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Preface
On 1 May 2010, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an essay in which I presented the main argument of my inaugural lecture for the chair of the study of
religion, which had been delivered at the University of Groningen on 16 March
2010. The editors of Trouw chose the title De schepping in vier letters (Creation in Four Letters), because I argued that the metaphor of the four letters constituting the DNA code was taken (unknowingly, to be sure) from a long intellectual tradition in Europe, both in philosophy of nature and Kabbalah; by
decoding, reading, and writing DNA, the so-called life sciences partake in
a discourse that is inseparably tied to religious, metaphysical, and esoteric approaches to nature and the cosmos. Thus, the marriage between religion and science may not be a happy one, but the widespread idea that they were divorced
sometime in the eighteenth century seems to be untenable.
The readers responses to this article were mostly critical. A certain Henk
Timmerman from Oegstgeest was outraged and wrote in a letter to the editors
on 3 May that if four consonants that simply indicate chemical entities are
seen as language, many other things can be made into language, too. More interesting, though, was his response to my remark that it is common in contemporary Europe to ridicule religious, metaphysical, astrological, homeopathic,
or other approaches that are seen as completely irrational. What a strange
list of terms, Mr. Timmerman wrote. Yes, of course, homeopathy, metaphysical
approaches, and astrology do not have any scientific value; these are anachronisms that often lead to fraud. But religion? Does religion belong in that list? As a
(natural) scientist and a Christian I defy the thoughts of the scholar of religion,
von Stuckrad.
I doubt that Mr. Timmerman will read this book. He may be interested to hear
that his irritation is indicative of a complex cultural debate, in which the borders
between religion and science on the one hand, and between science and pseudo-science on the other, are constantly renegotiated. What makes the pseudosciences particularly interesting is the fact that they challenge the rational truthclaims of the secular sciences. In their long cultural history, disciplines such as
astrology, alchemy, and even magic subscribed in large part to standards of rationality and philosophy of nature; they formulated theories about nature and
the cosmos and thus have often been seen as competitors with modern science,
a concept that was introduced only in the nineteenth century. To be sure, the
competition between various cultures of knowledge and the polemics that go
with it is not as new as the modern age. But the specific constellation in
which astronomy is disjunctively separated from astrology, chemistry from al-
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Preface
chemy, and science from magic is a European phenomenon of the past three
hundred years.
Polemics are always an indication of a problem. The problem with the pseudo-sciences is that it has not always been easy to identify the exact difference
between discarded and accepted forms of knowledge. What is more, these marginalized forms of knowledge continued to be attractive as an alternative to what
was perceived as reductionist knowledge of nature in the sciences. This led to an
intricate entanglement of various discourses in the large field of religion, science, and public culture. In the genealogy of the current situation, the institutionalization of knowledge about religion and science in a spectrum of new disciplines around 1900 (from religious studies to Indology and anthropology to
psychology and theoretical physics) played an important role. These secular disciplines became the major experts when it comes to what we know about religion, science, and culture. And their representatives engaged in a lively debate
not only with one another but also with a non-academic audience that was eager
to absorb this knowledge.
The Scientification of Religion attempts to disentangle this complex knot of
discourse strands. In a way, it is a follow-up to my Locations of Knowledge
(2010), because I am interested here in the further historical development of
the discursive constellations I described in that study with regard to the European situation between 1400 and 1700. But this volume also picks up data and considerations I engaged in my book on contemporary shamanism in Europe and
North America (Schamanismus und Esoterik, 2003). Finally, the present book is
an attempt to apply, as consistently as possible, the discursive approaches to
the study of religious and cultural history that I have been working on during
the past years. My object of study is not religion or science as a phenomenon
that can be defined and then submitted to scholarly analysis; my object of
study is the discursive construction of religion and science, i. e., the various
meanings that are attributed to religion and science in cultural communication
and practice. The meanings that are attributed to theseand relatedterms
change over time, and it is the advantage of discursive analyses to make these
changes visible in their historical contexts.
My analysis follows the changing combinations of discourses that have been
operative in our understanding of religion and science since the end of the eighteenth century. I untie the discursive knots that I find in the data and follow their
strands in changing constellations up to the end of the twentieth century. This
leads me to conclusions and groupings (Foucault) of discourse strands that
are difficult to match with the simplistic narratives still dominating the debate
about religion in secular Europe today. Particularly when it comes to the officially discarded knowledge systems of astrology, alchemy, metaphysics, and magic,
Preface
IX
we can see that many elements of their discursive systems have been prolonged
in secular (and thus accepted) forms of knowledge. The first part of this book reconstructs the changes in these discursive constellations. The second part describes the normative discursive power of academic constructions of knowledge
about religion; focusing on several influential academics from both the humanities and the natural sciences, I argue that secular discourses have not only
changed the understanding of what religion is, but that they have also produced
new forms of religious practice. Taken together, these two levels of analysis form
the basis of what I call the scientification of religion, i. e., the transformation and
perpetuation of religious discourses as a result of their entanglement with secular academic discourses.
