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Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. As you know I’m a PhD and a University Lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of Magic, Esotericism, and all things Occult.
Today I have a very, very special guest here with me we are at the conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions at the University of Pisa and with me is Professor Henrik Bogdan from the University of… Gonneburg?
Prof Henrik Bogdan HB: Gothenburg.
AP: Gothenburg and yeah, he’s a very well-established scholar in the field of Esotericism and he has published extensively on the matter. In fact, I will be putting here a few of his books and do check out the infobox because you will find links to those books as well. And thank you so much for being here on Angela’s Symposium by the way.
HB: Thanks for the invitation, it’s a pleasure to be here.
AP: Yeah, actually you know that I have been trying to have you on my channel for quite some time because I’m a fan of your work. Perhaps fan is not the right word; an admirer of your work, but yeah, definitely. So I guess the first topic that I’d like to discuss with you, Henrik, is about the field of Esotericism. So how did it all start and where are we at now with the study of Esotericism?
HB: Well it started really, as far as I’m concerned, in the 1990s, when more and more scholars started to self-identify as scholars with a focus on western Esotericism. There were, of course, many, many good scholars before that who would do research on Alchemy or Astrology or Magic or Theosophy or yeah, Rosicrucianism, or whatever. But it tended to have a very specialized focus and not to place their subject matter within a broader context. But in the 1990s, gradually, much thanks to the work of Antoine Faivre and other pioneers in the field. Several scholars started to approach it from a broader perspective, from a historical-critical perspective placing these subject matters within their context, rather than studying as something unique and something odd or something that has no pre-history and no following history.
So, when I started to do my PhD in the late 1990s it was really a new field that opened up. So I’ve been lucky to be able to follow this development of this field, how it gradually has been established as an important field of research, not only in Religious Studies, I’m a Historian of Religions, but also History of Ideas or History in general. That’s where it started, more as a historical focus and when a field is being established it’s being established in different steps. With courses being offered at universities with positions, with a focus on Esotericism, with the book series, with specialist journals, with conferences, with organizations, and so on. So, this field has really, in little more than 20 years, been remarkable in its success, in that sense. There are, of course, many challenges still. It’s still a young field compared to, let’s say, the study of the world religions like Buddhism or Hinduism or anything like that. So Esotericism is, of course, a new field but at the same time, it’s a very popular field you can see that, for instance, here at Pisa, the conference that we attended here that the sessions that we had on Esotericism were very well attended. A lot of people are interested in this field even though they are not perhaps specialists in it. It attracts attention. It feels an important place in the Study of Religion obviously.
AP: Yeah, there is something that I’m really happy about; the fact that Esotericism is getting more attention and more scholarly recognition as well and it is also thanks to pioneers, such as yourself, and I know that you are also the secretary of the European Association for the Study of Western Esotericism, so you have a very active and a central role in the developing of the field and where do you think the field is at the moment? Do you also see it growing from this moment onwards or…?
HB: I think it’s natural it’s going to grow but it’s not going to grow indefinitely, of course, there are limits to how many scholars and the limits is set to a certain extent by the structure of the universities. Since all of us, nearly all of us, I would say, who work in different ways with Esotericism, we do it from the limits of the humanities and of course, there are huge problems facing humanities across the world in terms of cut downs, in terms of insecurity for young scholars in terms of postdocs, in terms of permanent positions, and so on. So it’s a very difficult situation across the world. And since Esotericism is comparably a quite small field it’s even more difficult, in a young, new field, for young scholars to continue their careers. So you have to be better than everybody else in order to continue, to have that possibility, so that’s one of the challenges. Yeah, so we’ll see where we’re gonna go from here but there are also other types of ways that the field is growing, I think, in the sense that new perspectives are being added we can see that gradually throughout these years scholars from other disciplines are discovering Esotericism and bringing in new theories and new methods into the study of Esotericism. Just Art History, Literature Studies, Gender Studies, Lived Religion, Sociology of Religion, Psychology of Religion so there are many different new perspectives being added, also Theology and more classical like Church History and so on. So scholars with totally different areas of specialization, when they take an interest in the study of Western Esotericism, the field is also growing, of course.
