gr



This document contains the majority of the papers presented at the Demons in the Academy

session in November 2011, and accompanies the videos of that session. It may be freely distributed

but copyright remains with the individual presenters and should be attributed at all times.

Contents

p. 3.........................................Abstracts and Biographical Notes

p.10....................................... Prof. Lee Irwin: Methodology in Western Esotericism

p. 12.......................................Dr Angela Voss: The Gnostic Scholar: Integrating Reason and

Revelation

p. 19.......................................Dr Jason Winslade: Alchemical Scholarship; Esotericism in Motion at the

Festival Fire

p. 25.......................................Sasha Chaitow: Esotericism in a Brave New World

p. 37.......................................Samuel Garrard: The Limitations of Rationalist Epistemology, the use of

Analogy and the Value of Revealed Knowledge

p. 40.......................................Kirk Templeton: Towards an Imaginal Methodology in the study of

Western Esotericism

p. 43.......................................Peter Duchemin: Fountainheads: tapping visionary experience in an

academic setting

p. 46........................................Dr. Hereward Tilton: Enthusiasms Sacred and Profane: Phenomenology

vs. Empiricism in the Study of Western Esotericism




Abstracts and Speaker Bios

Amy Hale: I Am Not a Spooky Weirdo! The Contexts and Consequences of Methodology in Esoteric

Studies

I am an Anthropologist specializing in contemporary Celtic cultures, with an emphasis on modern Cornwall and

contemporary Esoteric culture and history. I received my PhD in 1998 from UCLA in Folklore and Mythology and my

dissertation was on the intersections between various constructions of Celtic identity in Cornwall, both ethnic and spiritual. I

have worked with the Cornish since 1994, and have also undertaken comparative research in Ireland, Wales, and the U.S.

In terms of Western Esoteric Studies I have particular interests in the intersections between esoteric movements and

intellectual history, identity politics, research methods and also in Pagan and esoteric spiritual tourism. My recent projects

have focused on a study of the life and work of Surrealist artist Ithell Colquhoun where I seek to understand her position

within the development of several different streams of British intellectual and spiritual culture in the mid to late 20th century.

The notion that the texts and artifacts of that which we call “Western Esotericism” can be

empirically separated from the people who created them is deeply flawed. As with esoteric

practices in the rest of the world, Western Esotericism is deeply connected to world views and

bodies of practice that run the gamut from mainstream to resistant.

Ethnographic methodologies integrate, in fact demand, subjectivity and reflexivity (though

not necessarily insider status) of the researcher in order to produce valid results. Ethnographers also

know that you can produce valid research regardless of your status as in insider or your beliefs. In

short, to try to insist that every scholar of religion be a detached atheist is not only impossible, we

miss out on good data if we do that. This is not to say that all “ways of knowing” are considered

methodologically acceptable within academic frameworks, but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t

talk about them. So if we can demonstrate the use and validity of a range of well established

subjective methods that are perfectly applicable to the study of Western Esotericism, what is the

real issue here?

This paper will address the history of the fear of academic engagement with practitioners of

Western Esotericism, rooted in the construction of an inherent western rationalism, and which has

some uncomfortable consequences for how we define “self” and “other” regarding esoteric

practice. I will contrast this with the, also flawed, emerging discipline of Pagan Studies where the

focus on establishing religious legitimacy also, ironically, excludes many practitioners of Western

Esoteric traditions. In the end, both approaches actually serve to further marginalize Esoteric

Studies.




Hereward Tilton: Enthusiasms Sacred and Profane: Phenomenology vs. Empiricism in the Study of

Western Esotericism.

I am a specialist in the history of esotericism in early modern Germany, having published work on early Rosicrucianism,

alchemy, Paracelsianism and magic, most notably my book 'The Quest for the Phoenix: Spiritual Alchemy and

Rosicrucianism in the Work of Count Michael Maier (1569-1622)'. I currently teach on the Western esoteric traditions at the

Exeter Centre for the Study of Esotericism at the University of Exeter; I have also taught courses in this field at the Center for

the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam and the Institute for Renaissance

Intellectual History and Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. My professional career began at the

University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, where I lectured on psychoanalysis, parapsychology and the history of

mysticism.

This talk will examine the dominance of the empirical paradigm within the contemporary study of

the history of Western esotericism with recourse to 1) its relation to associated post-modern critiques

of the phenomenology of religion, 2) its more recent historical origins within the academic study of

religion in the Netherlands, and 3) its broader historical situation within a Protestant anti-

enthusiast tradition. Challenging the claim of empiricists to profess a methodological agnosticism, it

will be argued that empiricism in the study of Western esotericism possesses an essentially partisan

nature vis-à-vis the object of study which compromises its value as a tool for analysis. Looking

beyond the history of ideas to consider esoteric forms of practice and modes of corporeal being,

the purpose of this talk will be to seek out a methodological path beyond phenomenological

essentialism on the one hand and the scientism and historicism of empirical method on the other.

Angela Voss: The Gnostic Scholar: Integrating Reason and Revelations

For the past ten years Angela has lectured in Religious Studies in the School of European Culture and Languages at the

University of Kent, where she directed the MA in the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination, and is also a member of

faculty at the Exeter Centre for the Study of Esotericism (EXESESO). She is developing new collaborations while also teaching

distance learning courses with Phoenix Rising Academy.

In this presentation I want to address the role of wisdom in learning and teaching. The author of the

Platonic Epinomis asks the question “what is wisdom?” and concludes that it is impossible to define,

but that “the soul has a confident trust, a prophetic divination, that she possesses such a native

capacity, though what it is, when come by, or how, she can hardly discover.” Wisdom is not to be

discovered through gaining knowledge of a particular art or science, or from a stance of

detached, objective analysis. Wisdom implies experience, insight and a mysterious intuitive grasp of

meaning.

I will suggest that, in terms of Iain McGilchrist’s triumphant metaphor of brain hemispheres,




wisdom is about a continual and fertile interplay between the observational and discriminatory skills

of the left hemisphere and the capacity for symbolic—and religious—vision of the right. In terms of

the study of esotericism, I want to draw attention away from the question of what is studied and

how it is studied, to the researcher or teacher themselves and how, inevitably, their own degree of

wisdom will be reflected in the approach they take to their studies. As Jeffrey Kripal has suggested,

there are researchers who demonstrate an understanding of their subject which is “at once

passionate and critical, personal and objective, religious and academic”. I will argue that this

sacred marriage of rational clarity and passionate participation can inspire a truly transformative

engagement—for both teachers and students—with texts and traditions which themselves arise

from a deep sense of the spiritual necessity of unity between the divine and human aspects of the

psyche.

Jason Lawton Winslade: Alchemical Scholarship: Esotericism in Motion at the Festival Fire

Jason Lawton Winslade is scholar of occultism, popular culture, and performance, having received his PhD in Performance

Studies from Northwestern University. At DePaul University, he teaches courses on occultism, comic books, and Buffy the

Vampire Slayer, as well as composition and rhetoric. He has published articles on Pagan festival culture, cult television, and

comic books in various journals and anthologies. His most recent work includes a co-authored chapter on Alan Moore’s

Promethea, featured in Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels from Continuum Press, as well as a

chapter on fandom and pedagogy in Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching the Vampire Slayer, an anthology from

McFarland Press. He is also on the faculty at Cherry Hill Seminary and Phoenix Rising. In his spare time, he is a musician and

recurring member of the musical project, Faebotica, performing regularly on the festival circuit, and is a festival drummer.

The study of Western Esotericism often seems tethered to historical texts and accounts rather than

the living practice of those who actually perform magic and engage in communal ritual and

service. In this statement, I will address the issues of subjectivity and authenticity in performance

theory and ethnography, concentrating on my recent work studying fire culture at Pagan and

Thelemic festivals. Specifically, I will briefly outline associations commonly made between initiation

and ethnography, and present instances of genuine insight that can occur from encounters

around the fire and conversations with practitioners that engage with their spiritual beliefs in

performative ways. Unlike ethnographies of specific magical groups, in which the ethnographer

either initiates or remains outside the group, I would offer festival ethnography as a way to avoid

specific insider/outsider dichotomies, since anyone can attend these festivals, where intense and

intimate actions, within a magical context, can occur. I will examine the ways in which the field of

Western Esotericism has rejected these paradigms and attempt to determine if we are speaking

two different languages or if a bridge is possible. I will particularly address notions of

“methodological atheism” that scholars of Esotericism have supported, comparing these to recent

ethnographic approaches to festival culture, such as Lee Gilmore’s Theatre in a Crowded Fire:

Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man. Ultimately, I wish to consider the question of whether we can

engage the present and future of Western occultism and esotericism as a practice, rather than as




a relic of the past.

Sasha Chaitow: Esotericism in a Brave New World

Sasha is currently conducting doctoral research in Western Esotericism and Myth Studies at the University of Essex. She holds

an MA in Western Esotericism (EXESESO, Exeter, 2008) and an MA in English Literature (Indianapolis-Athens, 2004). Her current

area of study focuses on the French Occult Revival and French Symbolism in the 19th century, and her MA thesis (awarded

with distinction) focused on the alchemical emblems in Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens.

Sasha is the founding director of Phoenix Rising Academy of Esoteric Studies and Creative Arts , (London and Athens), an

independent academic institution for the promotion of the Academic Study of Western Esotericism and Art. Her research

interests include art and esotericism, mind and consciousness, ritual and initiation, and Greek esoteric history. She writes for

academic journals, the Greek special-interest journals Avaton and Fainomena, and is an experienced speaker in both

academic and public fora. For more see: http://www.phoenixrising.org.gr/en/academy/teachers/sasha-chaitow/ and

www.peladan.org.

The significance of disinterested academic scholarship is self-evident. The field of Western

Esotericism is a vast, and still largely unexplored domain. We need valid documentation,

commentary and translations – and thus far, the admirable efforts of scholarly societies such as

ESSWE, its sister organisations, and the chairs and scholars in these fields have achieved a

monumental task and provided younger scholars with invaluable resources.

However, the entrance of Western Esotericism into academe and the development of related

disciplines such as Pagan Studies hold wider implications on a number of levels. The popularity of

these subjects, whether in academia or popular culture, is far more than just some fad fuelled by

Harry Potter and Dan Brown. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the modern rediscovery of

these subjects, their new-found respectability and the increased availability of both academic and

good quality mass market literature have burgeoned in response to a growing social need for

alternatives to tried, tested, and failed approaches to critical social questions.

Within the history of Western Esoteric currents, and the worldviews belonging to them, are

embedded models and ideas that we can learn from and which can offer practicable and

pragmatic ways in which to counter the social, moral and existential crisis that we are all

experiencing, whether from the eye of the storm or the sidelines. When they are so inclined,

scholars in particular, have a duty to communicate, disseminate and discuss these models and

their potential applications. The potential applications are infinite, from sustainable development to

sustainable economies, and now more then ever, the world – not just the classroom – are in need

of new models and ideas.

For something like this to be considered on a practical scale, it has to start with awareness

and dialogue. Scholars who have the privilege of understanding how these concepts work, need

to leave their ivory towers and talk both to their more positivist colleagues, and their ‘objects’ of

study. Practitioners need to root philosophical and enchanted ideals in modern reality. It is


http://www.phoenixrising.org.gr/en/academy/teachers/sasha-chaitow/

http://www.phoenixrising.org.gr/en/academy/teachers/sasha-chaitow/



esotericism that can provide a common vocabulary and vision; from there on, we need fruitful

dialogue. In this paper I will outline some of the main reasons for which we feel that both the

methodological question, as well as that of the role of this area of study, must be constantly re-

examined, and I will also attempt to propose potential ways of doing so.

Kirk Templeton: Towards an Imaginal Methodology in the study of Western Esotericism

Kirk Templeton is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His primary area

of research is comparative studies involving Consciousness, the Self and the Metaphysics of Light in the Medieval Western,

Islamic, and Hindu Tantric traditions. Kirk’s involvement with Western Esotericism goes back to the late 1960s when he was a

member of a research consortium in Thelemic Magick and Computer Science at the Portola Institute in Palo Alto. Since that

time he has served as core faculty at Transformative Arts Institute, a center for contemporary Shamanism, and as Director of

Wind Mountain Institute, a center for integral studies.

Imaginal methodologies for the study of Western Esotericism must meet two sets of criteria.

There are those mandated by the canons of the Western Academy and those mandated by the

canons of the imaginal as such. The concept of imaginal knowledge was re-introduced into

Western Academic discourse by Henry Corbin, who derived it from the Hikmat al-Ishraq or

Wisdom of Illumination of the great 12th century Persian philosopher Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī.

A valuable first step in the development of imaginal methodologies is to investigate them at their

source. This approach is all the more appropriate given the profound formative influence of the

Islamic Esoteric tradition upon the Western.

Suhrawardi’s methodology integrated methods of reason (ba th) with methods basedḥ

upon direct intuitive apprehension (ta’alluh). This provided access to the ‘alam al-mithal or

imaginal world (Corbin’s mundus imaginalis) in a process of hermeneutic (ta’wil) which was thus

validated by For Western Esoteric Studies, this suggests a program of first setting our own house in

order by developing canons and protocols of legitimate imaginal practice which, while of

sufficiently wide scope, are nonetheless based upon sound noetic knowledge and practice

( ta’alluh). This will in turn set the stage for the inevitable Kuhnian struggle of employing skilled and

resolute rational discourse to shift the paradigm (ba th). This task will be facilitated by theḥ

increasing global prominence and influence of intellectual cultures (India, China, Iran) in which the

radical separation of the rational and noetic did not occur.

