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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Birkbeck Institutional Research Online Correspondences Online Journal for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism Editors Jimmy Elwing and Aren Roukema 4 (2016) © Contributing authors 2016 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ All articles are available at http://www.correspondencesjournal.com Editorial contacts: Jimmy Elwing: [email protected] Aren Roukema: [email protected] Associate Editor Allan Johnson: [email protected] Book Review Editor Egil Asprem: [email protected] ISSN 2053-7158 (Online) Editorial board: Franscesco Baroni (Université de Lausanne), Henrik Bogdan (University of Gothenburg), Juan Pablo Bubello (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Dylan Burns (Universität Leipzig), Peter Forshaw (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Christian Giudice (University of Gothenburg), Kennet Granholm (Stockholm, Sweden), Amy Hale (Helix Education), Boaz Huss (Ben-Gurion University of Negev), Birgit Menzel (Universität Mainz). Contents Editorial: A Good Year for Correspondences 1 Research Articles EGIL ASPREM. Esotericism and the Scholastic Imagination: 3 The Origins of Esoteric Practice in Christian Kataphatic Spirituality JULIAN Strube. The “Baphomet” of Eliphas Lévi: 37 Its Meaning and Historical Context BoaZ Huss. Translations of the Zohar: Historical Contexts and Ideological Frameworks 81 Book Reviews Kennet Granholm. Dark Enlightenment: The Historical, Sociological and 129 Discursive Contexts of Contemporary Esoteric Magic. Reviewed by AMY HALE Abraham von Worms. The Book of Abramelin: A New Translation. 134 Reviewed by KEITH CANTÚ Henrik Bogdan and Jan A.M. Snoek (eds.). Handbook of Freemasonry. 138 Reviewed by PETER OLSSON Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas (eds.). Revelation, Literature, 143 and Community in Late Antiquity. Reviewed by DYLAN M. BURNS Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein (eds.). Handbook of the Theosophical Current. 148 Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER A. PLAISANCE Asbjørn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis, and Jesper Aa. Petersen. 152 The Invention of Satanism. Reviewed by CIMMINNEE Holt Correspondences 4 (2016) 1–2 ISSN: 2053-7158 (Online) correspondencesjournal.com Editorial: A Good Year for Correspondences Aren Roukema E-mail: [email protected] It’s unclear at the moment how history will look back on 2016, but it was an exciting year for Correspondences. Our long term efforts to solidify our fledging project gained traction in March, when we received almost 400 euros through the Sponsorship Program for Independent Scholarly Initiatives, a development grant offered by the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism. This grant provides us with funding for three years of web hosting, as well as the financial resources needed to secure membership with professional open access databases, a move which will make our content more easily searchable and accessible. Even without this affiliation, Correspondences has been making good prog- ress in our efforts to establish a publication that can deliver important new research and widely distribute it via an open access (OA) publishing model. We recently dug around in the belly of the intrawebs and gathered statistics on the journal’s performance since it’s founding in 2012. Despite our publication’s relative youth, our readership and citation statistics (as measured by Google Scholar) suggest that with a few more years of longevity we’ll have similar citation rates to established print publications of a similar size and research scope. We believe that in addition to the quality of the work Correspondences has been fortunate to publish, this impact can be explained by the widespread distribution enabled by the OA model. Our most significant step forward this year, however, was the appointment of Dr. Allan Johnson of the University of Surrey to our editorial team. Allan specializes in esoteric currents in modernist British literature. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and former Marjorie G. Wynne Fellow of British © 2016 Aren Roukema This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 2 Roukema / Correspondences 4 (2016) 1–2 Literature at Yale University. In addition to his work with Correspondences, Allan is taking exciting new approaches to the study of esotericism as director of the Magic, Language, and Society Network, funded by the UK’s Arts and Human- ities Research Council, in partnership with Treadwell’s Bookstore in London. Allan has already improved the journal’s digital infrastructure, switching the journal’s management and publishing software to Open Journal Systems (OJS), and will be taking on other editorial roles in the future. 