AP: And why would you say that the study of Esotericism is important? I mean what kind of relevance do you think it has?
HB: Well I think that’s where one of the leading scholars in the field is, of course, Woulter Hanegraaff and has been so for a long time and has in many ways defined western Esotericism and he argued that Esotericism is…
AP: Rejected knowledge.
HB: Rejected knowledge and he has definitely a point here. I would definitely say because much of what we are discussing at our conferences and so on, something which has been, for various reasons, rejected from the narrative of western culture and that means that there are blind spots. So there are areas which, important areas or traditions, that we don’t properly know yet or understand yet. So it’s a task of us to really to fill out those blanks and it’s not that these are blanks that are insignificant, on the contrary, I think that many of these currents have had a large impact upon our self-identity as a culture. And usually, when I talk to my students about this, well I take Isaac Newton as an example of this. So everybody knows Isaac Newton…
AP: Had an interest in Alchemy?
HB: No, no, no, more that he is the father of the scientific worldview in a sense. And that this has been problematic for a long time for Historians of Science that a large part of his preserved papers are not scientific, they are religious, hermetic, esoteric, alchemical papers. Put it that way. And they were excluded from the collection of his scientific papers because they were seen as his personal papers. Whereas now, of course, now, for quite some time now, scholars have seen that, well, you cannot exclude these papers because this is part of his whole work; that these two aspects are not separable they are integrated that in order to understand his, so-called, religious or esoteric writings, one needed to understand his scientific writings and vice versa. So, by ignoring that side of his work we don’t have a full picture of … that’s such an important person for western culture and we could continue to take example after example, for example. Take for, in literature, we can take August Strindberg from Sweden. Strindberg, of course, is an extremely well-known author who went through a crisis and that crisis coincided, in many ways, with his interest in Esotericism, in French Occultism, at the time, Martinist Occultism and Alchemy and so on. So we can see that he was using alchemical imagery referring to this particular strand of Occultism in France, for that period, in his writings and if one doesn’t understand that context one doesn’t really understand that literature as well. So that’s why so these are marginal human beings that haven’t had an impact upon western culture? No, no this is people just like you and me or people, you know, who … they’re not odd or strange or crazy who have dealt with Esotericism. Many times people have formed western culture.
HB: No, but yeah and I think it’s for me and as a scholar, I’m not only focused on western Esotericism, I’m focused on what I call alternative forms of religion. So that also includes neo-religious movements and secret societies and then Western Esotericists but many times these areas overlap. But I think what they all have in common is that these various perspectives or research areas they are about broadening the understanding of religion and in this case, in the western context then. Because, if one looks at the History of Religions, for a long time it has been treated as the study of very monolithical traditions where we have the world religions. Okay, we have Christianity and what is Christianity? Yeah, we have the Roman Catholic Church, we have the Protestant Churches, we have the Orthodox Churches and that’s more or less it in a sense. But, of course, the new History of Religions in Europe they focus on the diversity and the multitude of traditions that have existed and still exist. Also within those churches, of course, there’s not never been only one voice – there are many voices and that’s, I think, an important aspect of the study of Western Esotericism is that it can highlight a number of these voices to show the complexity, to show the multifaceted nature of religion.
AP: So in a way, it’s like, when you don’t only study the dogmatic institutionalized religions but you study religious phenomena that are more malleable and fluid. That means that by studying them you also get an insight into how human culture is formed, more generally because you know you don’t have one central dogma that people are following so they are creating their own rules in a way. So that also gives us insight into culture formation and religious formation when you have a lack of a central, a centralised dogma. Do you think that… do you agree with that?
HB: Yes, I definitely agree with that and I think that’s an important aspect to show that there is this… The state of religion is very messy in that sense. It’s not a clear-cut science where everything is easily explainable than where you have clear-cut borders between various groups and various currents and so on. Now everything goes into each other, everything is interconnected and everyone needs to try to navigate in these messy areas and try to follow it. Yeah.