Samuel Garrard: The Limitations of Rationalist Epistemology, the use of Analogy and the Value of

Revealed Knowledge

Samuel Garrard is studying for his MA in Western Esotericism from the University of Exeter , and holds a BA (Hons) in English,

specialising in transcendentalism, native American histories, psychoanalysis and literary theory. His interests include

psychoanalysis, the psychologisation of magic, the Kabbalah, the Tarot, natural magic and witchcraft.




In this paper I will consider possible reasons why academic value-systems cling on to Enlightenment

ideals despite the progressive work of certain post-structuralist theorists who have highlighted the

limitations and corruptibility of this approach. I will explore the notion that Western science has

vested sociological interests in emphasising materiality due to the support it gives to materialist

culture and argue that many academic disciplines have managed to gain acceptance and

support by aligning themselves with Eighteenth-century materialist paradigms and in doing so

neglected more progressive epistemological approaches. I will briefly describe the developments

in science, from the mechanist philosophy to the work of modern cosmologists and neurologists

who admit that the unstable semantic qualities of academic epistemology undermine the

principles with which one attempts to understand nature.

Using various Neoplatonic portrayals of symbolic reality (such as Robert Fludd’s mnemonic

illustrations), I will consider the implications of symbolic and revealed forms of knowledge as value-

systems that support individuality and personal expression, rather than social control and limited

experience. I will argue that knowledge that emphasises the value of relationship as opposed to

isolated truth, can have positive ethical implications for both the individual and society, looking at

how analogy is used as a tool to impart a wisdom, operating in terms apart from literal

comprehension. I hope to highlight the socio-political concerns that inform the basic premises and

principles underlying rationalist epistemology.

Peter Duchemin: Fountainheads: tapping visionary experience in an academic setting

Peter G.H.A Duchemin is engaged in questions of mediation, technology, and the means by which values are by

influenced by the imagination. Academically, he holds a B.A., Hon. in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Carleton

University, an M.Phil in Humanities from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and is working on a Ph.D in Interdisciplinary

Studies, across philosophy, sociology, religious studies, and classics. His MA Thesis "The Enchanted Circus: Language, Time,

and the Circus Arts", explored three performance figures: the Fool, the Magician, and the Juggler, seeking to examine the

full spectrum of these roles; from the level of embodied performances by professional artists to the the archetypal and

mystical meanings of the symbols themselves. His current work extends this investigation further: into the mediating nature of

enchantment understood in a broad sense. Methodologically, Duchemin combines physical practice, imaginal psychology,

and philosophical realism. His travels have taken him worldwide to sacred sites, circuses, magic shows, and shamanic rituals,

where he has traded magic, and participated in ceremony. He advocates experience-based, rigorously intuitive,

philosophical and spiritual exploration.

Esoteric study is a balance between intellectual reflection and intuitive contemplation. The

academic approach to esotericism is grounded in history, anthropology, and discourse analysis,

and assumes that we can understand esoteric discourses, especially as they bear upon the

emergence of modernity.

But is it possible to practice esotericism while engaging in these researches? While

sympathetic investigators may tap into the gnosis, it remains a dangerous sea to navigate. In order

to engage authentically, the thinker must be absorbed into the magical life itself and cease, on




some level, to be a thinker. In the wake of this process there lies a residual awareness that sustains

intuition as a primary epistemic source.The temptation to divorce practice from analysis marks a

divide between scholars OF esotericism, and esotericists themselves, but it IS possible for a thinker to

be academically fruitful and draw on the intuitive roots of the esoteric experience itself: Formal rigor

is re-engaged with intuition in the process of translation into discursive expression: The fountain of

intuition flows through and over an architecture of criticism, that when engaged with energetically,

assists in developing, extending, and supporting that flow. I will discuss visionary contemplation as

an experimental field, that both engages and produces discourses that can be assessed but not

exhausted by analysis. I will draw from Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, & Michel Serres, on the terrain

opened up by Yates, Rossi, Faivre, et al. My aim is to present a methodological blueprint for the

critically engaged occultist.




Methodology in Western Esoteric Studies

© Prof. Lee Irwin, Elder Scholar

Religious Studies Department

College of Charleston

At the last international meeting (May 2008) of the Association for the Study of Esotericism

(ASE), we had over 50 presentations representing 13 different academic disciplines. Among these

the most prevalent discipline was Religious Studies; however, even among those in Religious Studies

there was a wide range of methodological approaches. Because the area of study is relatively

new in academia, commonly shared methodologies gave some emphasis to three approaches:

historical development, primary textual analysis, and various forms of ritual practice. American

scholars tended to be comparative and also to express great interest in non-verbal “texts” such as

images, diagrams, art, music, and various forms of symbolism.

Underlying this diversity of interests was a sophisticated use of theories that reflected

transdisciplinary thinking and analysis. A striking feature of the conference was the tendency of

scholars to treat the subject matter with respect and appreciation while offering interpretive

perspectives that pushed beyond any literal interpretation of contents. Without doubt, the demand

for authentic scholarship requires an epistemological engagement that moves from the literal and

historical into the imaginal worlds of esotericism by recognizing a deeper symbolism beyond simple,

accurate representation. A fundamental characteristic of esotericism is the attempt by

practitioners to actualize and embody visionary worlds whose contents are subtle, elusive, and

embedded in ontological claims that cannot be reduced to rational schemes and social or cultural

contexts. The blunt fact of psychic or subtle claims, of magical practices or alchemical

transformations, requires sophistication in symbolic thinking that preserves the integrity of the claim

while simultaneously exploring the ramifications of symbolic processes reflective of broader fields of

meaning.

The participatory nature of esotericism - its gnostic and mystical depths, its subtle psychism,

and its transformative, enactive paradigms – cannot be comprehended from a strictly “objectivist”

position that would deny the ontological significance of both practice and theory among

esotericists. By “ontological significance” I refer to participatory being, to the transrational nature of

human discovery, and the impact of encounter on the mind and heart of the individual

practitioner. Much like the enactive and participatory aspects of traditional religions, mature

esotericists claim authentic engagement with being that is, for them, transformative and non-




reductive to local context or to a specific cultural psychology. While context, locality, and

individual characteristics may influence such claims, the more substantive goals of esotericism

extend beyond the immediacy of historical circumstances to embrace a deeper human potential

than what local context usually offers. And thus the heart of the symbolic nature of esoteric

discourse - be it verbal, artistic, imaginal, or fictive - is reliance upon expressive media that seek to

embody in some meaningful ways, this transrational, deep, transformative encounter.

The scholarly goal should be to engage the full scope of esoteric claims, to respectfully and

critically examine its transrational engagement with being, and to offer models of interpretation

that fully involve an often imaginal epistemology as embodied in a dedicate, serious way of life by

practitioners. And practitioners should strive to overcome enclosure in a specific discourse that

would deny the validity of comparative study or place their own practice as superior to the

practices of others. What is required, by scholars and practitioners alike, is a sense of humility in the

face of being, a sense of respect for differences, and a genuine, deep appreciation of diversity as

an expression of a profound mystery that is transrational, imaginal, and ontologically vast and

complex. The interpretation of esoteric beliefs or practices is additive when it acknowledges a

methodology that recognizes an open horizon in human potential. If we hope to develop a fully

robust field of scholarly inquiry, it is imperative that we do not reduce the human potential to a false

image of rationalism nor to an inflated sense of grandeur. In walking the middle road, what is

required is respect, creative inquiry, and a compassionate desire for discovery that allows for

significant growth in the scholar and practitioner alike. Our work is a form of partnership and our

goal is not simply the creation of an academic discipline, but the further deepening of human

knowledge in the face of being – that is a task truly worthy of our full and complete dedication.




The Gnostic Scholar: Integrating Reason and Revelation

© Dr Angela Voss

In this Phoenix Rising panel on ‘Demons in the Academy’ I want to address the question of how the

academic study of esoteric traditions could benefit from an approach to teaching and

researching which embodies an integrative methodology, and how such a methodology may itself

give rise to that indefinable quality, wisdom. By integrative, I mean the scholar as an amphibian,

with one foot in the rational or empirical analysis of the outer objective form or historical context of

their source material, and the other in a passionate engagement with the meaning of that form

and its capacity for inner transformation. I would agree with the recent assertion by John Carey,

that “if what we learn does not change us then we have not really learned anything at all”, and

also with Jeffrey Kripal , who has suggested that there are teachers and researchers of religious

subjects who demonstrate an understanding which is “at once passionate and critical, personal

and objective, religious and academic”. He argues that these two ways of knowing, which we find

rooted at the heart of Pythagorean and Platonic traditions, are not mutually exclusive but vitally

connected and inter-dependent, as has in fact been confirmed by Ian McGilchrist’s recent

research into the right and left brain hemisphere functions. As Kripal states, “the human as two is

not just an ancient mystical doctrine, it is a universal neurological fact”. I suggest that if this sacred

marriage of rational clarity and revelatory insight can be achieved, it can inspire both an

informative and transformative engagement with texts and traditions which deserve such attention

precisely because they themselves arise from a deep sense of the spiritual necessity for psychic

unity. Kripal has also suggested that there is a particular kind of scholar or researcher who is able to

achieve an ‘interpersonal communion’ with what they are studying, and that this kind of scholar

can bring together the opposing qualities of head and heart, reason and imagination, resulting in a

kind of knowing which is gnostic in the sense that it unites the soul of the researcher with a deeper

ground of being encountered through the very process of studying.

The author of the Platonic Epinomis asks the question “what is wisdom?” and concludes that

it is impossible to define, but that “the soul has a confident trust, a prophetic divination, that she

possesses such a native capacity, though what it is, when come by, or how, she can hardly

discover.” We would all agree that wisdom is not to be found through gaining knowledge of a

particular art or science from a perspective of detached assimilation of information. Wisdom implies

hands-on experience, insight and a mysterious intuitive grasp of meaning. It is sought in humility

through encounter with living ideas, not in the regurgitation of dead concepts. In terms of

McGilchrist’s metaphor, wisdom is about a continual grounding of the factual, observational and




discriminatory skills of the left hemisphere in the essentially symbolic—and religious—vision of the

right.

Other scholars of esotericism have also approached the question of sympathetic

engagement, notably Arthur Versluis, who has posited a threefold categorisation of ways in which

esoteric material may be read: firstly ‘exoterically’, where texts and images are seen as purely

historical or cultural objects of study, secondly ‘mesoterically’, where they are understood to reveal

a hidden truth but do not necessarily impinge on the reader’s own inner life, and thirdly,

‘esoterically’, where the scholar finds the material inspiring their own spiritual awakening in some

way. Now Versluis concludes that it is the imagination which allows the reader to connect the

material studied with their own life and experience, discloses its meanings, and allows the soul to

be transformed. “One returns to the field of the imagination”, he says, “because this is where we

come to know what it means to be alive”. With this observation he is affirming the power of the

symbolic to awaken hidden or dormant powers of perception, a way of reading which goes back

to Plato and could be said to constitute the very ‘initiatory’ function of esoteric philosophy.

Tim Addey has shown how three stages of philosophical discourse are embodied in Plato’s

dialogues: firstly, the collection of information through sense perception, secondly the application

of rational thinking through critical analysis, and thirdly the imaginative participation in

mythological narrative, “as if” it were true. Plato was said by his followers to have had three eyes

which corresponded with these three types of vision, and which were associated with three

philosophers: Heracleitus , Socrates and Pythagoras – the most important point being that sense

perception and reason were always in service to a more primordial and integrated faculty of

knowledge which Plato calls the intuitive intellect. And we must remember that by ‘reason’ we do

not mean the kind of disembodied rationality of post-Enlightenment discourse, which has become

disengaged from all imaginative or religious understanding, but a cognitive tool which is used to

mediate, clarify and interpret the kind of revelatory insight which precedes all quantitative analysis.

The distinction between human reason and divine revelation which was to become a chief

theological concern of medieval Christianity, finds its roots in Plato’s Pythagorean creation myth in

his Timaeus. Here we are told that the Demiurge creates the world soul or anima mundi prior to the

physical world as its informing essence or vital principle. It is described as being inserted into the

centre of the world and diffused throughout its body, “as its ruler and mistress”. Incidentally, this

metaphor has interesting resonances with McGilchrist’s assessment of the role of the right brain

hemisphere as ‘master’ to the left’s ‘emissary’. Spiritual intelligence is then at the heart of the

material world, and forms it; Plotinus describes the anima mundi as continually mediating between

the divine world of the immaterial Ideas, and the human world of matter, sowing essences of the

Ideas in the world as hidden baits or lures – its ‘occult properties’ - which then continue to attract it.

Furthermore, the soul substance itself is described as threefold, being compounded of three

different substances, the ‘same’, the ‘different’ and a mixture of both. The soul thus embodies both

the eternal unchanging, unified quality of divinity, and the changeable, time-bound nature of




divided existence, and since this same soul also forms the animating force in human beings, they

have the possibility of accessing and cultivating either part.

Plato then elaborates the two modes of existence into a complex epistemology in his

Divided Line metaphor in the Republic, where sense perception, fantasy and opinion as human

and unstable faculties are separated from the stable, noetic function of the intuitive intellect by the

reason which mediates between the two. But for Plato this mediating function is not yet termed the

imagination. His notion of divine frenzy certainly acknowledges artistic and poetic inspiration, but it

is not associated with phantasia. It is more like an influx of divine power into the soul which allows it

to discard the shadows and illusions of everyday consciousness and apprehend the truth that lies

behind them, through a shattering of the veil between this world and the next.

