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Western Esotericism” 67 Liana Saif New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism - 978-90-04-44645-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/05/2021 03:08:58PM via Stockholm University Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Editorial Board Aaron W. Hughes (University of Rochester) Russell McCutcheon (University of Alabama) Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Groningen) Volume 17 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/smtr - 978-90-04-44645-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/05/2021 03:08:58PM via Stockholm University New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism Edited by Egil Asprem Julian Strube - 978-90-04-44645-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/05/2021 03:08:58PM via Stockholm University This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided no alterations are made and the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2060 “Religion and Politics. Dynamics of Tradition and Innovation” – 390726036; as well as by the Open Access Fund of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster Cover illustration: mycelium, copyright Taviphoto. | Dreamstime.com, https://www.dreamstime.com/taviphoto_info Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Asprem, Egil, editor. | Strube, Julian, editor. Title: New approaches to the study of esotericism / edited by Egil Asprem, Julian Strube. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2021. | Series: Supplements to method & theory in the study of religion, 2214-3270 ; volume 17 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2020048069 | ISBN 9789004446441 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004446458 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Occultism–Research–Methodology. Classification: LCC BF1439 .N49 2021 | DDC 130–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048069 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2214-3270 ISBN 978-90-04-44644-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-44645-8 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Egil Asprem and Julian Strube. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. - 978-90-04-44645-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/05/2021 03:08:58PM via Stockholm University Contents Notes on Contributors vii Esotericism’s Expanding Horizon: Why This Book Came to Be 1 Egil Asprem and Julian Strube Receptions of Revelations: A Future for the Study of Esotericism and Antiquity 20 Dylan Burns Towards the Study of Esotericism without the “Western”: Esotericism from the Perspective of a Global Religious History 45 Julian Strube “That I Did Love the Moor to Live with Him”: Islam in/and the Study of “Western Esotericism” 67 Liana Saif The Occult among the Aborigines of South America? Some Remarks on Race, Coloniality, and the West in the Study of Esotericism 88 Mariano Villalba “Don’t Take Any Wooden Nickels”: Western Esotericism, Yoga, and the Discourse of Authenticity 109 Keith Cantú Rejected Knowledge Reconsidered: Some Methodological Notes on Esotericism and Marginality 127 Egil Asprem Race and (the Study of) Esotericism 147 Justine Bakker “What Can the Whole World Be Hiding?”: Exploring Africana Esotericisms in the American Soul-Blues Continuum 168 Hugh R. Page, Jr. and Stephen C. Finley - 978-90-04-44645-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/05/2021 03:08:58PM via Stockholm University vi Contents Double Toil and Gender Trouble? Performativity and Femininity in the Cauldron of Esotericism Research 182 Manon Hedenborg White What Do Jade Eggs Tell Us about the Category “Esotericism”? Spirituality, Neoliberalism, Secrecy, and Commodities 201 Susannah Crockford Interpretation Reconsidered: The Definitional Progression in the Study of Esotericism as a Case in Point for the Varifocal Theory of Interpretation 217 Dimitry Okropiridze Afterword: Outlines of a New Roadmap 241 Egil Asprem and Julian Strube Index 253 - 978-90-04-44645-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/05/2021 03:08:58PM via Stockholm University Notes on Contributors Egil Asprem is Associate Professor in History of Religions at Stockholm University. He is the editor-in-chief of Aries and has published widely on esotericism and its study, including The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900–1939 (Brill, 2014). Justine M. Bakker is a postdoctoral fellow in Critical Philosophy of Race at Radboud University, Nijmegen (the Netherlands). In May 2020, she obtained her PhD in Religion from Rice University (Houston, TX) with a dissertation that aimed to rethink the categories of and relationship between “the human” and “religion.” Dylan M. Burns is a research associate at Freie Universität Berlin. He has published sev- eral books and many articles on Gnosticism, later Greek philosophy, early Christianity, and their modern reception, recently including New Antiquities (Equinox, 2019) and Did God Care? (Brill, 2020). Keith Cantú is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He is an Associate Editor for Correspondences and, along with his forthcoming dissertation, is the author of “Sri Sabhapati Swami: Forgotten Yogi of Western Esotericism” (Palgrave, 2021). Susannah Crockford is a post-doctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. Her first mono- graph, Ripples of the Universe: Seeking Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona, will be published in Spring 2021 in the Class 200 list by the University of Chicago Press. With a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics, her research interests focus on questions of religion and ecology, science and spir- ituality. On Twitter: @SusCrockford. Stephen C. Finley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African & African American Studies (AAAS) and Director of AAAS, who currently studies blackness and the paranormal. He is co-editor of Esotericism in African American Religious Expe- rience: “There Is a Mystery”… (Brill 2015). - 978-90-04-44645-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/05/2021 03:08:58PM via Stockholm University viii Notes on Contributors Manon Hedenborg White holds a PhD in the History of Religions from Uppsala University. She is the author of The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism (Oxford University Press, 2020). Dimitry Okropiridze is a research associate at Heidelberg University of Education and lecturer at the department for the Study of Religion at Heidelberg University. He has pub- lished widely on theoretical and transcultural topics in the study of religion and culture. Hugh R. Page, Jr. is Professor of Theology and Africana Studies and Vice President and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affairs at Notre Dame University. He is co-editor of Esotericism in African American Religious Experience: “There Is a Mystery”… (Brill 2015). Liana Saif is a post-doctoral fellow at the Warburg Institute and Université Catholique de Louvain. Her research focuses on Islamic occult sciences and esotericism in a global context and exchanges between the Islamic world and the Latin West in medieval and early modern periods. Julian Strube is a Research Fellow at the University of Münster, Germany. He has published a range of monographs, edited volumes, and articles on the relationship be- tween religion, esotericism, and politics since the nineteenth century from a global historical perspective. Mariano Villalba is a PhD candidate in History of Religions at the University of Lausanne and École Pratique des Hautes Études. He is editor of Melancolia and has published a number of articles on esotericism in the Spanish Renaissance, Argentina, and Mexico. - 978-90-04-44645-8 Downloaded from Brill.com01/05/2021 03:08:58PM via Stockholm University Esotericism’s Expanding Horizon: Why This Book Came to Be Egil Asprem and Julian Strube The academic study of esotericism is currently undergoing a phase of expan- sion and diversification. This is true whether we look at the topics, geographi- cal regions, and subject languages of new research projects in the field, at the disciplines involved in its study, or the demographic composition of its schol- ars. The past decade has seen monographs, anthologies, and journal special issues on topics such as African-American esotericism (Finley, Guillory and Page, eds., 2014), esotericism in South America (Bubello, 2010), esotericism in South Asia (Djurdjevic, 2014), esotericism in Scandinavia (Bogdan and Ham- mer, eds., 2016), global esotericism (Bogdan and Djurdjevic, 2014), contempo- rary esotericism (Asprem and Granholm, eds., 2013), esotericism in antiquity (Burns, ed., 2015), Islamic esotericism (Saif, 2019), cognitive
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