Although my analysis addresses the discursive changes between roughly
1800 and 2000 (with occasional excursions into earlier periods when it seems
necessary to explain the prehistory of certain discourses), the most important period for this study turns out to be the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of
the twentieth century. My regional focus is Germany and Great Britain, with occasional excursions to other parts of Europe and to the United States of America. In
this period, the developments that characterize German and British academic
culture had decisive influence on other parts of the world, which makes such
a focus reasonable, even though the results of my study should of course not
be uncritically extrapolated and generalized.
Scientification of religion means that the borders between religion and science are constantly renegotiated in cultural processes. The concept challenges
overly simplistic binary constructions, not only between religion and science,
but also between etic and emic, professional and amateur, academic and vernacular, as well as between center and periphery. All of these binaries are united in
discursive communities that stabilize attributions of meaning to the world
around us in mutual dependence.
The major part of this book was written between January and August 2013
during a research stay at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social
Studies at the University of Erfurt. It would not have been possible to work
through all the material necessary for this research without the excellent support
I received in Erfurt. I want to thank all of the other fellows, students, and administrative staff, and particularly Jrg Rpke, for a stimulating and most pleasant
stay. I thank the University of Groningen for granting me eight months of sabbatical leave to finish this project. For a few chapters, I made use of material that
was published before. Chapter 1 is a revised version of Discursive Study of Religion: Approaches, Definitions, Implications, originally published in Method
and Theory in the Study of Religion (25/1 [2013]: 5 25). For Chapter 8, I made
use of The Only Game in Town? Or: Contested Masters in Modern Western Sha-
Preface
manism, from Meister und Schler in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Von Religionen
der Antike bis zur modernen Esoterik (edited by Almut-Barbara Renger, 363 382;
Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012). I thank the presses for permission to
use these publications in the present book.
From the many colleagues who helped me formulate the ideas presented in
this book, I want to thank especially Egil Asprem (whose forthcoming book will
be a major contribution to the debate about scientification of religion), Ulrike
Brunotte, Marjo Buitelaar, Alexandra Grieser, Jay Johnston, Hans G. Kippenberg,
Anders Klostergaard Petersen, Kim Knibbe, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Yme Kuiper, BerndChristian Otto, Almut-Barbara Renger, Lautaro Roig-Lanzillotta, Dave Vliegenthart, Laura J. Vollmer, Erin Wilson, and Frans Wijsen.
Thanks to the referees for their diligent and constructive critique, and to De
Gruyter for accepting the manuscript for publication and for the excellent handling of the editorial process. I especially thank Alissa Jones Nelson, who invited
me to submit the proposal and supported me in the long process from idea to
manuscript. Her professionalism, knowledge, wisdom, grace, and humor have
had a decisive influence on me and on my work. I will bow down to her on Sunday and salute her when her birthday comes.
Groningen, 20 January 2014
Contents
18
Part One:
Discarded Knowledge and Its New Legitimacy in Secular
23
Discourse
56
Alchemical Quests in Modern Garb
58
Alchemy as the Occult Other
vitalism: A Mnage-a-Trois of Life, Spirit, and Matter
64
XII
Contents
70
76
Darwinism Turned into Religion: Monism
77
Ernst Haeckel: From Darwinism to Pantheistic Monism
80
Wilhelm Ostwald: Entanglements Personified
Discursive Implications: Holistic Thinking between new age science, Nature-Based Spirituality, and a New Philosophy of Nature
87
88
Fritjof Capra
Ilya Prigogine
89
Gregory Bateson
91
92
Rupert Sheldrake
92
David Bohm
Part Two:
Academics as Religious Pioneers
113
Contents
211
183
178
XIII
159
166
There is a parallel with the discipline of philosophy here. Let me invoke Richard Rortys
famous remark of 1979: Professions can survive the paradigms which gave them birth. In any
I argue that the notion of discourse is of particular value if we are to establish such a self-reflective academic discipline. Although basic considerations
about a discursive study of religion were made already in the 1980s (Kippenberg
1983; Lincoln 1989; see also Kippenberg 1992 and Lincoln 2005 [1996]), these suggestions have not been picked up in a more general way as an attempt to build a
serious referential framework for a (self)critical study of religion. Recently, we
have witnessed a rich discussion in neighboring disciplines, mainly in sociology
and historiography, about the usefulness of discursive analysis. German and
French scholars, in particular, have readdressed the theories of discourse,
which were developed by Michel Foucault and others a generation earlier, and
made them fruitful for the study of cultural phenomena in the twenty-first century. The academic study of religion has only sporadically taken notice of these
new approaches to the study of discourse that break down the boundaries between academic disciplinesand even between the humanities and the natural
sciencesin a most productive and promising way. More recent publications
show that there is a growing interest in discourse theory, including its application to the study of religion, though most contributions still base themselves
on linguistic and textual analyses of discourse.