It is only with the neoplatonist Plotinus that the word ‘imagination’ (phantasia) is given to

that part of the rational soul which acts as an intermediary between the spiritual or noetic power of

sacred texts and images and their sense-perceptible forms in the world. According to Plotinus,

“imagination has consciousness of what is external to it, for it allows that which has the images to

have knowledge of what it has experienced”. In other words, the imagination takes on a cognitive

function and is not to be confused with the kind of fantastical images which originate from the

unreliable realm of human opinion. Plotinus uses the metaphor of two ‘imaginations’ – lower and

higher - as mirror images which need to be brought into a single focus. He says:

“When the two souls are in harmony, and the two imagining faculties do not stand apart, but that

of the superior soul is dominant, then a single image only is perceived, the less powerful being like a

shadow on the other, like a lesser light merging into a greater”.

In this way the human being unites the opposing tendencies within him or herself through image-

based, contemplative exercises which strengthen the connection between the intuitive intellect

and the image making art of the soul. In the medieval period, this fundamental idea of two distinct

modes of intelligence – the divine and the human - was seen to be reflected cosmologically in the

realms above and below the moon, hence the moon became a powerful symbol for the

mediating function of the soul and embodied a feminine wisdom, associated with the goddess

Sophia in her various guises as Isis, Artemis or the Virgin Mary. The chief characteristic of this

feminine wisdom is its role as a portal to spiritual knowledge through images which evoke deep

intuitive resonances with the Divine Ideas deep within the soul. Thus Plotinus’ ‘higher’ imagination

could be seen metaphorically as the solar light of gnostic understanding reflected through the

lunar rays and finding form in the arts, in dreams, visionary revelations and oracles. By the time of

Marsilio Ficino in 15th century Florence, Platonic wisdom itself was characterised as the nymph

Eurydice, ready to be rescued from the underworld through the rebirth of the liberal arts.

I want to move now to the neoplatonically inspired Sufism of the medieval mystic Ibn Al

‘Arabi, where the idea of the soul having ‘two eyes’ is given great emphasis in the exaltation of the

power of the creative, visionary imagination to the status of divine revelation. The two eyes of

Reason and Revelation are given distinct functions and capacities, and must work together to




achieve optimum cognitive breadth and synthesis. William Chittick has commented on the

consequences of either eye over-reaching itself and gaining dominance, which will happen if an

exclusive attachment to either one takes hold. If the eye of reason, which divides and abstracts,

cuts itself off from the eye of myth and imagination, then it may exile the divine from the world and

push it into total transcendence if not oblivion, resulting in an inflated materialist rationality immune

to the knowledge of the soul. Conversely, if the eye of revelation is left to its own devices, it will lose

the ability to discriminate and clarify between conditions of being and will tend to conflate the

infinite into the finite in an unreflective solipsism characteristic of much ‘new age’ material. As

Jorge Ferrer has observed, there is a great difference between a ‘participatory turn’ to a deeper

level of consciousness and an ‘infra-subjective’ reduction of the transpersonal to the personal.

The perfect sage or enlightened man however can allow the two eyes to work together, each at its

own task. The Islamic scholar Henry Corbin explains that the allying of philosophical study to inner

spiritual experience is a way to achieve this harmonious relationship, and indeed he demonstrates

this in his own writing. Related to this dual vision, Ibn ‘Arabi distinguishes between second-hand

and first-hand knowing. The former is characterised by the gathering of ‘external’ facts and

information, whereas the latter concerns realisation, or learning through tasting for oneself, as the

truthfulness or verity of the text or image is ‘revealed’ in accordance with the soul’s own level of

consciousness or awareness.

When we come to the Renaissance, a period which McGilchrist sees as demonstrating a

particularly harmonious interplay between brain hemispheres, we find Ficino speaking of the

imperative of uniting the rational and revelatory modes of vision in his quest to marry philosophy

and religion, which in his astrological imagination were associated with the symbolism of the

planets Jupiter and Saturn. He deliberately chose the day of their conjunction in 1484 to publish his

complete translations of Plato, thus effecting a ‘realisation’ of the symbolism in an earthly event. As

a Christian Platonist, Ficino was concerned with synthesis and concordance between the two

traditions. In his Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, he draws on both Plotinus’ idea of the two

kinds of soul-vision and Thomas Aquinas on the distinction in Christian thought between reason and

revelation, and presents an image of the two lights of the soul, innate and infused. The innate light

is received from God by the soul immediately after it is born, and it becomes “proper and natural

to it”, enabling it to see itself and “things inferior to it”. But after a while, it receives another, brighter

spark with which it is able to ‘see’ heavenly things also. Armed with both human and divine sight

fused together, the soul is able “to fly through the heavenly region”. If it neglects the divine light, it

falls into the material world and loses sight of its divine origins; if it neglects the light of reason, it

deprives the earth of its divinity. Interestingly, in his Philebus Commentary Ficino refers to the right

eye as the eye of divine wisdom, and the left as the eye of human knowledge, which together

constitute the intelligence of the soul. He is here giving a literal physiological location for what in

Plotinus and Ibn ‘Arabi remains pure metaphor. We now know that it is in fact the opposite brain

hemispheres that control the eyes, so the right eye is under the guidance of the left hemisphere of




rational thinking, but in the days before neurological research Ficino has grasped the same

underlying principle.

I don’t have time today to discuss Ficino’s symbolism in detail, but I will draw your attention

to his neoplatonic scheme of the rational soul as mediatrix between the human and divine modes

of understanding by reference to Botticelli’s painting Primavera, which was produced under the

influence of the Platonic Academy in the 1480s. Here we find the feminine, imaginative aspect of

the rational soul given form in the central figure of the Lunar goddess, who is directing the circuit of

spiritual energy from the human realm of sensuality on her left, through the form-giving imagination,

to the perfect harmony of the three Graces on her right, to be returned to the stars by the

caduceus of Mercury.

Botticelli is here depicting what Henry Corbin calls the mundus imaginalis or the visionary

realm of the cognitive imagination, where spirit and matter meet in an alchemical union. Corbin

describes this intermediary world as “a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and

the world of the intellect,” and as a “precise order of reality, according to a precise mode of

perception” which is more coherent that the empirical world perceived by the senses. This order of

reality is primary - enveloping and containing the external and visible world. “Spiritual reality”, he

says, “is not ‘in the where’, it is the ‘where’ that is in it”. This imaginal world can be seen as the

visible manifestation of the anima mundi, giving rise to all that the human ‘eye of reason’ then

seeks to understand.

I hope it is now becoming clear why I would advocate the metaphor of the two eyes as

helpful for the scholar or researcher of esotericism, as they negotiate between the necessary

historical contextualisation and philological analysis and the initiatory power of the texts and

images they are studying. Finally, I would l ike to contextualise this metaphor more fully in

McGilchrist’s work, because I believe that he has provided a ‘way in’ to the imperative of co-

operation and interplay between the two modes through appealing to a model of tremendous

authority, rooted as it is in the physical dimension of empirical observation and experiment.

In his wide-ranging book, McGilchrist has shown that the dimension of experience we are calling

‘revelatory’ or ‘intellectual’ in the Platonic sense is in fact, ‘the world according to the right

hemisphere’ of the brain. In his exhaustive study of the functions of the two hemispheres and the

expressions of these functions throughout Western culture, he has shown how the two cognitive

modes in humans are autonomous, but that their co-operation and cross-fertilisation are essential

for healthy brain activity. Furthermore, it is the rightful function of the right hemisphere to be

primary, the ‘Master’, and for the left hemisphere to act as emissary – Just as Plato describes the

functions of the Divine Mind in relation to human reason. He points out that “the divided nature of

our reality has been a consistent observation since humanity has been sufficiently self-conscious to

reflect upon it”, and starting with the results of medical research into hemisphere imbalance, he

investigates the implications of what happens both in the individual and in societies when the two

modes of cognition become disconnected and at odds with each other.




To cut a very long story short, McGilchrist concludes that it is the function of the left

hemisphere to unfold through explication the implicit understanding of the right, so that the

clarified, unfolded vision can then be re-integrated with the ‘bigger picture’ of the right

hemisphere. Here we find a physiological metaphor for the interpretation of the symbolic image or

divinatory sign, and for the Mercurial act of returning meanings back to their origins in the divine

minds of the cosmos. In the act of returning, new insights and understandings come into being, and

this whole process, suggests McGilchrist, should be the basis of education. In all creativity and in the

development of a religious sense, he says there must be progress from “an intuitive apprehension of

whatever it may be via a more formal process of enrichment through conscious, detailed analytic

understanding, to a new, enhanced, intuitive understanding of this whole, now transformed by the

process that it has undergone”.

It is all too easy for us to see the effects of a purely left hemisphere approach to knowledge,

for it dominates our institutions and can result in both fundamentalist and scientistic tyranny. As

McGIlchrist wryly observes, the left hemisphere produces a rationality divorced from reason, and

can always “find quite plausible, but bogus, explanations for the evidence that does not fit is

version of events”. Only the right hemisphere is in touch with primary experience, and if the left

does not act in accordance with it, as receiver rather than initiator, it will tend to see all that the

right stands for as intellectually deluded in some way. We see this all the time in relation to the

esoteric and occult in our society, for the right hemisphere mode resonates with the aims of

esoteric teachings, with their emphasis on metaphoric understanding. In fact the right

hemisphere’s mode of understanding IS primarily through symbol and metaphor. McGilchrist

echoes Plotinus, Ficino, Corbin, Jung and the entire strand of Western esoteric theory and practice

when he states “it is the faculty of imagination which comes into being between the two

hemispheres, which enables us to take things back from the world of the left hemisphere and make

them live again in the right. It is in this way, not by meretricious novelty, that things are made truly

new once again.” McGilchrist’s model confirms that of neoplatonic epistemology, that

consciousness has a continual existence, as he says, “transforming itself as it travels upwards until it

becomes high level awareness”. It thus engenders a dynamic, mobile process of never-ending

renewal and transformation, constantly informing the world of the senses with insights from another

order of reality altogether. But for such a synthesis to occur, the left hemisphere has to be

‘awakened’ to the possibility of realms beyond its own limited boundaries, and this is where we

return to the role of initiation.

So where does this leave our gnostic researcher? I would suggest that McGilchrist himself

demonstrates the very qualities he is advocating and presents us with a model for the integrated

mode of research I advocated at the beginning of this paper. In subjecting the intuitive

understanding of the right hemisphere to the analysis of the left, in grounding it in a literal metaphor

(if there can be such a thing) of scientific empiricism and causal mechanism then returning it to the

wider perspective of historical and cultural conflicts and ideologies, he is himself forging a




coniunctio between the two hemispheres through a brilliant engagement with the symbolic. I

would argue that this is exactly what the best writing on esotericism also achieves: taking a

standpoint in the awareness, understanding and above all presence of a transpersonal cognitive

dimension, it finds a language in which to contextualise and interpret the symbolic vision via

rational discourse. I will give the final word to Corbin, who laments that in the absence of such a

two-way process, mere ‘theoretical models’ are transmitted and the intellectual vitality of the

traditions is lost. Scholars of esotericism are presented with the opportunity of engaging directly

with this vitality and transmitting it through academic forms, and I will conclude with the thought

that in so doing they may be contributing to a redemption of the anima mundi that the world so

urgently needs.




worse, the notion that some Pagan Studies scholars were actually practitioners was downright

reprehensible. The classic insider/outsider debates that have been, if not settled, thoroughly vetted

in anthropology and sociology, were completely ignored here. At one of these panels, one of the

most prominent scholars in Western Esotericism made the case that scholars in his field had very

judiciously practiced a kind of methodological atheism that allowed for their hard-won

acceptance in the European rationalist academy and that any whiff of practice in the scholarship

might be construed as apologia. This scholar further suggested that Pagan Studies, a consultation

at the time, would have to follow suit if they wanted legitimacy not only in the academy as a

whole, but in AAR itself – that they would not achieve group status if they didn’t shift their emphasis

away from a scholar/practitioner approach. Needless to say, this assertion didn’t prove true, at

least about the AAR, as Pagan Studies achieved group status a year later, without abandoning the

participatory methodology of many of its scholars.

My problems with both these academic niches were several. First, the contemporary

ceremonial magician, whether as a Hermetic, polytheist, or Thelemite, was left out of the equation

altogether by both groups. Second, the strict division between these groups did not reflect my

reality on the ground in any way. As a practitioner and member of several groups and social

circles, as well as an attendee and participant at many Pagan or occulture-based festivals, I was

constantly in situations where various magical practitioners of the Pagan and the Ceremonial

variety mingled, ritualized and celebrated together with little fanfare. Granted, as with any eclectic

group of individuals, tensions and preconceived notions existed, but for the most part, members of

countless esoteric categories acted under a broad umbrella of magical practice and occulture.

This was true in my own group at the time, the Hermetic Order of Chicago, but also at festivals,

where Pagans, Wiccans, Santerians, Vodun initiates, Ceremonials, Thelemites, Burners and Fire Tribe

members, even members of the Church of the Sub-Genius played, drummed, and danced

alongside each other.