AP: Another thing that I wanted to discuss is that that’s, I guess, also because I want to understand the matter better. I know that recently there have been discussions surrounding the definition of the study of Esotericism as ‘western’ Esotericism. So could you please allow me to better understand what the discussion was about? Since you know, at first, this field was called the Study of Western Esotericism and to a certain extent still being called the Study of Western Esotericism. So what’s the debate about the ‘western’ thing all about?
HB: Well, it’s a discussion that has been going on for quite some time. So it’s not really a new discussion or a new perspective on the western Esotericism to bring that matter into the front and there are various ways why the prefix ‘western’ in Western Esotericism is problematic. One can look at it from a geographical perspective, so where do you draw the line? Where does western begin and where does western end? So, is it only Europe? Is it Europe and the US? Is this the English, French and German-speaking worlds we’re talking about or what is it that we’re talking about? Is it the cultural heritage from the Greek world, so where do we draw the line. And those are valid questions of course that one needs to discuss and to analyse and to try to be transparent about what you mean by that, as a scholar. But there are also other aspects with western which has been raised and that is that the very concept of ‘westernism’ a form of excluding the other, of trying to make a difference between the West and the East, for instance, and that’s this artificial difference then between the East and the West. It’s a way of trying to exotify the East or trying to make it different from the West by emphasizing differences. So this is, of course, a more post-colonial perspective connected to that. And again, if one continues that way one can say that this has something to do with also with power and legitimacy that we, as westerners, as Europeans, somehow define what to study in terms of the West and what to exclude in terms of the East and so on by exotifying the East. And this is just a few of the various arguments that exist for the problematic nature of the West. My position is that it’s… I still tend to use western since the subject matter that I’m studying is from a European context most of my areas of research, Freemasonry, the new religious movements that I’m studying or that they are part of the US. So it’s more for pragmatical reasons, really, that I think that this it works fine for me.
But of course, I’m aware of the problems with the concept of Western and I’m aware that the very idea of dividing eastern and western Esotericism has emic or insider roots that go back to the so-called ‘Hermetic reaction’ in the 1880s, where occultists reacted against Theosophy and the emphasis on so-called Eastern teachings. And that societies like the Hermetic Society or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn instead, tried to construct or to try to argue that there is a valid, western, esoteric, unbroken tradition going back all the way to ancient Egypt or and something like that. And tried to focus on what they believed was unique for this western esoteric tradition. Yeah, Magic and Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah. That this was something unique, more suited for the western mind as it were and of course this is an emic construct of everything. But again, we are scholars we are studying in a certain way emic people but then have to take the next step and look at it from a theoretical perspective and try to understand it.
Yeah, and there are many other reasons which one could bring up also for keeping the West as well as there are many reasons why we should drop it, you know. So I can see both perspectives although I, so far, I’m not convinced, completely yet, to drop it.
AP: Likewise at least based on the arguments I’ve seen so far I agree with you in that. What the idea of West and East is still meaningful and it’s still telling us something about different ways of seeing the world. Of course, they are generic terms and so you always need to contextualise but I don’t particularly see a colonialist outlook on the terms themselves. But I don’t know, I might be wrong. So far I haven’t heard any argument that I found particularly persuasive as to why the idea of West is colonialist just because you’re calling it West. Why west would be better than… you know the term west is not implying that West is better than East and perhaps it is because the concept of West and East were created by Westerners? I don’t know.
HB: Well I think the very idea of dividing the East and the West, in itself, is problematic for various historical and for other reasons why this can be problematic to do so. Because such divisions have often tended to emphasize the differences and differences in a that värde andra(?), as we say in Swedish, as where you put value into the differences where certain differences are valued as more positive, our differences and other differences are added as negative their differences. So it is us and them. But I think as long as you, as a scholar, are aware of that and don’t shy away from it and so on contrary engage in it. Well, I think that one has to do that, one has to face those issues and there are many good ways of doing that of course. But at the same time, I think it’s important to look at what are we, as scholars are actually doing. We can look at, for instance, at the presentations here at the four sessions that we had on Esotericism, the subject matter. So what examples are we studying? What sort of currents or what sort of persons or what sort of practices are we studying? And we can also extend this to all the conferences and the journals specialized in Western Esotericism or the book series that specialize in Western Esotericism. Just call it for what it is.
