Academic models of interpretation

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Western esotericism is a fairly new field of study in academia, which makes it even more intriguing as if the topic itself wasn’t fascinating enough. More on this in a few seconds.

Hello everyone. I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel. Your online resource for information based on academic research and literature. Today we will introduce the first video of a series on Western esotericism. For the topic is quite complex and has numerous ramifications. This first video will give you an introduction to Western esotericism based on the book called “Western Esotericism: a Guide for the Perplexed by Wouter Hanegraaff – hope I pronounced it right – Professor of Hermetic Philosophy and related currents at the University of Amsterdam. I am a huge fan of his work and I really do hope that I will get to meet him someday.

As Professor Hanegraaff explains, Western esotericism is not a tradition that exists in and of itself out in the world with this specific name. It’s not a term created by practitioners, nor it is one self-contained tradition but rather a scholarly construct of recent origin. Such a definition emerged because scholars and historians were able to identify underlying similarities among the variety of worldviews and practices which now fall under this umbrella. In order to understand how Western esotericism has been conceptualized so far, I will illustrate the three main models underlying Western esotericism as they are presented in the introduction to this book. Once again, you find everything in much more detail in the book, so please, do check the infobox.

So, the first model is called early modern enchantment. Based on the criteria set by the pioneering work by Antoine Fievel, esotericism is seen as a radical alternative to the disenchanted worldview that has dominated Western culture since the Enlightenment and the resulting positivist worldview. Such a worldview interprets the world as a bundle of isolated and inanimate elements ruled by mechanic laws. This is the reason why Max Weber called it the ‘disenchantment of the world’. Here, in this model of esotericism, the world is re-enchanted once again. Nature is now a living entity and every manifestation of it has a life force of its own.

Everything is interconnected on a non-visible level and things can interact with other things through understanding these hidden laws of nature. For further, the time in history, when this view saw its brightest moment was the early modern period from Paracelsus in the 16th century until the Romantic Era. Frances Yeats had a similar perspective when tackling the Hermetic tradition of the Renaissance. According to Yeats, this tradition emerged from the rediscovery and translation of a collection of texts from late antiquity – The Corpus Hermeticum translated by the Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Thanks to this translation, Renaissance Hermeticism flourished during the 16th and 17th centuries as a worldview dominated by magic, personal experience, and powers of imagination. In both cases, esotericism is seen as the enchanted alternative to a dominant culture that negates this kind of worldview.

Moving on the second module is post-modern occult. Here esotericism is not really the object of nostalgia for a lost or forgotten enchanted worldview but rather a dimension placed in the here-and-now, with implications for the future as well. When sociologists first started studying the occult in the 1960s and the 1970s, they saw it as a phenomenon of social deviance, dealing with anomalous claims of knowledge, at the time, associated with youthful rebellion against science and established religion.

In more recent scholarship, however, the occult has started to be seen as something that can actually tell us something about modernity rather than just an anomaly that shouldn’t be there. Esotericism becomes then a good indicator of how religious beliefs can survive by changing forms, as it is an element embedded in a culture and tells us something about that culture since it is part of it. It is important to highlight that recent scholarship talks about the occult in a broad sense including, for instance, the fascination with superpowers in TV shows and comics.

Hannegraaff points out that, while the first model has the limitation of excluding modern and contemporary manifestations of esotericism, as it doesn’t see them as independent from the early modern times, the second model lacks in historical depth.

Lastly, we have the inner tradition. The third model refers to the inner traditions concerned with a universal spiritual dimension of reality as opposed to the external reality offered by dogmatic systems and organized religions. The meaning attributed to esotericism, in this model, is the closest to the original meaning of the term used in reference to Pythagorean Brotherhood and mystery cults.

Esoteric teachings are those which go underneath the surface of conventional religious dogma to learn the deep hidden knowledge reserved to initiates. These esoteric truths go beyond the domain of Western culture and share a common ground with eastern philosophies and religions for they underlie all dogmatic systems, contextual to one specific place or culture. The weakness of this model lies in this very concept, for academia can not possibly have access to the true and absolute nature of reality that is claimed to exist according to this model. It also presents issues from an historical point of view, for it removes any possibility of contextualizing the knowledge object of the inquiry.

Therefore, in his book, Hanegraaff prefers to look at Western Esotericism as a pluralistic field of currents, ideas, and practices without favouring any historical period over another nor a particular worldview. Thus, I’d highly recommend you get this book and read it as it is extremely fascinating and has lots of information regarding Western Esotericism.

Hope you liked this first introductory video on Western Esotericism and if you did like this video, SMASH like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell, so that you won’t miss anything out, and stay tuned for all the academic fun.

Bye for now.

REFERENCES
Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed’ by Wouter J. Hanegraaff.