Further, these strict divisions didn’t even reflect my academic reality. As a graduate of a

PhD program in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, I had been immersed in

interdisciplinarity, discourses of hybridity, and a sense that participation was key to understanding

and critically addressing the experiential nature of practice and, in my case, spiritual and religious

belief. In the anthology Teaching Performance Studies, Elyse Pineau frames the discipline as one

that “argu[es] that sensuous engagement and kinesthetic empathy between researchers and

subjects can best illuminate the experiential complexities of human interaction, the texture of a

living moment.” Similarly, Dwight Conquergood offers “the performance paradigm” as one that

“privileges particular, participatory, dynamic, intimate, precarious and embodied experience

grounded in historical process, contingency and ideology.” This sensuous engagement pervaded

coursework and texts that dealt with ethnography in my program. Performance Studies itself has

several threads – the more well known iteration of the field emerges from the productive but

problematic partnership between anthropologist Victor Turner and theatre scholar and practitioner




Richard Schechner, when they explored connections between theatre and various rituals particular

to the cultures that both scholars studied. It is this incarnation of Performance Studies that

esotericism scholar Christopher Lehrich, in his book The Occult Mind, quickly dismisses as naïve

when he considers cross-cultural approaches to the study of ritual. And while Schechner and

Turner’s work is seminal for performance studies scholars, many in the discipline have thoroughly

critiqued the Eurocentric and colonialist approaches in Schechner’s work, so they might even

agree with Lehrich.

However, Performance Studies also encompasses a different track, particularly building on

the work of Wallace Bacon and the study of Speech and Rhetoric that had its home at

Northwestern University in the mid 20 th century. It is this thread that often includes considerations of

JL Austin’s performative theory of language and various versions of speech-act theory. When I was

in coursework in the mid-90s, New York University’s Performance Studies, where Schechner taught,

approached performance as live art, often within an avant-garde context, while Northwestern’s

Performance Studies program, under the auspices of the late Dwight Conquergood, was more

focused on ethnography, living cultures, postmodern and postcolonial discourses, and the

performativity of text, language, and the body. Even though Chris Lehrich dismisses the

performance studies approach to ritual, it is that latter aspect of performance theory that he

adapts in his analysis of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica, which ostensibly argues for the Monas as

a performative text, oddly enough by drawing an analogy with Japanese No theatre. Here, Lehrich

critiques his colleagues in religious studies who eschew cross-cultural comparisons, arguing against

analytical approaches that either “radically familiarize” the object of study, reducing the object

merely to context and construct, and those that “radically defamiliarize” the object, so that the

object itself is impenetrably other.

This dynamic has, of course, been played out in Pagan Studies, in debates about insider

and outsider scholarship, in which clinging too strongly to either side of the participant/observer

equation is equally problematic (such as the edited volume, Researching Paganisms). Similarly, in

outlining Performance Studies methodology, Dwight Conquergood emphasizes engagement with

those being studied while maintaining a critical eye. In his groundbreaking 1991 essay, “Rethinking

Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,” he asks questions that can be directly applied to

the issues surrounding the study of magical practice. First, Conquergood asks, “What are the

conceptual consequences of thinking about culture . . . as [an] unfolding performative invention

instead of a reified system, structure, or variable?” and as a corollary, “What are the

methodological implications of thinking about fieldwork as the collaborative performance of an

enabling fiction between observer and observed, knower and known?” Inherent to these question

are the ways that the performance paradigm shifts the emphasis from “the world as text,” a notion

strongly associated with the natural philosophy at the heart of Renaissance occultism, to “the world

as performance.” This approach could offer a way out of Lehrich’s dilemma, by noting the

complicated ways in which the researcher and his subject meet and interact in a discursive field.




What is produced cannot be fully self or fully other.

Conquergood’s third question, “What kinds of knowledge are privileged or displaced when

performed experience becomes a way of knowing, a method of critical inquiry, a mode of

understanding?” reflects a growing emphasis on bodily knowledge in analyses of magical ritual

and magical practitioners’ language and identity formations. As is suggested by the work of Susan

Greenwood and others, some researchers studying contemporary magical practice are taking

seriously the experiences of practitioners and critically addressing their own experiences while in

ritual space. Sarah Pike certainly emphasizes bodily knowing when she writes about celebrants at

various Pagan festivals who dance around the fires in Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves. These dancers

use the body as a site for expression, healing, conflict resolution, exploration, and learning. Pike

herself writes of her participation in the fire circle as a performance space where she awakens

“sensual memories embedded in my body” (Earthly Bodies 189).

However, simply applying performance theory to research does not fulfill the potential of

Conquergood’s paradigm. Nikki Bado, in her study of Wiccan initiation rites from the position of a

high priestess, laments that when religious studies and folkloristics address ritual performance, “it is

removed from its context in the embodied world of ritual praxis. It is duly cleansed of any reference

to the transformative power of magic, prayer or other discourse of faith” (8). According to Bado,

these studies emphasize ritual as “disembodied text” rather than as a bodily, visceral experience

that “feels real” to the participants. Further, she critiques performance theorists that “tend to

secularize ritual and evaluate it as an act of artistry, a moment of religious theater” (19). Theatrical

metaphors are inadequate for the study of magickal ritual, and especially problematic for

practitioners, specifically because of an association with “play-acting,” the notion that the

activities are somehow inauthentic. Bado further suggests “it might be more productive to…

examine the criteria by which a religious community determines the authenticity or inauthenticity of

its religious performances. This avoids any tendency to simply impose what we as scholars consider

valuable criteria, without taking into consideration what the evaluative criteria of the performers

themselves might be.”

My own study of ritual practice evolved from Pagan and esoteric initiation rites, the focus of

my dissertation, to other more diffuse and unstructured performances, such as can be found

around festival fires. In my dissertation, I included analyses of historical discourse and ritual. But

when critiquing the scholarship of Western Esotericism, what’s missing is not just the study of ritual.

Ritual is not the only modality through which to critically frame magical practice and magical

practitioners. Esoteric language and rhetoric should also be addressed. My years of teaching

composition and rhetoric have introduced me to the theory of the discourse community, a group

that communicates, makes claims, and receives feedback through certain speech, performance,

and writing genres. At festivals, a researcher can observe and interact with discourse communities

who enact these discourse genres daily (and nightly). As Sarah Pike has pointed out, the problem

of insider/outsider scholarship is largely a non-issue at festivals, where anyone who pays can attend




and participate at whatever level he or she feels comfortable.

My own attendance has been mostly at mid-western events, such as Starwood, Sirius Rising,

Elf Fest, Fires Rising, Pagan Spirit Gathering, Babalon Rising, and in the east, the Rites of Spring

festival. Some of these festivals have a more “pagan” bent, while others, like Starwood, emphasize

a general occulture or counterculture aesthetic. In my chapter on festivals in the Handbook of

Contemporary Paganism, I wrote of a growing subset of festivalgoers who eschew traditional

religious labels, such as Pagan, in favor of an identity as part of a Fire Tribe, where anyone can

drum, dance, or work with the fire. While some consistency exists among various festivals and fire

circles, this eclectic Fire Tribe takes on many forms. At events organized by stage magician Jeff

McBride and his partner Abbi Spinner, the fire circle is constructed and framed as an alchemical

ritual in which participants work through various stages of the alchemical process in their own self-

directed performances with drumming, music, chants, songs, dance and ritualization. The discourse

created by McBride, Spinner and their compatriots borrows both from alchemy and popular self-

actualization. The circle is designed using alchemical symbolism (crucible, vessel, planetary track)

and participants’ available roles are also defined through alchemical processes. Participants are

said to transform the lead of their lives into gold through their enactments at the fire, to the degree

that the triumphant sunrise the following morning, after participants have drummed, danced, sung

and chanted throughout the night, represents their gold.

In more loosely structured fires, such as Starwood, Sirius Rising, or Babalon Rising, participants

simply immerse themselves in ecstatic experience where the emphasis is on drumming and

dancing. Even here, however, participants adapt some of the discourses of esotericism, such as the

daily ritual at these sites where participants shout Aleister Crowley’s Liber Resh at the rising sun. This

is especially the case at the Babalon Rising festival in Indiana, one of the few festivals in the country

dedicated to ceremonialists and followers of Thelema, with many of the attendees and organizers

being OTO members. The general bent of Babalon Rising is towards those interested in ceremonial

magick and sacred sexuality, so much that the workshops offered at the festival are along these

two tracks, ranging from discussions of polyamory, using BDSM scenes as ritual, creating talismans,

Egyptian mythology, the importance of sacred touch, Thelemic approaches to Tarot cards, magic,

and alchemy, among many others. It is here that I encountered the god Pan, embodied by a 34

year old active duty soldier, and an initiate of the OTO, scantily clad and in makeup, enticing

women and men to engage with him through dance and flirtatious game playing around the fire.

For me, this man, embodied not only the Pan of Aleister Crowley’s provocative lyrical poem, but

also a performative cipher, a synecdoche for the potential ideals of both the festival itself and the

version of Thelema being practiced by individuals I encountered in my studies. At the festival,

Thelema, and esotericism in general, represented an opportunity for both men and women to

reclaim an edgier, more provocative sacred sexuality, particularly represented by performers who

took on the role of Babalon and the Beast in the climactic ritual of the festival.

As part of an essay on festivals and sexuality, I interviewed several practitioners at the




festival, including Pan, and several women who had portrayed Babalon. One participant, who took

on the role of the Scarlet Woman for a number of years, describes how her performance with her

male counterpart as the Beast assuaged the “fear and dread that I had come to associate with

desire.” Further, her interaction with Pan within the fire circle space “swept me into a place where

I was this magician who represented the lust for life and showed my companions the way into

revelry.” Likewise, the man who embodied Pan talked of the evolution of his relationship with the

persona he created for the festival, how various parts of his life, emotional, intellectual and magical

pursuits, including his OTO initiation, came together and that his performances were expressions of

his True Will, in Thelemic terms, and in the practitioner’s terms, “when you’re doing the right thing,

and everything else falls into place.”

When I initially encountered this manifestation of Pan, it was not as a researcher, but as a

participant in the fire circle who engaged with Pan, and as an observer who would watch his

interactions around the fire and note how women especially responded to instances in which their

boundaries were pushed. The interview only came later (in fact, several years) and he was

surprisingly articulate about what he does in terms of gender roles and sexuality in our culture. So

here you have an instance in which a contemporary practitioner of Western esotericism is

engaging in a performative, and undeniably spiritual practice, who is making his own claims about

magic, culture, and gender. Practitioners embody history, discourse, and culture. As an

interdisciplinary academic, I could approach this embodiment of contemporary practices from

several different disciplinary angles – through the lens of ethnography, discourse theory,

performance theory, or religion, just to name a few. But my encounter with Pan could certainly be

framed as “the collaborative performance of an enabling fiction between observer and observed,

knower and known.”

But why do scholars of Western Esotericism pursue their work? While legitimacy within the

academy is important, what is the point of studying these strange subjects if it doesn’t engage with

or is not relevant to the actual practice or to actual practitioners? What’s truly at stake in this study?

For me, delving into the ritualizations and performances at Babalon Rising has helped illuminate

problematic but potentially transgressive approaches to sexuality and gender, which can be

further discussed and implemented into the communities that practice. Not everyone imitates or

even understands or acknowledges what the man embodying Pan is doing at the festival, but

these considerations of gender roles and sexuality matter. Perhaps more festivalgoers who often

stumble through awkward or potentially oppressive social encounters can learn from these

considerations. Regardless, these discussions are important to have, not only for scholars, but for

practitioners. Further, the ability to frame these notions in different ways and to study magical

practice through different lenses is essential for the longevity of this field. I would argue for Western

Esotericism to sustain itself as a vibrant field that can actually have an impact on the broader

academic scene, or even the actual world of practice, scholars must embrace interdisciplinarity, or

else the field risks becoming irrelevant and ghettoized, of becoming hermetic in the wrong sense.




Western Esotericism in a Brave New World

© Sasha Chaitow

Recently I was very excited to come across a website owned by the Bodossakis foundation 1, a

high-profile educational charity based in Greece. The website hosts international academic

lectures and conference videos from across the spectrum of the sciences and the humanities, and

in its mission statement, it notes that its ambition is to form a true crossroads of interdisciplinary

dialogue, and to offer the insights gleaned in closed conference halls and classrooms to a broader

public audience. Two items in particular caught my eye: The first was a collection of talks from an

international conference that took place in Athens this summer, entitled “Philosophy, Politics, and

Finance in the Era of Globalisation,” and another was called “Leadership and Management in a

Changing World: Lessons from Ancient Eastern and Western Philosophy,” and featured a number of

discussions of Platonic thought vis-a-vis modern political dilemmas, as well as comparative analyses

of Confucian thought from Platonic perspectives. A third conference was called “Art and

Education: Creative ways of teaching languages.” Two lecture titles that stood out were entitled

“Do you speak Music in your classroom? Conditions and Ideas for solid teaching and learning,” and

“Techniques for Contemplative, Creative, and Linguistic motivation of students through the arts:

theoretical and practical approaches.”

The reason for my excitement at discovering the

content of this website was because it embodied

precisely the concept driving Phoenix Rising

Academy and which brought us here today. The

questions we're here to discuss are twofold: Firstly, we

wish to take a fresh look at whether the

methodologies we utilize are sufficient, or whether

they are in danger of stifling or truncating the very subject they were designed to illuminate by

keeping the experiential aspect and epistemology belonging to the esoteric traditions firmly

outside the scope of exploration. Although many scholars may believe that we are tilting at

windmills by quixotically reopening a subject that many consider to have been resolved long ago, I

beg to differ.

My reasoning lies in the second issue that I wish to raise and which is so beautifully

represented by the mission statement of the Bodossakis foundation as well as many of the

conference topics that it features: If these topics are only discussed in conference halls and

1 http://www.blod.gr/default.aspx


http://www.blod.gr/default.aspx

http://www.blod.gr/default.aspx



classrooms at advanced and theoretical academic levels, and if they provide only the most

sanitised perspectives on these topics, presented in language based on a referential framework

that only scholars are actually privy to, while simultaneously frowning on the participation of the

very people who make these traditions what they are, then what precisely is their purpose, beyond

a very small, special interest niche in academic scholarship? It has become a well established

truism that the W. Esoteric traditions form a third current in the development of Western thought,

and represent a neglected, or rejected aspect – and a very broad one at that – of our cultural

history. The reasons for its rejection are manifold and anything but uniform, but that does not

necessarily mean that that pattern ought to be continued.