Systematically applying discursive approaches is an important contribution to a
discussion that is specific to the academic study of religion. It helps to resolve some
of the conceptual problems in the field, as mentioned above, and tries to provide a
coherent analytical framework for an academic study of religion that is capable of
countering the theoretical challenges the discipline has to face.
Two directions of scholarly thinking, both reaching back to the first half of the
twentieth century, are of specialand underestimatedimportance for a new understanding of discursive approaches. For one, the contributions from the sociology of knowledge should be more seriously incorporated in our theoretical framework; furthermore, the historical analysis of discourse is something that scholars
of religion need if they want to retain their strong basis in historical research. In
case, the need for teachers who have read the great dead philosophers is quite enough to insure
that there will be philosophy departments as long as there are universities (Rorty 1979, 393).
English contributions include van Dijk 1985; Potter 1996; Torfing 1999; Phillips and Hardy 2002;
Jrgensen and Phillips 2002; Fairclough 2003; Wodak and Meyer 2010. On discursive approaches in
the study of religion see Murphy 2000; Moberg 2009; Taira 2010 (without defining his concepts);
Wuthnow 2011 (unfortunately, despite the title, the author does not conceptualize discourse at all).
See now also Hjelm 2011 who follows Faircloughs definition of discourse as a way of speaking that
does not simply reflect or represent things out there, but constructs or constitutes them (Hjelm
2011, 135, referring to Fairclough 1992, 3; Hjelms explanation under Key concepts remains a bit
vague [Hjelm 2011, 149]). Hjelm consciously chooses a linguistically oriented approach to discourse.
For a more historically oriented approach see von Stuckrad 2003a and 2010b.
the following, I will introduce these lines of thought that are closely related to discussions in sociology and historiography. I will then clarify the most important
terms that constitute a discursive study of religion and will suggest a definition
of religious discourse as a clearly demarcated object of study. Discursive study
of religion provides a research perspective rather than a single method to study
religion. Nevertheless, this perspective has implications for the concrete scholarly
work of designing a research project, putting together a corpus of data, and interpreting this data with the use of appropriate methods. I will explain this research
strategy with reference to the themes that the present book engages.
hausting the play of meaning (1999, 87). Sociologists of knowledge still include
the dimension of power and the importance of politics in their analysis, but not
necessarily as the main and determining dimension of discursive practice or as
expression of the need to radically reform plural democracies (in the way Laclau
and Mouffe would have it; see Jrgensen and Phillips 2002, 24 59; Honneth and
Saar 2002; on the reception of Laclau and Mouffe in German-speaking sociology
see Stheli 1995).
Combining ideas about the social construction of reality with Foucaults understanding of discourse, this approach argues that everything we perceive, experience, and feel, but also the way we act, is structurally intertwined with socially
constructed forms of approved and objectified knowledge (I summarize Keller
2011b, 58 59; see also Landwehr 2009, 91 93). We do not have an unmediated
access to the world an sich, even though the robustness of its material quality
limits the spectrum of interpretation. Knowledge of the world is not a neutral understanding but the cultural response to symbolic systems that are provided by
the social environment. These symbolic systems are typically produced, legitimized, communicated, and transformed as discourses. Discourse analysis, from
the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, aims at reconstructing the processes of social construction, objectification, communication, and legitimization of
meaning structures. What is regarded as legitimate knowledge in a given society
is generated on the level of institutions, organizations, or collective actors.
There is a close parallel between this approach to the social organization of
knowledge and the poststructuralist positions that have reshaped postcolonial
and gender studies since the 1980s. If you allow me an excursus into gender studies, reference must be made to Joan Wallach Scott, who already in 1988 criticized
the binary construction of the sex-gender division and insisted on an examination
of that binary opposition itself (1988, 40). That brings her to a redefinition of gender: My definition of gender has two parts and several subsets. They are interrelated but must be analytically distinct. The core of the definition rests on an integral connection between two propositions: gender is a constitutive element of
social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender
is a primary way of signifying relationships of power (ibid., 42).
The close links between sociologies of knowledge and poststructuralist understandings of gender become fully visible when we look at Barbara Heys variation of Scotts definition of gender, now using the German word Geschlecht
See also Mills 2004, 69 115. An influential thinker in this field of research is Edward Said. As
Alissa Jones Nelson aptly points out, Said sees no opportunity for objective knowledge of other
social worlds. [] Knowledge is, in fact, a matter of hermeneutics (2012, 21).