2016 also brought us the articles and reviews enfolded in this volume. As usual, these essays and analyses of recently published material reflect the enormous diversity of esoteric studies. Egil Asprem looks at the roots of the esoteric imagination in medieval kataphatic spirituality; Julian Strube places Eliphas Lévi’s symbol of the Baphomet in the context of his political, religious and scientific views, and Boaz Huss provides a history of Zohar translations that will prove invaluable to researchers of the history of kabbalah. Reviews by Amy Hale, Keith Cantú, Peter Olsson, Dylan Burns, Christopher Plaisance and Cimminnee Holt round out an issue that, in its diversity, should appeal to all. We hope you enjoy it. Correspondences 4 (2016) 3–36 ISSN: 2053-7158 (Online) correspondencesjournal.com Esotericism and the Scholastic Imagination: The Origins of Esoteric Practice in Christian Kataphatic Spirituality* Egil Asprem E-mail: [email protected] Abstract Scholars agree that the imagination is central to esoteric practice. While the esoteric vis imaginativa is usually attributed to the influx of Neoplatonism in the Italian Renaissance, this article argues that many of its key properties were already in place in medieval scholasticism. Two aspects of the history of the imagination are discussed. First, it is argued that esoteric practice is rooted in a broader kataphatic trend within Christian spirituality that explodes in the popular devotion literature of the later Middle Ages. By looking at the role of Bonaventure’s “cognitive theology” in the popularization of gospel meditations and kataphatic devotional prayer, it is argued that there is a direct link between the scholastic reconsideration of the imaginative faculty and the development of esoteric practices inspired by Christian devotional literature. Secondly, it is argued that the Aristotelian inner sense tradition of the scholastics left a lasting impression on later esoteric conceptualizations of the imaginative faculty. Examples suggesting evidence for both these two claims are discussed. The article proposes to view esoteric practices as an integral part of a broader kataphatic stream in European religious history, separated out by a set of disjunctive strategies rooted in the policing of “orthopraxy” by ecclesiastical authorities. Keywords Imagination; kataphatic practice; scholasticism; the inner senses; illumination; heteropraxy * I wish to thank two anonymous peer reviewers for their immensely helpful comments and corrections, which have improved the quality of this article. For all remaining blunders and confusions in the text: mea culpa. © 2016 Egil Asprem This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 4 Asprem / Correspondences 4 (2016) 3–36 1. Introduction: Contextualizing Esoteric Practice Recent scholarship in the field of esotericism has sought to demonstrate that the currents we now class as “esoteric” have, historically, been integral parts of the religious, philosophical, and scientific cultures of Europe.1 This revisionist work has primarily focused on ideas and doctrinal systems, sometimes in combination with the institutional affiliations and social standing that “learned men” writing on esoteric topics enjoyed in their own lifetimes.2 What has generally been lacking is a focus on practice.3 In this article I aim to show how esoteric practices can shed additional light on how esotericism has come to be differentiated from categories such as “religion” or “Christianity”. My main focus shall, however, be on the underlying continuities between esoteric and mainstream practices that tend to get hidden from view by these disjunctions. 1 See especially Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Beyond the Yates Paradigm: The Study of Western Esotericism between Counterculture and New Complexity,” Aries 1, no. 1 (2001): 5–37; Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, “Esoterik und Christentum vor 1800: Prolegomena zu einer Bestimmung ihrer Differenz,“ Aries 3, no. 2 (2003): 127–65; Kocku von Stuckrad, “Western Esotericism: Towards an Integrative Model of Interpretation,” Religion 34 (2005): 78–97; von Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010). 2 In addition to the programmatic works mentioned in footnote 1, numerous empirical and theoretical studies of this kind focusing on esotericism and the Enlightenment are found in the two volumes Neugebauer-Wölk, with Andre Rudolph (eds.), Aufklärung und Esoterik: Rezeption – Integration
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