Behind these issues lies the more elusive question of the purpose of academic study, and of

the humanities in particular. A heretical notion, to be sure. We are so convinced of the intrinsic

value of academic learning and knowledge that, at least in the humanities, we rarely pause to

wonder at its practical value from a utilitarian perspective, despite often enough being governed

by utilitarian rules. In the sciences, in technical specialisations, and in the political, business, and

financial disciplines the inherent “usefulness” of such topics in terms of the world we live in, is more

self-evident. With the humanities, the lines are more blurred, and apart from teaching, the media &

publishing industries, or self-employment of one sort or another, a practical mind might wonder just

what use a degree in philosophy, or religion, or Western Esotericism, might be to all those graduates

not destined for or inclined towards an academic career. It is hardly surprising that since the onset

of the financial crisis, it is the humanities that have been hardest hit. In the UK, history courses are

being cut and truncated, focusing more and more on “useful” areas of history that may be

combined with politics or sociology. Latin and Greek are being phased out of secondary schools. I

cannot speak for many other European countries, but I can speak of the tens of thousands of

unemployed and underemployed humanities graduates in Greece (Eurostat), 2 and of the rhetoric

of more and more American higher educational establishments which are simultaneously focusing

on marketable degrees and

cutting Philosophy, Classics, and

other humanities courses.3

Figures for 2010 showed that more

than half of all undergraduates in

North America were opting for

degrees in business, engineering,

or nursing, avoiding liberal arts

2 http://www.tanea.gr/ellada/article/?aid=45559333 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/education/edlife/03careerism-t.html?ref=edlife&fb_source=message


http://www.tanea.gr/ellada/article/?aid=4555933

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/education/edlife/03careerism-t.html?ref=edlife&fb_source=message

http://www.tanea.gr/ellada/article/?aid=4555933

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/education/edlife/03careerism-t.html?ref=edlife&fb_source=message



programs and colleges in order to focus on subjects with guaranteed career trajectories, and

despite the decision of many liberal art colleges to add professional programmes to their

curriculum, they are rapidly losing ground, turning away financially needy students, and some are

nearing bankruptcy. Most tellingly of all, a recent survey carried out by Pew Research Centre for

The Chronicle of Higher Education, reveals the disparity between the perspective of higher

education leaders and presidents, and that of the general public. Where three quarters of

Americans polled felt that higher education was too expensive, presidents and administrators have

to worry about balance sheets and student numbers. Where colleges prepare marketing

campaigns based on employability and watch their student bodies swell with the recently

unemployed and overqualified seeking retraining, the public survey tells a different story: 55% of

Americans viewed higher education as preparation for a career, but an overwhelming 74% said

that it was more useful for knowledge and intellectual growth, with a further 69% saying that it was

important for personal growth and maturity.4 We can read these figures in two ways: either as

saying that college offers opportunities for knowledge and growth, but not necessarily career

building, or as saying that knowledge and growth are more important than career building. It

would be irresponsible and inaccurate of me to insist on one or the other interpretation, and in truth

the way the question has been framed is not terribly helpful. However, the fact of the matter is that

the humanities subjects being cut, are the ones most conducive to the life of the mind, intellectual

development, and critical and creative thinking, the latter being a crucial skill in any workplace, as

another report on student experience has attested.5

Dr Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, had the following to say

about liberal arts schools in relation to the demand for immediately marketable skills: “We ... give

[students] the tools to be analytical, to be able to gather information and to determine the validity

of that information themselves, particularly in this world where people don’t filter for you

anymore....We want to teach them how to make an argument, how to defend an argument, to

make a choice.” But, as noted by John Neuhauser, president of St. Michael's Liberal Arts College in

Vermont, “The humanities tend to educate people much farther out. They’re looking for an impact

that lasts over decades,” and as noted by Times reporter Kate Zernike, “these colleges also say

they have the hardest time explaining the link between what they teach and the kind of job and

salary a student can expect on the other end.” 6 In the modern world, this is certainly true. However,

I think we can all agree that the analytical and critical skills one acquires when faced with the

demands of humanities topics, especially at entry-level when these skills are newly acquired, allow

for creative problem-solving, the ability to multitask, the ability to see the “big picture” and think

laterally, and from this perspective, it is not surprising that technocratic governments have not

succeeded in coming up with sustainable solutions for the issues currently plaguing both sides of

4 http://chronicle.com/article/A-Crisis-of-Confidence/127530/ , http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Transform-the-

Liberal/64398/

5 http://chronicle.com/article/Its-More-Than-Just-the/127534/

6 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/education/edlife/03careerism-t.html? pagewanted=2&fb_source=message&ref=edlife


http://chronicle.com/article/A-Crisis-of-Confidence/127530/

http://chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Transform-the-Liberal/64398/




http://chronicle.com/article/Its-More-Than-Just-the/127534/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/education/edlife/03careerism-t.html?pagewanted=2&fb_source=message&ref=edlife



http://chronicle.com/article/A-Crisis-of-Confidence/127530/



http://chronicle.com/article/Its-More-Than-Just-the/127534/





the Atlantic. I cannot help but wonder what scale of difference might emerge were they historians

with considerable life-experience behind them.

With regard to advanced degrees, the situation is not necessarily the same, particularly

when we are talking about real-l ife

applicability of skills. David Bejou, Dean of

the School of Business and Economics at

Elizabeth City State University in Virginia,

makes the following point about MBA

degrees: “Today, many M.B.A. programs

define themselves the way railroad

companies did some 50 years ago.

Theodore Levitt (past professor of Harvard

Business School, 1925-2006) believes that

organizations that narrowly define themselves and focus on their products become myopic and fail

along with their myopic products.” Of the attempts to change and modernise MBA degrees, he

has this to say: “ Unfortunately for the most part... they did not engage the students in a holistic

approach that would positively impact the individual students, the business world and the global

society.”7 One of the key issues of study at advanced levels is the degree of focus and inevitably,

the narrowing of one's sights. Once one has crossed into MA and PhD territory, it becomes

increasingly harder to retranslate that perspective into a language accessible by those on a lower

educational level, even though it is they who need it the most. The ability to effectively transfer

knowledge is an underrated, yet invaluable skill, and less educated individuals cannot be blamed

for what they do not know. Time and time again I have encountered senior scholars who are quite

shocked by this observation, and who even consider that if individuals who cannot grasp such

complex concepts have no place in the dialogue.Yet, if they are not the students of tomorrow,then

who is? It is hardly surprising then, that frequently enough, a powerful anti-intellectualism is

observed across the media and public life, if all but a few scholars place themselves out of the

reach of the layperson. I am not suggesting that we should dumb down, by any means, but I am

calling for us to translate and condense our information into a language that can be accessible to

all. In that way, not only will it be on its way into the mainstream, but it would also be in a position

to demystify the academic eyrie of ivory towers and marble halls, hopefully attracting more people

to invest in the humanities.

By this point you may be

wondering what all this has to do with

the study of esotericism, and

particularly the matter of

methodology. I think David Bejou

7 http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/are-they-students-or-customers/


http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/are-they-students-or-customers/

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/are-they-students-or-customers/



could have been talking about any number of advanced academic qualifications, and not just

MBAs, especially if we reconsider that survey of the public. Professor Dame Alison Richard, former

chancellor of Cambridge University in England has noted that: “the dichotomy between useful and

not-useful is itself increasingly not-useful.” Her successor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz points out

that, far from simply perceiving subjects belonging to the humanities and liberal arts as “knowledge

for its own sake,” we need to take a broader view and look to the long term if we are to find

workable solutions to today's problems. He also notes that “the case for a broader outlook centres

on the proposition that the greatest challenges facing the world today are of huge complexity and

global scope, best tackled by people whose education enables them to integrate different fields

of knowledge and work across conventional academic boundaries.” 8

As I have already mentioned, W. Esotericism is an indisputable part of Western culture, with

unique dynamics informing its complex interrelationships with the discourse, expression, and

development of said culture, and with various strands that can be shown to be intimately

interconnected with social and political developments on larger and smaller scales. It is also a set

of currents, many of which are in existence and continuing to evolve, even as we speak, and

which for many people are living traditions, as well as a way of life. Over the last few decades, the

scholars who have dedicated themselves to exploring and establishing this fascinating field in

Western Academia, have done wonders in terms of developing a structure, a vocabulary, and a

set of tools for younger scholars such as myself to work with, while also establishing a series of

continental and transnational networks for the support of the growing academic community. The

field is constantly growing, with new departments and courses springing up in both European and

American universities, and numerous invaluable publications and studies appearing every few

months.

Yet, I would venture that there may be trouble in paradise, and the trouble begins with

some of the elements that I have outlined thus far, particularly the point raised by the survey of

higher education administrators juxtaposed with the needs and desires of the general public. When

it comes to Western Esotericism, the existing options for study are aimed mainly at students planning

to pursue an advanced academic path, or, in some cases, students simply wishing to pursue it for

their own personal interest. In terms of methodology, the options are also fairly straightforward, and

in all cases approaches that conform to as empirical, documentary, and objective a method of

research as possible are well-established and defended.

8 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8838679/Universities-need-Pepys-as-much-as-Newton.html


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8838679/Universities-need-Pepys-as-much-as-Newton.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8838679/Universities-need-Pepys-as-much-as-Newton.html



However, it is my strong conviction, based on my involvement with this field, on my own

teaching experience, on dialogue resulting from addresses I have delivered and articles I have

written aimed at the general public rather than academic peers, and on my understanding of

education in general, that adhering to this approach for the field to the exclusion of all others, will,

eventually, jeopardise the very field itself.

The reasons are twofold. Firstly, this approach is alienating the very people who could and

should be the most passionate and able to carry this field forward, and secondly, because in

restricting these studies to an academic level which does not make allowances for entry-level

students, or speak a language comprehensible to the general public, it is inevitably narrowing the

scope for intake and spread, much like the MBA programs discussed by David Bejou, like a railroad

company worrying about the colour of the trains, and not the efficient service of the passengers.

That the field needs to be demarcated, and that quality standards need to be met and

maintained is a given. I am not in any way challenging this. However, it must be noted that a key

argument used by many independent scholars or practitioners of esotericism, rests on the premise

that it is almost impossible to understand esoteric concepts without the referential framework of theenchanted worldview from which they sprang, and thus feel that an unambiguously academic

approach in its current form cannot do justice to these subjects. Some, ourselves included, have

called for more interdisciplinary perspectives to be introduced within the bounds of acceptable

scholarship. In other cases, a considerable number of individuals and groups who self-identify as

practitioners of various esoteric paths have not only argued that the academic approach is a

mistake, but are quite hostile towards it, as the intellectual rigour it demands and the lack of

flexibility allowed in terms of empathetic engagement, is seen as damaging to the overall

perception of esotericism. From this perspective, in some circles it is believed that scholars can




never truly understand exactly what esotericism is, much less be in a position to label themselves as

experts in the field. And all of these perspectives are emerging in response to a burgeoning

demand for books, lectures and courses in esotericism, though it appears that no two people can

agree on just how this should take place, since even academics disagree amongst themselves, as

do practitioners of various kinds, while scholar-practitioners are frowned on in academia. These

issues are becoming an ever larger proverbial elephant in the room, and for as long as the leaders

of the field neglect to respond to it, or respond by simply excluding themselves from this dialogue,

the larger the elephant will grow, and the longer the controversy will be perpetuated.

Although we wouldn't for a

moment claim that we at

Phoenix Rising Academy

have THE answer, what we

do have is a handful of

suggestions and a strong

desire to bridge these

disparate views, that we

also hope might go some

way toward healing the

often quite forceful

animosity that appears to emerge whenever these views are aired. The foundation for these

suggestions is that the form of thought that we now call esotericism, is very very similar indeed to

the ancient Philosophia of the Liberal Arts educational model.

To begin to bridge the perceptual

divide, we need to begin by fostering an

environment within which these ideas can

regain their meaningfulness, and to do

that, we need to look at the worldview

within which these traditions emerged and

evolved. When speaking of an

appropriate environment and worldview, I

am speaking not of some revivalist

tradition, but of a mental and intellectual

environment. This brings me not to a

romantic revisioning of the past, but to the model of classical education. Grammar, the first lesson

of the Trivium, was first developed by poets in ancient Greece in order to help speakers of the

common tongue understand the poetic language of Homer. Known as the “Art of Grammar”, and

later called “Janua Artum”, meaning the Gate of the Arts by the Romans, the concept of




Grammar was always closely related to the creative arts, as it provided a frame of reference to

exercise and expand the mind toward its creative possibilities. Rhetoric, or the art of speaking,

takes note of the differentiation between written and spoken expression, and beyond the actual

skills it imparts – including the use of allegory and metaphor - it is an exercise in consciousness, self-

awareness, and analytical thought and expression. Logic at this level sets the ground rules for the

study of philosophy – we could say that logic is to philosophy what grammar is to language. Then,

curiously, all four of the quadrivium subjects inherently incorporate the philosophical and

metaphysical bases for what we now call the esoteric traditions. Mathematics and abstract

mathematics inherently include a philosophical component. Plato himself had a warning carved

above the entrance to his Academy: let no-one enter here without geometry – since for Plato

philosophy, cosmology, and geometry, were inseparable – and reading Plato without geometry

may leave more gaps in our understanding than we know. Of music I shall say little, apart from

noting that of all the art forms it was considered the most ethereal and magical – both because it

was considered able to move, as well as for its harmonic and mathematical properties. And finally

astronomy served to place Man in the universe, at once observer, recorder, creator and guardian

of nature. As a form of education, this is the model and set of principles that liberal arts colleges

were founded on, and from which they are now being forced to move away.