I mean most other scholars focus on examples or do research on European or North American topics or at least there are specialists in these areas that might do comparative studies with other areas as well. And I think that’s an honest way to say that well the main focus is on the West and then we have other scholars, excellent scholars, very good scholars who have this ability of focusing on not only on one geographical area but they are experts on other areas as well and of course, for them, this becomes very problematic to label what they’re doing. Yeah, you’re doing Western Esotericism. No! I’m doing Esotericism that’s it! I’m a specialist on Hindu Tantra or I’m a specialist on Vajrayana Buddhism as well as a specialist on western forms of Esotericism and have this more comparative approach to it. Which I think is fascinating and it’s I think it’s good that we’re bringing back the comparative method which, within Religious Studies, became so criticized. When the School of Michelíada crumbled in the 1980s, for a long time, it was impossible to do comparative study it was seen as some form of essentialism, that you tried to find the essence in religion and try to compare them and that’s where the project itself was deeply problematical.
But now there’s some new forms of comparative study coming and I think that it’s fascinating. I think it’s great. I think that we need that, bringing in that method again because the comparative study of religion is really one of the founding perspectives in the History of Religions. So it’s good it’s coming back. But most of us in the field of Western Esotericism don’t have that expertise and we should be honest about that, I think. I know there are certain scholars out there gonna say well he’s totally wrong and that’s fine. I mean we can have different opinions about this. I think as long as we…
AP: Are in a conversation, in a fruitful kind of conversation…
HB: …as long as we agree to disagree or that we can, it’s fine to have different opinions it’s fine to want to drop western, it’s fine to want to keep western – nobody should tell the other one what you have to do. But those tendencies, I don’t like where there’s some sort of moral dimension being connected to the discussion whereas one way is seen as more morally superior than another way of approaching it – that I react against and I don’t think that that has a place in academia.
AP: Yeah I totally agree and since the conference was about resilience, religious resilience and of course our panels were about resilient Esotericism, why do you think that Esotericism has been so resilient over the centuries and now the scholars of Esotericism are resilient because it’s difficult to make your way into academia so you have to be very resilient?
HB: Well, if we learn something now from these four sessions it’s difficult to really answer that question in an easy way, as always in humanities, when we analyse something we’re gonna see that there are many, many different answers to that. And what do we mean by resilience in terms of Esotericism? Is it the ability to stick around, not to go away, to survive or is it the ability to change to adapt to new interpretations? I think that one reason why many forms of Esotericism tend to survive than to be reinterpreted, is that Esotericism, in many ways, can be characterized as non-dogmatic in the sense that there’s an openness for individual interpretations, there’s an openness for new ways of approaching, let’s say esoteric symbols. I’m going to take one example here to explain what I mean by that and that is, one of my research areas is the study of Freemasonry and this is actually one of the points I made in, together with Jan Snoek, when we published the Brill “Handbook of Freemasonry.”
In our introduction, we argue that the very fact that Freemasonry is non-dogmatic might explain why Freemasonry has survived for 300 years. That is that the rituals of Freemasonry have tended to remain the same. Okay, they have developed during the 18th century but in general, you can say that the basic structure has remained the same, the symbols have remained the same, the basic concept of Freemasonry has remained the same and if we look at Freemasonry in the early 18th century and onwards one will see that there’s never been one way of interpreting Freemasonry. The symbols of formation and the rituals of Masonry, there’s always been different ways, there has been religious interpretations of the rituals of Freemasonry, there has been philosophical interpretations, there’s been moral interpretations, there has been esoteric interpretations, there’s been political interpretations and many times these different interpretations have co-existed within the same lodge, with the same systems. So I think that’s one of the strengths of Freemasonry in that it has this non-dogmatic nature where new interpretations have been possible to make and where new generations of Masons have read new things in those rituals that we were going through, where individuals can read in their own interpretations of the rituals. And where that’s often perfectly fine, of course, there have been conflicts with Freemasonry with different systems and so on but it usually hasn’t been about interpreting the symbols, it has been other conflicts connected to authority or power or jurisdiction and those sort of issues. Not so much about how to interpret the symbols and I think that we can take this example and perhaps apply it to many forms of Esotericism, this ability of being reinterpreted. There’s never been let’s say like a formalized church, in that sense, but an official doctrine that one has to follow, if you break this doctrine in different ways that you’re going to be expelled from it in terms of doctrine.
