ESSWE Newsletter, Vol. 9, No. 1
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The Newsletter of the ESSWE European Society for Summer 2018 the Study of Western Volume 9, Number 1 Esotericism Newsletter Words from the Editor – Chris Giudice Words from the Editor (p. 1) Four new publications (p. 2) Scholar Interviews (p. 4) Conference Reviews (p. 7) Call for Papers (p. 8) News from the Ritman (p. 11) I would be delighted if any of our members could provide the Welcome to the Summer 2018 Newsletter: this issue sees the Newsletter with a brief report of these and other conferences, presence of some of the most popular sections, such as scholar accompanied, if possible, by pictures related to the events. interviews and not two, but four member publications. The field of Member contribution is a vital aspect of the Newsletter, and is Western esotericism seems to be blooming, not only in regard to highly appreciated for those events that your humble editor will the main societies’ ESSWE and ASE conferences and not be able to visit. As always, please do not hesitate to contact publications, but local regional networks’ activities, such as me if you think that something should be added to the next CEENASWE and INASWE appear to be on the rise. The EASR in issue or if you are organising an event that could be of interest Bern and the CESNUR conference in Taiwan are taking place as I to the membership of ESSWE. The next issue of the newsletter write this editorial: will be sent out in December. Wishing all ESSWE members a productive and (moderately) stress free summer! Edited by Chris Giudice, Department of Literature, History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothenburg ([email protected]) ESSWE Newsletter New publications by ESSWE members Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière Annie Besant (1847-1933): Struggles and Quest My biography of Besant was first published in French (Annie Besant : la lutte et la quête. Paris: Editions Adyar, 2015), then in (London: Theosophical Publishing House, German (Annie Besant: Weisheit und Wissenschaft. Munich: 2018) Aquamarine Verlag, 2017). My English translation of the biography was published thanks to the Foundation for As a Senior Lecturer Theosophical Studies, who decided to revive the Theosophical in Victorian studies at Publishing House (London), making this book the first to be Sorbonne University, released under the new imprint.♦ I have my students work on Annie Besant’s socialist Tessel M. Bauduin & Henrik Johnsson (eds.) fight alongside the The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature and match-girls on strike Cinema in the East End of London in 1888. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Focusing on Victorian women in my seminars, I often The editors intend this dwell on Besant’s anthology as a pioneering struggle in contribution to our the 1870s for the right understanding of the to information on relationship between birth control. occultism and Meanwhile, when modernism in the arts, preparing classes on a research topic that the British Empire, I realized that Besant’s election as President can best be designated of the Indian National Congress in 1917 had been almost as ”occult completely forgotten in the West. modernism”. A significant number of But my interest in Besant intensified when I refocused my modernist authors and academic research on the underestimated links between the artists were fascinated late-Victorian socialist movement, the contemporaneous fight by the occult for women’s rights and the spiritual and occult revival. I then movements of their began to work on understanding Besant’s personal evolution. I day, a fascination that discovered that in her main two biographies — the first by helped to inspire the Arthur Nethercot in 1960-1963, the second by Anne Taylor in art, film and fiction of 1992 — her conversion to Theosophy was described as yet such diverse another fracture in a life these two authors thought to be proponents of fragmented to the point of incoherence. Neither managed to modernist and avant-garde aesthetics as W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria establish a link between Besant’s freethinking, socialism, Rilke, André Breton, Piet Mondrian, and August Strindberg, just feminism, criticism of the Empire, and conversion to to name a few. Academic research into the interactions of Theosophy. To make matters worse, both works suffer from occultism and modernism that takes both subjects and their prejudices regarding Theosophy that are so strong as to impair interrelation seriously is, however, a relatively recent their reflective abilities. development, the interactions between occultism and modernism often having been downplayed or ignored altogether by earlier I therefore decided to write a new biography of Besant. My scholarship. purpose was not to so much to uncover still potentially unexplored archives, but rather to make Besant better The research topic has specific requirements which have not yet understood by the general public. The logic behind her been taken fully into account, and which the anthology seeks to evolution, leading