There is still a dissonance and a fatal flaw in my argumentation that I have not yet

addressed, which has been aptly identified by Professor Wouter Hanegraaff as the profoundest of

ironies: the fact that “the 19th and 20th century representatives of Western Esotericism are largely so

deeply influenced by the very worldviews to which they object, that what they present as

enchanted alternatives turn out in fact to be products of the secularization process.” 9

This is absolutely true, and it is also true of our educational

system. But does that mean that my call for a re-

examination of the Liberal Arts as a model of education

underpinning the core esoteric notion of self-awareness

and self-determination is just one more religionist and

utopian dream? Hardly religionist, I would venture.

Philosophist, perhaps, but then I would not presume to

argue with Plato and Socrates! But is it utopian?

It might be, if we were to advocate some kind of return to the glorious past, which would

represent the “first naiveté” of Paul Ricoeur's system of hermeneutics. Yet, if we accept this, and

choose instead to use the academic tools at our disposal, imbued with the spirit of rationalism, we

do in fact remain at the first naïveté, because we are continuing to take a rationalist approach to

material which is patently irrational. Naturally these are the best tools for the historiography of

esotericism, as well as for discourse analysis. But in that case, we are not scholars of esotericism at

all, but scholars of a specific historical niche, or of a particular type of discourse.

9 Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Seculr Thought (Leiden:Brill, 1996), pp. 520-1.




So here's the basic conundrum: We have a set of neglected cultural currents, without which

our general understanding of Western history and culture is essentially incomplete on several

fundamental levels. Academic attempts to explore and reinstate them in our collective corpus of

knowledge, are slow, painstaking, in some respects unable to fully do them justice, in others more

damaging than good, particularly when these topics are only made available at advanced

academic levels – although they belong in undergraduate classrooms alongside history, literature,

art as well as science. Practical and individual approaches to these topics are unlikely to have a

great influence on their being understood on a broader level, and are often likely to lack method

or to reflect more subjective or solipsistic interpretations. So in all cases, the 'esoteric traditions'

remain grouped outside of mainstream culture, outside mainstream academia as a kind of “other”,

in a situation that is perpetuated by the way of thinking that divided these worldviews from each

other in the first place. Keeping its study in the highest echelons of academia fuels accusations of

elitism, and supports calls for anti-intellectualism and the shunning of academic perspectives

altogether.

I see two ways out of this conundrum, and they are both based on the premise that within

the history and the content of Western Esoteric currents, are embedded models and ideas that we

can learn from and which can offer far-reaching practicable and pragmatic ways in which to

counter the social, moral and existential crisis that we are all experiencing, whether from the eye of

the storm or the sidelines. The first of these models is that of education that I have already raised.

It is also my conviction that when they

are so inclined, scholars in particular, have a

duty to communicate, disseminate and

discuss these models and their potential

applications. Scholars who have the

privilege of understanding how these

concepts work, need to leave their ivory

towers and talk both to their more positivist

colleagues, as well as their 'objects' of study

and the uninitiated (pardon the pun).

Practitioners who wish to join this dialogue

need to root philosophical and enchanted ideals in modern reality. It is esotericism that can

provide a common vocabulary and vision; from there on, we need to talk to each other - assuming

of course, that we are agreed that right now the world could use some improvement. If scholars

remain ensconced in libraries and conference halls, practitioners remain fixated on high-minded

discussion and defence of their individual belief systems, and armchair occultists continue to

disseminate misperceptions, then all together, we remain part of the problem.




In her 2010 presidential address to the AAR, published in this summer's Journal of the AAR, Ann

Taves makes the following point: “Rather than simply borrowing theories and methods from other

disciplines and turning our departments into fragmented microcosms of the larger university, I think

we can take advantage of the fact that we can approach our object of study at many different

levels of analysis and take up the challenge of figuring out how we might relate explanations

generated at different levels of analysis.”10 In the same issue of the same journal, another author

notes the following point, in an article entitled 'Embodied research and writing: A Case for

Phenomenologically Oriented Religious Studies Ethnographies,': The body can be a vehicle for

complicating, at times transcending, emic and etic boundaries. To ignore our embodiedinteractions with others in the field when we write is to occlude lived experience and how our

bodies are epistemological sites that allow us privileged access into our interlocutor's worlds.' 11

I am not proposing that we should use Ricoeur's method of hermeneutics as he used it, nor

as it was adapted for use in theological hermeneutics, and I do believe that matters of personal

spirituality and belief have no place in academia. Then again, neither do personal politics.

However, that doesn't mean they should not be talked about, and that we should not explore

germane ways to make use of the insights gleaned from a closer interaction with these ideas. Nor is

the fear of this occurring, or precedents belonging to a different time, a sufficient reason to avoidreexamining them from new perspectives.

All teachers inevitably bring their life-experience to bear in the classroom, whether they are

aware of it or not, and the more self-aware they are, the better teachers they tend to be. We

would not bat an eyelid at an art historian who is also an artist bringing his own aesthetic

perspective or artistic imagination to bear in the classroom, and we would not think twice about a

musicologist who is also a musician using her performance experience to clarify elements of

10 Ann Taves, '”Religion” in the Humanities and the Humanities in the University,' Journal of the American Academy

of Religion, 79:2, June 2011, 287-314 (p. 293).

11 Kristy Nabhan-Warren, 'Embodied Research and Writing: A Case for Phenomenologically Oriented ReligiousStudies' Journal of the AAR, 79:2, June 2011, (378-407), p. 378.




composition. If anything, their practice of these intangible arts of the imagination will make them

better teachers. Nor is there a problem with using the language and hermeneutic devices of

diverse philosophical perspectives in order to explore aesthetic nuances. Likewise with literature

and concepts ranging from the post-modern sublime to the semiotics of poetry. Multiple

conferences on education are organised annually, in which both theoreticians, administrators, as

well as teachers discuss and exchange ideas; the latter basing their expertise on their classroom

experience, which has a bearing both on the further development of theory, and of management.

The approach of each of these professions incorporate a legitimate epistemology: the

theoretician's is based on psychological, pedagogical, and statistical research. The administrator's

is based on mainly practical considerations such as finance and logistics, and the teacher's is

experiential first and foremost.

A good teacher need not be a good theorist, but

she does need to learn from experience and

implement that experience in the future, and both

administrators and theoreticians must hear that

experience if they are to help, and not hinder, the

educational process – which is often enough like

being on stage without a script, especially when

teaching younger age-groups. It is the experienced

teacher who must be able to translate theoretical models and practical concerns into a classroom

setting, and communicate that classroom reality back to the theoreticians hidden in offices and

libraries. Likewise in the medical field, both clinicians and practitioners frequently gather to

exchange findings – and there is a tension between them, since although the findings of clinicians

may rest on empirical bases, it is the practitioners who know what no meta-analysis can

demonstrate. Alone, they can only perform half their task, and I dread to think of the bedside

manner of clinicians, whose valuable work, on

the other hand, serves both as quality control

and as a constant learning tool for medical

practitioners seeking to develop and improve

their field.

Finally, coming full circle to the Bodossakis

Foundation website with which I started, it is

hardly surprising that, while Greece is in the

throes of financial and sociopolitical crisis, the Athens School of Economics summoned political

philosophers to attempt to redefine the possible applications of Platonic thought to the current

situation. A naïve approach would quote the Republic verbatim and possibly call for synarchic rule

by philosophers. Passed through a critical lens while maintaining the essence of Platonic




philosophy, and adapted to modern considerations, the result was a series of presentations that

produced thoughtful and applicable suggestions for management, governance and economic

protocols, that take social cohesion and the human element into account, and all of which made

abundantly clear that technocratic number-crunching is not the way forward when governing

people rather than numbers.

Therefore, in summary, I

hope that I have clarified the

proposal being made here.

Firstly, that the humanities,

and education in general,

is in danger of becoming

ever more commercialised,

ever more an elite luxury.

Secondly, that esotericism

belongs in the corpus of

cultural knowledge just as

much as any other branch

of the humanities.

Thirdly, that there are numerous precedents in other areas of the humanities that support

the case for both interdisciplinary borrowing, as well as for the acceptable

acknowledgement and use of experiential learning alongside theory.

Fourthly, that esotericism as a corpus of knowledge is in a position to offer models and

paradigms that can be of use in a modern setting, provided that they are viewed through a

combined lens that takes their full nature into account.

Fifthly, that as a field, it is necessary to reach out and to translate “academese” into a more

accessible kind of language, if for no other reason than to counterbalance the continuing

misconceptions that led esotericism to be stigmatised in the first place.

And finally, that as scholars, we have a duty to bring this area of study to a wider audience,

not least because if it remains shut away in the ivory towers of academia, it will also remain

“other,” and may well eventually wither as an academic field if the state of the humanities

continues to devolve as it is currently doing. If that occurs, it will be the practitioners, and

not the scholars, who keep these currents alive. It is for this reason that at Phoenix Rising

Academy, we are calling for dialogue, and for all those of us who care about esotericism,

whether as an object of study, or as a way of life and worldview, to sit down at the table

and talk about what we can learn from each other, and how we can make our collective

knowledge count for something. It is to this end that today's session was organised, and it is

in this spirit that we hope to continue.




The limitations of rationalist epistemology, the use of analogy, and the value of revealed

knowledge

© SAMUEL GARRARD

Before I begin I would like to assert that whilst the ideas presented in this paper are resultantof research within my current Masters in Western Esotericism, they also are informed by many more

years of research into related currents of thought. This is a brief, condensed statement of a much

larger set of ideas sitting meekly within a larger discussion on methodology in Esotericism, full of

generalities, concepts unelaborated on and attitudes that will not be fully explained or related to

academic and authoritative sources. It is my sincere hope that there will be a point or two that will

cause the listener to make links with other ideas, to question, criticise and outright disagree with.

I’d like to start by comparing the methodological approach in Academia compared to

attitudes of acquiring knowledge within certain esoteric traditions. Generally speaking the values of

Academia are based on Empiricism, embodying a positivistic, mechanistic view of nature, reliant

upon a distancing of subject from the mode of phenomenological analysis and gives value to truth

in isolation. In many esoteric modes of though analogy is used to impart knowledge and

emphasises the value of truth in relationship. An example of this approach can be felt in the

syncretic works of the Seventeenth-Century esotericist, Robert Fludd.12 His work presents an

enchanted view of nature; one that perceives it as holistic, interconnected and dynamic. This is a

paradigmatic approach different to an Empirical approach whose ideals such as mechanism and

compartmentalisation of truth would in contrast appear abstracted. We might also compare the

relative fallacy of this approach when applied, for example, to contemporary cosmological

theories such as the works of cosmologist Sean Carroll who has explored ideas such as ‘cosmic

forgetfulness’, parallel universes, the absence of size in the universe before the Big Bang and string

theory.

In contrast, revealed knowledge may be seen to represent, by analogy, a natural holism

and dynamism as perceived from within the human experience. As historian of science D. Graham

Burnett explains, regarding the work of Robert Fludd:

certain analogies, rightly constructed and rightly dramatized, became powerful explanatoryinstruments. This was not mere analogy, analogy as rhetoric, but rather analogy raised to the status ofa tool for knowledge of the true nature of things.13

12Other examples of approaches may be found in The New Historicism, ed. by Harold Aram Veeser (London:

Routledge, 1989), The Postmodern History Reader , ed. by Keith Jenkins (London: Routledge, 1997), Jean-François

Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press, 1989), Joyce Appleby et

al., Telling the Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), Edward Hallett Carr, What is History? (New York: Random House, 1967), Richard Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W. W. Norton &

Company, 2002).

13D. Graham Burnett, ‘The Cosmogonic Experiments Of Robert Fludd: A Translation With Introduction And




Furthermore, the late Gunther Stent, Graduate Professor of Molecular Biology at the University of

California, notes that in many areas modern science has not assimilated the Post-Structuralist

standpoint that illuminates the limitations of positivism. He calls for a consideration of the

epistemological limitation to scientific understanding in order to avoid ‘psychological or

sociological prescriptions put forward by those who allege that they have already managed to

gain a scientifically validated understanding of man’.14 Citing the work of Danish physicist, Niels

Bohr, Stent points out the insufficiency of daily language to communicate certain Kantian a priori

concepts which conversely may be grasped intuitively by ‘every child in the course of its normal

intellectual development, without the need to attend physics classes’.15 The problem is when

attempting to cognise events at subatomic or immense cosmic scales, time, space and causality

appear bent out of shape from the intuitive understanding we have of them as generalized

concepts. This is but one of the examples of the unstable semantic quality of language that

undermines the very basic principles with which one attempts to understand nature.

In addition, theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Pierre Macherey, Jean Baudrilliard and Jean-

François Lyotard argue have asserted that language is corruptible and is used subtly to impose

particular agendas and biases. From this, one could argue that Empirical methodology is biased to

support the culture from which it was conceived: one that relies on a materialist outlook. In line with

this argument Jocelyn Godwin has noted the convenient overlooking of modern science of every

level of being but the material.16 However, I would like to depart from the two debates of firstly,

which approach is ‘truer’ to the human experience of reality and secondly whether and if so, why

Empiricism supports materialism, and briefly outline one or two of the ethical implications of a

methodology that takes into account phenomenological viewpoints of certain esoteric modes of

thought such as in the works of Robert Fludd.