But of course, you can be expelled from Esoteric societies, that’s part of Esotericism also to be expelled but often it has not to do with the official doctrine that you, for instance, that we can associate with churches in that sense.
AP: And based on your research, why do you think there’s such a be such a central role of Magic in Esotericism, in esoteric practices? Why is Magic so central and important? I know that there are some traditions where magic is not essential really but across the board, it tends to be one of the core traits or perhaps you disagree with that.
HB: No, I’m thinking what you’re saying if it’s central. I think it’s, yeah it’s central to certain currents of Esotericism but not all as you say. I mean let’s take the largest occult organization, for a long time in the world, the Theosophical Society. There will you not find magic as a central practice of Theosophy. On the contrary, Magic is deeply problematic in the history of Theosophy but if we look at magic as a practice, why is it so resilient, why has it survived and been reinterpreted? So I would say it fulfils a very important function, just like religion does, in the sense that Magic is often concerned with control. Of having control of yourself, having control of your surroundings, of your future, of trying to control what’s going to happen to you and that gives you a sense of… yes, if you have control, a sense of relief right? So I think that fulfils an important function and in that sense, it doesn’t differ from why has religion survived, why is religion still an important factor for humans today? Because it does the same thing. It creates order out of chaos and that’s what religions do if you go back and look at… I mean the very word of religion – it binds things together. What it does it binds human beings together, it binds the individual together with history, it binds human beings together with nature, with the future. If you have these linear traditions like Christianity or Judaism or Islam…
AP: If you’re part of a tradition, you’re part of something in a way.
HB: Yes, and it explains why we’re here, it explains what I’m supposed to do and explains what’s right and wrong. So and that gives you control. So I think that’s from a functionalistic perspective then. I think that religion definitely fulfils that. That the objective as well as Magic, Magic is dealing with the same thing but this is, if we turn up the volume a bit more, I would say, Magic is even more emphasized on this because you take on even more responsibility on your shoulders, as a Magician, of your control of your own existence. Where what we can see historically and also in contemporary forms of Magic, that rather than relying on supernatural beings in terms of religion that they might help you if you please them enough. Here you take control of your own destiny in many ways as a Magician, especially in more modern forms of Magic I would argue.
AP: Yeah. Sometimes I wonder is that empowering or is that another constraint that people put on themselves, you know. Having control over your life, on the one hand, it seems like something empowering, but on the other hand, it’s like everything that happens is, in a way, your fault everything bad that happens is, in a way, your fault. So I think…
HB: There’s there’s two sides to it, of course, like everything. There’s both negative and positive aspects of this for human beings. It can be empowering definitely for otherwise I think that Magic would not exist. I think that would have been disappeared by now. But obviously many people feel that this gives them something that in their world this is something that works for them. Just like religion works for many, many human beings. But of course, also we have the difference with tradition. If you are brought up in a context where everybody is part of religious tradition you might not perhaps reflect upon questions of empowering as perhaps people who practice Magic, where you often make a conscious choice to start to practice Magic, right? This is not something that you are… this is something, I think that Bernd-Christian Otto mentioned this at one of our panels that practitioners of magic can be seen as first-generation, belonging to first-generation religion. Like a new leader’s movement, in a sense, that you have converted to this, you’re not brought up with it. It’s very few, I think, practitioners of magic that have been brought up where it is something that comes through tradition. That they practice magic that’s something that you choose to do and the question of empowering is probably central to that choice.
AP: It’s interesting, I think that many scholars have pointed out the matter of control being one of the things that bring people to practice, to practice Magic. In my case, for example, in my study and my research what I saw is that in a lot of cases it’s more a matter of experiencing what lies beyond so having a direct experience. Perhaps it is because I did my PhD on Shamanism and these kinds of practices that have that include some form of magic but it is a form of Magic that even though you can get healing and knowledge and power out of it, it seems as though practitioners engage with these practices more because they want to experience something that goes beyond this, the ordinary reality. So it’s like if there is a non-ordinary reality, I want to feel it, I want to experience it. So and there is this sort of dimension of wanting more from what you see. But it also links to what you were saying about religion binding things together because it’s like most practitioners, most of my informants, they have said, in our interviews, they feel a sense of connection and also that they get to experience something that goes beyond the mundane and it often it is, you know, still linked to mundane but then it goes beyond it, to experience something more.