from an early religious crisis to secularism, address. The topic is intermedial, reflecting the variety of feminism, socialism, Theosophy, and Indian nationalism, had modernist forms of expression, with occult modernism barely been addressed, so I hoped to demonstrate the manifesting in fiction, art and cinema, as predominant art forms. underlying continuities in her long life of struggles. To do so, I The topic is multilingual, reflecting the pan-European successes chose to recall and to explain Besant’s choices and actions in of both modernism and occultism. The topic, and specifically its their moral, social, and spiritual contexts, while relying academic study, is and therefore demands to be interdisciplinary, primarily on her own writings. combining the theoretical and methodological foundations of the field of esotericism studies with those of such diverse fields as literary studies, art history, and cinema studies. ESSWE Newsletter This anthology advances the current state of the art in research have reasons to conclude that they are included in the larger on occult modernism by assembling chapters that approach the notion of the “esoteric paradigm”. ♦ topic from an interdisciplinary perspective, with case studies being drawn from the late nineteenth century until today. The anthology includes contributions from scholars working in the fields of literary studies, art history, cinema studies, and Fernando Pessoa & Aleister Crowley esotericism studies/religious studies. The editors hope that this La Bocca dell’Inferno - Marco Pasi (ed.) anthology will be followed by other publications, exploring the topic of occult modernism in other media, languages and (Saluzzo: Federico Tozzi Editore, 2018) historical periods more fully.♦ On September 2, 1930, the famous occultist Aleister Crowley and his young lover Hanni Jaeger arrived in Lisbon with the steamer Massimo Introvigne (ed.) Alcantara. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa was waiting for them on the dock. This is how one of the most curious episodes in The Journal of CESNUR 2:3 the biography of both men began. A few (Turin: CESNUR, 2018) weeks later, Crowley disappeared into thin This issue of The air after leaving a Journal of CESNUR mysterious farewell is devoted to a letter on a cliff near Ukrainian movement, Cascais, known as the the Applied Sciences "Boca do Inferno" (the Association, and its Mouth of Hell). Did founder, Oleg Crowley really Maltsev. commit suicide, as the Paradoxically, letter seemed to scholars of new indicate? And what religious movements was Pessoa's role in became interested in this strange story? the Association after This book is an Italian anti-cultists started edition of the denouncing it as a documents related to “cult”. Having the extraordinary studied the encounter between Association, these two however, they concluded it was not a new religious movement extraordinary men, including the whole of their correspondence but a group, teaching psychology and martial arts with a and the novel Pessoa wrote about the Crowley’s disappearance. scientific and technical rather than a religious approach. On the The novel has been discovered only in recent years and includes other hand, Maltsev sees a connection between both very interesting elements for understanding the relationship psychology and martial between Crowley and Pessoa, which had an important esoteric arts, and a notion of God dimension. Pessoa’s esoteric oeuvre is still relatively little known and a view of history outside the circle of connoisseurs, but deserves further scholarly that include references to attention both because of the exceptional status that Pessoa has what he calls “European acquired as a towering figure of twentieth-century literature and Mysticism”. This because of its originality and profundity. ♦ introduction refers to the notion of “esoteric paradigm”, which has been illustrated elsewhere with the reference that “religion” and “magic” do not exhaust all possible human relations with the sacred or transcendence. It argues that, although Maltsev himself would deny that his teachings are part of “esotericism”, outside observers may ESSWE Newsletter Scholar Interviews - Chris Giudice In every issue of the Newsletter one junior and one senior scholar of Western esotericism are interviewed. They are both asked the same questions. Professor Carole M. Cusack Studies in Religion Department University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia Second, as an undergraduate I was taught by Professor Eric J. Sharpe (who later supervised my Honours and PhD theses) and How did you come to be interested in Western Esotericism? he was interested in Celtic and Norse mythology, new religious movements (especially TM), and in the 1980s everyone read a I began studying for a Bachelor of Arts at the University of lot of Mircea Eliade. He fell from favour almost immediate after Sydney in 1981. At that time Western Esotericism as a specific his death in 1986 and the publication of the Encyclopedia of field did not exist in academia, and in fact I completed Biblical Religion (Macmillan 1987) of which he was general editor.