I suggest, in this statement, that, in essence, the positivistic attitudes informing Empiricism represent

reality in terms of isolation and separation, engendering a framework of the same values with

which to interpret the experience of being. Therefore, a methodology based on this, has the

tendency not only to reduce much of the esoteric corpus to historical curiosities and eccentricities,

Commentary’, Ambix, 46 (1999), 113-130 (pp. 126-127).

14Gunter S. Stent ‘Limits to the Scientific Understanding of Man’, Science, New Series, 187 (1975), pp. 1052-

1057 (p. 1057).

15Gunter S. Stent ‘Limits to the Scientific Understanding of Man’, Science, New Series, 187 (1975), pp. 1052-

1057 (p.1055)

16Joscelyn Godwin, Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds (London: Thames and

Hudson, 1979), p. 18.




but in a wider sense also to encourage attitudes such as the isolation of the self, detachment from

the natural world and a reduced ethics of violence and separatism that have come to negatively

define the shape of the modern world. Briefly, positivism may be seen to propagate an outlook of

disparity; the post-modern condition that sees a lack of relationship, principles, grand narratives,

ultimate truths and is prone to a reduced ethics of abandonment and violence to the natural world

and humanity.

In contrast, revealed knowledge uses analogy to impart knowledge that works in terms

apart from and, it could be argued, transcends essentialist, positivistic claims. It is a form of

knowledge that emphasises the value of relationship as opposed to isolated truth, using analogy

not as a rhetorical device but as a valid representation of the nature of reality. I assert that an

approach to esotericism that takes these values into account may not only provide a less reductive

picture of the historical field of esotericism but also have positive effects on phenomenological,

environmental and sociological attitudes in general. In my opinion, these values can only be a

positive force at the present, where there is an overwhelming abundance and simultaneous lack of

humanity. This is what I would define as a practical ethics – in the face of the relativism of truths as

set out by Post-Structuralist and Postmodern thinkers and at a time of environmental and social

crisis, it is a framework for understanding the human experience, the values of which, I would

argue, may help society and the individual in understanding ways towards a more cooperative

and sustainable future.

Finally I would like to re-iterate my invitation for criticism and response to these ideas in hope

that this brief statement might in its own and small way add to the discussion surrounding the

current approach to Esotericism in and out of academia. In appreciation of the concerns of this

conference and the noble aims of the Phoenix Rising Academy I would like to end by quoting Tom

Stoppard who describes the process of the acquisition of knowledge optimistically as a continual

process. He says:

we shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall willbe picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march.

But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles willturn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will revealthemselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again.

You do not suppose [...] that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria,we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?




Towards an Imaginal Methodology in the study of Western Esotericism

© Kirk Templeton

Imaginal methodologies for the study of Western Esotericism must meet two sets of criteria. There

are those mandated by the canons of the Western Academy and those mandated by the canons

of the imaginal as such.

The concept of imaginal knowledge was re-introduced into Western Academic discourse

by Henry Corbin, who derived it from the Hikmat al-Ishraq or Wisdom of Illumination of the great 12 th

century Persian philosopher Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī. A valuable first step in the development of

imaginal methodologies might be to investigate them at their primary source in this Islamic

Illuminationist tradition. This is all the more appropriate given the profound formative influence of

the Islamic Esoteric tradition upon the Western.

There is also the historical fact that the Islamic intellectual tradition as a whole is a sister

tradition to the Western. That is, it developed out of the same sources: Abrahamic religion and

Greek philosophy. Yet, the Illuminationist tradition never abandoned direct inner intuitive

apprehension of imaginal forms as a valid means of knowledge, as did the Western tradition at the

end of Renaissance.

So the Islamic Illuminationist tradition provides us with an example of a living tradition that

continues to be fundamentally rooted in imaginal theory and practice and that is derived from the

same historical sources as the Western Esoteric tradition. .

While the Islamic tradition cannot and should not be taken as a model for a resurgent

Western Esoteric tradition, it can for these reasons perhaps offer valuable contributions for the

process and recovery and reconstitution in which the Western Esoteric tradition is currently

engaged.

In the time available to me for this statement, I can of course only indicate in broad outline

what some of these contributions might be.

First and foremost is the recognition of the metaphysical reality of the imaginal world.




In Western intellectual culture, the predominant metaphysical position, even when it is not

fully articulated, is one of ontological commitment to two orders of reality, the empirical world,

accessed by the senses, and the world of abstract mathematical objects, accessed by the

intellect. Between these two, the Illuminationist tradition of Islam holds that there is a third world,

the ‘alam al-mithal, the world of the imaginal, the mundis imaginalis, in Corbin’s translation , a world

that is as ontologically real as the empirical world of the senses and the intellectual world of

abstract mathematics and theoretical physics. This order of reality requires a faculty of knowledge

a cognitive function that is appropriate to it, a noetic function, that is as a real as the faculties of

sensory perception and intellectual intuition that are appropriate to the other two orders of reality.

The second principle of the illuminationist tradition follows upon the first. The three orders of

reality, and their appropriate means of knowing, are not separate nor are they are conflict. They

are co-ordinate. They reflect and illuminate each other. Suhrawardi’s illuminationist methodology

integrates methods of reason (baḥth) with methods based upon direct intuitive apprehension

(ta’alluh). This enables the imaginative faculty, the active imagination, to be firmly balanced

between and coordinated with the two other cognitive functions. The imaginal mediates

between the other two orders of reality. Like the abstract, intellectual world it is immaterial. Yet,

unlike the intellectual world it has extension and quality, attributes it shares with the empirical world.

So, in broadest terms, what are some things that taking the imaginal at its source imply for a

revitalized imaginal methodology in the study of Western Esotericism?

In terms of the imaginal as such, the illuminationist tradition suggests a program of first

setting our own house in order by developing canons and protocols of legitimate imaginal

practice which, while of sufficiently wide scope, are nonetheless based upon sound noetic

knowledge and practice ( ta’alluh). This presents challenges, for as the Muslim Persian philosopher

Seyyed Hossein Nasr points out, the Western Academy is alone and anomalous among the great

intellectual traditions of our Planet in that it abandoned the imaginal world and imaginal modes of

knowledge with the rise of modernity at the end of the Renaissance. And, as Nasr reminds us, the

esoteric, and in particular the imaginal, depends by its very nature upon a living tradition of

practice. In the West, this must be recovered and brought forward.

In terms of meeting the methodological criteria of the Western Academy, what is most




Fountainheads: tapping visionary experience in an academic setting

© Peter G.H.A. Duchemin

I have been asked to make a statement concerning the relationship of visionary experience to

work in academia. So let’s mark the distinction between the two domains: the work of the practical

occultist is directed towards intensely personal, immediate, visionary gnosis, while the work of the

academic is to present accounts that can be critically defended. Gnosis is non-propositional: it

does not seek to make an argument. In contrast, academic discussion must work with concepts

that are debatable and can survive criticism. This is not to say that gnosis is weak, or flimsy to

criticism, but rather that it is of another order of sense altogether, one which is more akin to

sensation than calculation. Visionary gnosis, in a sense, is a form of empiricism, what might be

called higher, or transcendental empiricism.

It is as if there are two domains of direct experience, which are really one, into which a

break has been inserted: a zone of meditated discursive conceptuality that uses concepts instead

of sensations as its objects. Below the break is what we would call sensuous intuition, and above the

break is what we would call spiritual intuition. These two realms of immediacy, “wrap around” and

come together. The macrocosm and the microcosm are not just mirrored, they are in truth a single

domain. The poet-philosopher Michel Serres, writes:

“What if fairy-tales, visions and sabbaths were simply brightly coloured representation of the lost,

forgotten, disintegrated ruins of the sensible, whose qualities our culture of language and religion of

the word will no longer allow us to apprehend?”17

Locating academic practice in this break-zone of conceptual mediation, we can see how

its relationship with the sensory intuition is a relationship dominated by the logic of science, while its

relationship with the spiritual intuition is dominated by the non-logic of inspiration or illumination.

This marks the threshold between private, intensive intuition, and critically defensible arguments.

Inspiration. The task of crossing this gap is difficult for any occultist who has not been specifically

trained in criticism, but it is equally difficult for a person who has been heavily trained in criticism to

see that the language of the occult is not a set of truth propositional claims: it is in reality, an

intimate and sophisticated form of hieroglyphic, intuitive thinking: non propositional, but

experiential.

Propositions flow from an intuitive source.

A key difficulty in making this translation from a esoteric experience, to an academically

defensible account is the problem of the binary. As Foucault wrote: “Ever Since the Stoics, the

system of signs of the western world has been a ternary one, for it was recognized as containing the

significant, the signifed and the 'conjuncture'. From the seventeenth century, on the other hand,

the arrangement of signs was to become binary, since it was to be defined... as the connection of

17 Michel Serres The Five Senses p 233.




a significant and a signified.”18 Something shifted in mainstream Western Culture that significantly

diminished the esteem of this 'conjuncture', a zone that corresponds to the faculty of the

imagination, and to creative memory. We no longer ground arguments IN phantasmic sources. The

middle is excluded.

Let us take the question of whether or not an encounter with a Daemon is a legitimate

epistemic source. In making any such argument, unless we are VERY careful, we are likely to run

aground on the scylla or carybdis of “objectivity and subjectivity”. Attempts to prove encounters

with spiritual beings objectively are notoriously dismiss-able, and there is a skeptic's industry that

feeds off of drawing all esoteric claims into a challenge for such proofs. Reports of experiences are

taken as generalizable propositions, and they are dismissed. An absence of “hard evidence” of the

physical existence of a Daemon is understood to dismiss its validity as objective. Anticipating this

line of attack, one might take the position that these experiences are subjectively valid, or a result

of freely chosen “beliefs”. But this is problematic because a purely subjective experience is usually

considered to be isolated IN the subject, and in this way it can be regarded as merely subjective. If

we seek to mitigate this “mere” by an appeal to inter-subjectivity, saying that the personal belief in

magic becomes real by a kind of social contagion and that I can effect a space magically, for the

most part because I can spread my own unaccountable, subjective beliefs to others, then the

debunker still laughs: magic and the occult can now be seen as a play between deluder and

deluded. For a claim of magical action to be strong, it must dissolve belief, and in doing so, dissolve

the subject. A strong magical claim, requires an appreciation for the possibility that the “real” might

be an inseparable case of entanglement BETWEEN the subjective and the objective: a Daemon

may be a *real force*, existing on the threshold of within and without, that is directly perceivable by

means of the intuitive faculty.

As long as one is describing esoteric practices from a historical, anthropological, or

discourseanalytic point of view, these dangers are mitigated, but as soon as one begins to engage

in practice, the needs of the two worlds collide: the academic must qualify their claims, while the

practitioner must dissolve themselves into experience. The occultist has a more than casual

investment in their subjectivity: its intensity overflows into the real, annihilating subject-hood, and

generating changes in the world in response. Occult gnosis is not belief, it is encounter.

An encounter is neither “objective”, nor “subjective”: it cannot neither be separated from the

experiencer nor isolated IN the experiencer. Gnosis crystallizes on the surface of experience itself,

and so is, what I call the Knighted Realism. Sir Realism. Why realism? Because we are encountering

forces, and as we do, we are assigning them names and images, designations and orders,

signatures and schema. Diagrams. Mandalas. Our knighted realism is a realism of the process of

assigning name and form: of the threshold operation. Before a force existing in the real can be

known to the intellect, it must be re-cognized, named, and its signature read. It is re-presented by

the imagination, and stored in a hieroglyphic form.

18Michel Foucault , The Order of Things p 46.




So the question of whether a Daemon is a legitimate epistemic source can be rephrased: “is

an encounter, broadly speaking, a legitimate epistemic source?”. In answering in the affirmative,

we include the kinds of visionary experiences that an occultist might have, while they are in trance:

an encounter that is legitimate as a source of knowledge in the same way that any experience is. I

believe that this is the process that much inspired knowledge comes from: not a re-ordering of pre-

existing knowledge, but a direct interjection from non-discursive source, akin to an aesthetic

experience, that becomes unfolded into the discursive when it is expressed in terms of concepts. In

this respect, the intuition can indeed be a source of novel ideas, and the work of the occultist is

such that it systematically establishes a pre-conceptual phantasmic terrain for the intuition to

explore. While one would not likely cite a Daemon in an academic paper, one might well

encounter that Daemon, translate the intensity into a vision, and then translate the vision into

concepts. The encounter with the spirit is an epistemological fountainhead.

The esotericist in academia must live in two worlds and negotiate between them. To

collapse them is to lose the most precious elements of both: the purity of an intuitive and simple

union with the sir-real on the one hand, and a powerful regulatory criticism meant to cut out the

formation of static, or self-proposing “beliefs”, on the other. I think that there is something to gain by

maintaining the two foci, in their respective centres, as a kind of dynamo of thought and

experience, but there is no doubt that they remain, distinct, parallel, and incommensurable

approaches. In this coupled arrangement, the greater the rigor of discursive thought is, the more

intense the moment of intuitive vulnerability and dissolution of the subjectivity becomes, as if the

intellect constructs a defensive barrier, a flaming sword around a garden, at the heart of which

one is completely naked. The better guarded the “garden” is, the freer one is to play without

restriction at its heart.

Works Cited

• Serres, Michel; The Five Senses, (Trans. Margaret Sankey & Peter Cowley), New York,

London, 1985.

• Foucault,Michel ; The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London:

Tavistock, 1966.