HB: That’s a good point. I think that the issue of empowering depends also on what type of Magic we’re talking about and what we mean by Magic. So, for instance, if we take astral travels, for instance. Yeah, that’s probably not so much about empowerment that’s probably more about exploring the astral world and trying to get deeper understanding of, I don’t know, of who you are or…
AP: What it is that you can do as a human being.
HB: Yes and to try to understand the visions that you encounter, what meaning they might have and so on. So you’re right, yes, of course, there’s also this enchanting aspect about it that maybe Magic can be seen as a way of, not of escaping this secular world but of more of deepening the sense of relevance or the sense of mystery yeah that there’s more to it than the surface. To go beyond the surface in a sense. So that’s probably an important aspect of it as well.
AP: Yeah and I thought perhaps that is an aspect that is empowering without having the restraint and you know, having the control brings about the idea, okay I can create my own reality but that means that also all the things that happened to me are, in a way, caused by me or because I wasn’t able to be a good enough Magician so that places a lot of responsibility on the shoulder of the Magician as you mentioned earlier.
HB: Yeah well it’s a similar phenomenon to certain forms of Pentecostal religion or Christianity where the belief is that if you’re connected close enough to God and you perform your prayers and if you are you know on the good side nothing bad will happen to you but if you get sick it’s your own fault, you have sinned in one way another. So, and that, of course, puts an extra stress upon you and it’s also brings in the question of shame also. If you are in a group setting or a group community that somebody gets ill and if you have this belief that illness only afflicts those who are sinful then you became ostracised as well. So that’s yeah.
AP: Not only do you have to endure the fact that you are sick but also that you’re responsible for it. It sounds like a nightmare.
HB: Yeah.
AP: But yeah, I guess our conversation showed what you said to begin with which is that the matter is very complex and I actually, I know that you know some people may prefer to have clear-cut answers and perhaps it may seem annoying that in humanities and in Religious Studies we never had a clear-cut answer yes or no. It is always complex and always multifaceted but actually, I think that is a good thing because, perhaps, it could be the case that our objective and our aim is not really to find the one answer but to bring forward the conversation because the conversation brings lots of answers and lots of more questions and that’s how we know things. Knowledge doesn’t necessarily have to be one solid objective thing. At least that’s what I think.
HB: No you’re absolutely right. I think that’s the strength of humanities, that we are focusing on the complex nature of the phenomena that we’re studying. We’re not trying to simplify what we’re studying but at the same time we also need to be able to provide some sort of answers to questions We can’t just say that well everything is too complex so we cannot say anything about it because then why are we doing research on it? So, and I think that’s part of our job is to see the complex nature of the phenomena that we’re studying but still be able to try to distil or try to summarize the main trends in whatever it is that we’re trying to understand and usually we do that with the help of theories. I try…
AP: And methods.
HB: Yeah, I try to get to an answer to very complex phenomena from a certain perspective.
AP: Yeah absolutely and also the fact that knowledge is a moving target. It means that we need to be able to have the proper methodology or theories to understand them. So it means that we have to be very critical and also, I guess that also contributes to the knowledge that Religious Studies brings to the table so that we are helping develop new methodologies to understand knowledge and in its complexity without trying to cut out things that are inconvenient or that are too difficult to understand. So yeah, we are fond of religious studies.
HB: Absolutely.
AP: So thank you so much, Henrik for being here on my channel. It was a fantastic conversation and very informative, I think.
And for you, my kind viewer, don’t forget to leave a comment because I want to know what you think about our conversation. Hopefully, it was as informative for you as it was for me and thanks again Henrik, for being here.
HB: Thanks so much for being here.
AP: And see you the next time.
HB: See you next time, bye-bye.