Enthusiasms Sacred and Profane

Phenomenology versus Empiricism in the Study of Western Esotericism

© Hereward TiltonEXESESO, University of Exeter

As the theme of demonization forms a central concern of our meeting, today I would like to talk toyou about integrating the shadow, that quintessence of inferiority feelings whose hold over thepsyche leads to a quasi-autistic relationship with our social environment. Carl Gustav Jung was notalone in remarking that humans are wont to project onto Others all that they fear, loathe or otherwise ignore within themselves. In his essay on “Forbidden Knowledge”, Wouter Hanegraaffasserts that mainstream Western culture has “construed its own identity” by consigning excluded

‘Others’ to a wastepaper basket tagged ‘esotericism’; he advocates a “psychotherapy ofacademic research” integrating those excluded forms of thought to attain a more complex andnuanced cultural narrative. The current paper is intended as a wholly constructive contribution tothat proposed act of collective psychotherapy, and there could be no better place to formally

commence treatment than a conference session convened as an act of resistance toHanegraaff’s very own views. Hopefully he will consider this session a modest form of homage,

perhaps not as complimentary as the average Festschrift but nonetheless a testament to theinfluence of his work; indeed, the strength of emotional response gives us reason to pause for thought, lest our resistance is in fact to a change necessary within ourselves. After all, bothpsychotherapists and teachers must occasionally bring our attention to precisely those things wedo not wish to hear.

The most common forms of what Sasha has referred to as “imaginal epistemology” to beencountered in the contemporary academic study of esotericism derive from the phenomenologyof religion, and principally the works of Jung, Eliade and Corbin. While our field is dominated byhistorians with varying degrees of tolerance for these thinkers, the current state of discourse isnevertheless decisively informed by a scholarly debate that has been raging since the 1960’s. Atthat time the academic study of religion in the West was dominated by a phenomenologicalapproach rooted in Romantic hermeneutics and the philosophies of Dilthey and Husserl; its chiefadvocate was Mircea Eliade, who in his work of 1969 The Quest was already railing against the“empiricism” and “relativism” of “some fashionable sociological and historistic schools”. The most

influential of Eliade’s critics were in fact anthropologists such as Edmund Leach, who attackedwhat they saw as the crypto-theological underpinnings of the phenomenology of religion. Eliade’snotion of homo religiosus and his relation to an irreducible ‘sacred’ was rejected as an unfalsifiablespeculation upon the inner life of religious believers, while supposedly invariant experientialstructures such as the axis mundi came to be perceived as ahistorical templates finding endlessand often unjustified confirmation in the complexities of historical data. In place of the

comparative phenomenological approach a new cohort of scholars promoted a methodologyderived not from the humanities but from the natural and social sciences: hypotheses were to beformed by empirical analysis and submitted to inter-subjective testing, and religion was to be

studied as a cultural artefact rather than a sui generis phenomenon, thus challenging the veryfoundation of religious studies as a discipline distinct from history and the social sciences.

In the Netherlands this so-called “anthropological turn” in religious studies took on a formspecific to the historical and socio-religious context of that country, where the level ofsecularisation was second in Europe only to the DDR. Hanegraaff’s empiricism is a late expression of

the secular reaction to the dominance of liberal Calvinist theology within the academic study ofreligion in the Netherlands; the primary methodological agent of that dominance had been thephenomenology of religion as represented by its chief Dutch exponent Gerardus van der Leeuw.This paradigm was superseded with the rise in the late 1960s of the Groninger Working Group and its“Science of Religion”, an empiricism promulgated in the Dutch academy first by van Baaren andthen by Platvoet, Hanegraaff’s chief methodological source.

Before addressing specific aspects of the Dutch empirical approach, perhaps we should

recall that a standard means of demonising a perceived enemy is the production of caricature, i.e.




phenomenology, which Scheler once described as the most radical of empiricisms, albeit of anintrospective nature. Hence we are back on the slippery slope to the phenomenology of religion.One cannot fail to notice that, from the perspective of Platvoet’s sense empiricism, all aspects ofthe inner world of an Other constitute a meta-empirical realm – yet it is precisely the task of work inthe humanities to cast light upon that world. This does not involve pure description, if there ever were such a thing; through texts and behaviours we do not see face to face, as it were, butthrough a glass darkly. As I will argue, for the hermeneut and the mystic alike that glass is clouded

by the exigencies of worldly existence.In the first place, as scholars of Western esotericism we cannot bootstrap ourselves beyond

received discourse and divest ourselves of culturally conditioned judgments. Through our researchwe not only enter into a dialogue with the traditions we study; we are of necessity contributing tothose traditions for posterity. Hence Dutch empiricism stands firmly in the lineage of a Protestantanti-enthusiasm; as such it partakes in what Culianu once portrayed as the post-Reformationsuppression of the imagination, conceived as the vehicle for receiving and expressing data from

the so-called meta-empirical realms. Here I am not launching into a polemic against this anti-enthusiast tradition; I am merely pointing out the fact that through our studies we are joining a later act in the very historical drama playing out in the texts before us. This fact was tacitlyacknowledged by Hanegraaff in a 2007 lecture on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.There he referred to the conflict between the Pietist Gottfried Arnold and the anti-enthusiast

Lutheran Ehregott Daniel Colberg on the subject of a “Platonic-Hermetic Christianity”; referring toArnold as the first “religionist” author in our field and Colberg as the first “historian of Westernesotericism”, Hanegraaff argued that these men represented “the two main theoreticalapproaches which are still competing within the contemporary study of Western esotericism”.

The reference here is again to Platvoet, who contrasts the Dutch empirical approach withthe phenomenological methods of Eliade, Corbin, Jung etc., which he subsumes under the term‘religionism’. In these methods Platvoet sees the work of a powerful idée directrice, an organisingidea of great explanatory power with a compulsive hold over its creator and his or her ‘disciples’,which causes empirical reality to be perceived in a selective and limited way. Examples of such an

idée directrice would be Eliade’s homo religiosus, or Jung’s theory of archetypes. Those who utilisesuch methods are contrasted by Platvoet with so-called neutral scholars, banded together intodemocratic communities of organised scepticism for the purpose of achieving scientific (i.e. inter-

subjectively testable) knowledge.However noble this vision of Platvoet’s may be, one cannot fail to remark upon the extreme

naivety it displays. If the weight of tradition militates against any aspirations to neutrality, how much

more so does institutional corruption? And we should make no mistake about this matter – theacademy is profoundly corrupt. Like any other group of humans, scholars are driven by a host ofconscious and unconscious desires, not least being the quest for status and the emotional, sexualand other satisfactions it appears to bring. Power lies in the mastery of certain forms of “discourse”and the suppression of others, sometimes through caricature or the manipulation of politicallycharged symbols; hence in our field intellectual opponents falling loosely under the category of“religionists” have been marginalized with false accusations of racism, homophobia and fascism.Referring in its everyday sense to an “affected religious zeal”, the term “religionism” itself is highly

polemical, serving to exclude certain personalities and ideas from the realms of valid discourse –

and conversely to elevate the status of those who wield it. In an increasingly competitive economicenvironment with dwindling resources and funding opportunities, institutions and theories too oftenbecome vehicles for the promotion of egos rather than creative components of the transparentscientific network Platvoet envisages. Quantitative data on the subject of corruption in thehumanities are scarce, but the so-called hard sciences are hardly an exemplar for us: a 2009 meta-

analysis of survey data found that 72 percent of scientists reportedly engaged in misconduct suchas the fabrication of data or the modification of results due to pressure from funding sources.

One must assume that Platvoet’s portrayal of the academy is an ideal construct, and thathe believes with Karl Popper that actual scientific communities only exist as more or less corruptversions of it. In any case, that ideal is decisively informed by Calvinism, at least according toPlatvoet’s source, Robert Merton, who traces the origins of scientific empiricism and “organisedscepticism” to seventeenth century Puritanism. We might add that behind the ideal of scientificobjectivity promoted by the Dutch empiricists lies not only an Enlightenment but a Protestant idéedirectrice; that is to say, a God of pure spirit looking down upon Nature from a vantage-point




infinitely removed from His antithesis.As we are not and can never be disinterested observers divorced from our object of study,

it is noteworthy that some central streams of thought and practice within Western esotericismemerged in response to the inertia of tradition and the corruption of scholarly institutions. I amspeaking here of Paracelsianism, Christian Cabala, Rosicrucianism and other currents dominatedby inspirationism and an introverted religiosity, which responded to the corrupt or fallen knowledgeof Scholasticism with the quest for an archetypal language at the fount of the pristine theology. To

this end of attaining a wisdom untainted by worldly power we are presented with numeroustechniques for transcending the ego, set forth with varying degrees of clarity, from fasting andprayer to ritual magic, dreaming and the ingestion of entheogens. By contrast the lowest part ofthe soul, bound to the material world by the senses, is implicated in the methods of the Scholasticacademy, in which theories are applied to the defence of the scholar’s ego rather than anyknowledge of nature and the divine. In the early Rosicrucian milieu this critique possesses a Paulineemphasis on philautia – self-love, which Plato spoke of as “an evil, great above all others” and the

“cause of all sins… for the lover is blind in his view of the object loved”, being “bound always tovalue what is his own more than what is true”.

I mention these facts briefly to indicate once again that the exclusion of introspective“spiritual techniques” from the realms of scholarship has a history with which we are intimatelyinvolved through our studies; to insist upon a sense empiricism in our field is to become a partisan of

what is essentially a process of social disciplining, associated with the formation of the early modernand modern states, and with that fictionalisation of “the psycho-physical apparatus of man” towhich Max Weber once referred. The currents of thought and practice we study posed – andcontinue to pose – a genuine threat to social stability as inspiring sources of authority lying beyondthe control of Church and state, compromising the obedience of citizens and promoting resistancein the individual to the consensual force of sanctioned religious, state and civil institutions. In hisaccount of a “grand polemical narrative” marginalizing the esoteric Other, Hanegraaff argues thatthe intellectual wastepaper basket tagged ‘esotericism’ has been filled by ‘scholars’ seeking to“define their own identity”, as if this process took place primarily according to the whim of

intellectuals; yet many traditions central to our study explicitly appeal to l ittle-understoodpsychosomatic processes with implications for the mental health of the individual and thepreservation of social order.

Hence our field of research affords contemporary society an analysis and surveillance oftrends potentially threatening to its internal cohesion, just as the field of anthropology emerged inthe context of the external concerns of colonial administration (rather than from some armchair

fascination with the lifestyles and beliefs of peoples deemed exotic). It is in this context that weshould understand those somewhat neurotic concerns with sequestering the scholar from theobject of study in our field today. One sure sign of contagion is the phenomenon Umberto Ecoreferred to as over-interpretation, which we find not only in the esoteric literature but also in thework of scholars and students. As I have written elsewhere, this is closely associated with thepsychiatric notion of apophenia, the hyper-creative interpretation of patterns in random dataaccompanied by the “experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”, as Klaus Conrad put it. Manyof us will have encountered this phenomenon in the conflation of history and esoteric pseudo-

history, which can be incited by the mere textual proximity of historically unrelated data, a passing

similarity between words and numbers or the mistranslation of foreign terms, prompting non-sequiturs which call to mind that disinhibition of associative processes Eugen Bleuler identified asthe key feature of schizophrenia.

To his lasting credit, Hanegraaff has contributed greatly to the disentangling of Westernesoteric history from pseudo-historical fantasy, and this achievement in itself has played a

significant role in the growing prominence of our field. Having accomplished this separation, our collective act of psychotherapy now requires an act of reintegration at a higher level. As I see it,Dutch empiricism has mounted a very legitimate challenge to scholars of the religionist persuasion(pejoratively so-called) and the stronger the affect in our response the more carefully we shouldexamine our approach. Meticulous discrimination between the many possible levels of textualinterpretation is necessary to avoid a quasi-autistic relationship with the text, which – deprived of itsunique historical character – becomes a comforting mirror for our certainties or a mere slate for theprojection of what Jung would have considered to be unconscious archetypal content.

Yet as I have indicated in this talk, imaginal factors and religious subtexts inevitably play a




role in the writing of history, even when our approach is ostensibly “neutral”. Recognition of this factrequires careful reflection upon one’s own cultural and psychological dispositions rather than theiconoclastic zeal of the Aufklärer , which amounts to a type of secular or profane enthusiasm. Toflatly refuse the admission of young scholars to the academy on the basis of their phenomenological orientation is to disregard the subtle historical and psychological relationship ofscholarly textual interpretation to the “spiritual techniques” we study. For those who wish to employthem, these techniques offer significant insights into methodological issues, if not the inner lives of

the men and women we study. As you can imagine, scholars in a city like Amsterdam are free toconduct such informal research into the meta-empirical realms on a fairly regular basis; the methodof choice in these times is the Amazonian shamanic potion known as ayahuasca. Rather thanleaving posterity to guess at the clandestine impact such forays might have had on a scholar’sideas, scholarly rigour calls upon us to acknowledge and identify biographical data relevant to theformation of our conclusions. On this count Hanegraaff confesses in a recent work that he has noparticular talent for visualisation – a fact which fuels the suspicion that divisions in our field relate to

distinct psychological types, and which further complicates any pretensions Dutch empiricism hashad to possessing the status of an objective science. While those scholars who believe socialscientific methods are appropriate to research in the humanities should by no means be excluded,in my view the success of our field and the continued relevance of its contribution to society obligeus to maintain a creative tension between opposing yet complementary methods and

personalities. Only this act of integration would constitute a true “psychotherapy of academicresearch”.

Demons in the Academy Papers

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