We can learn a lot from Heys definition of Geschlecht when it comes to the study
of religion. But at this point, let me emphasize that the notion of knowledge here
does not refer to an objective truth of the world but to the social communication, attribution, and legitimization of what is accepted in a given society as
knowledge. This knowledge can be explicit, but also implicit or tacit. An example of tacit knowledge would be the societal consensus in Europe that democracy is better than dictatorship, that magic does not work, or that astrology
is not scientific. Implicit or tacit knowledge is, generally, not tested or challenged (or even thematized) by agents in a given society; what is more, such
knowledge can change significantly from one society to another and from one
historical period to another. That is why historical analysis of discourse addresses not only the explicitly available forms of knowledge (for instance, in the natural sciences) but particularly the self-evident knowledge, the truth that is not
formalized but generally accepted (see Busse 1987, 40 41). This brings us to the
historical dimension of discourse analysis.
a strong historiographical focus. One reason for this may be that the notion of
history of religion is to a large extent associated with Eliadean phenomenology
of religion (as a critique see McCutcheon 1997), which led to a general disregard
of the category history in the study of religion, particularly in the United States
(see Kippenberg 2001; von Stuckrad 2003b; see also Lincoln 2005 [1996]). I will
address Mircea Eliades impact on twentieth-century attributions of meaning to
religion repeatedly in this book.
The so-called linguistic turn (programmatically Rorty 1967) has had far-reaching impact on all fields of cultural research. That our knowledge of the world is
constituted in language and linguistic structures and that the scholar is also an
author whose narrative account does not provide a privileged access to truth
was famously argued for historiography by Hayden White (1973) and for anthropology by Clifford Geertz (1988). To be sure, large parts of historical scholarship,
including scholars of religion, shunned the consequences of this reflective critique
(see Vann 1998). Even today, sources are still read as documents of a past realityperhaps they are read better, more diligently and critically, but nevertheless as
medium with sufficient transparency (Sarasin 2003, 32). That historical meaning
is generated in communicative processes is only insufficiently acknowledged (examples of this acknowledgment include Koselleck 2004 [1979] and Rsen 1997).
Even fewer scholars include the category of discourse in their historical analysis
or make the argument that historical meaning is not reconstructed from the
facts and sources in a hermeneutical process of understanding (Verstehen)
but discursively generated. This is exactly what Michel Foucault wanted to show
in his critical reflection on our presupposition that historical truth is attainable
in our accounts of it. Since Foucault, discourse analysis can be understood as
the attempt of scrutinizing the formal conditions that steer the production of
meaning (Sarasin 2003, 33; similarly Stheli 2000, 73).
In close reference to Foucaults work and in conversation with structuralist
approaches, several forms of discourse analysis have emerged (Maingueneau
1991, 15, distinguishes seven for the French academic discussion; see also Bublitz
et al. 1999; Bublitz 2003; Mills 2004, 1 25), some of them closer to linguistic and
textual analyses than others. What they have in common is the argument that
there is no thing in the world that determines what is being said but that the
meanings of things are generated by the chain of signifiers that the speaker is
introducing.
Talal Asad is a notable exception to this rule; see Asad 1993 and 2003. See also Masuzawa
2007 as an analysis of the history of the discourse on world religions; for ancient history see
Albinus 1997; Larmour, Miller, and Platter 1998; van den Heever 2006; methodologically Paul
Allen Miller 1999.
The thing that is meant, the referent, is as referent of a certain linguistic sign not prior to
language; rather, it is the system of signs that ultimately creates it as social reality from the
chaotic variety [chaotische Mannigfaltigkeit] (Kant) of all possible things in the world: It
is the world of words that generates the world of things [Jacques Lacan]. Something else is
fundamental for discourse analysis: This is not about the abstruse question whether there is
more than texts; it is about how the non-linguistic things gain their meaning. No discourse,
no grid of classification, however familiar it may appear, has ever been derived from the
things themselves; it is the other way round and discourse and classification generate
the order of things. [] Even though practices, gestures, and objects are themselves no longer constituted in language, they are relevant in the social world only because meaning has
been discursively attributed to them (Sarasin 2003, 36; see also Busse 1987, 23; on the related concept of empty signifier see Laclau 1994).
Or, in Achim Landwehrs apt remark, at the bottom [Grund] of realities and discourses there is no other fundament than their own historicity. Hence, the shortest possible definition of the function of discourses must be: discourses generate
realities (2009, 92). We can understand the working of discursive structures only
if we know their genealogy and formation. And only through comparisonin diachronic or synchronic perspectivewe can see the historicity and even singularity of discourses (see also Scott 2007, 8). There are no discourses that emerge
naturally or that are dictated by the working of some abstract reality; historical
and comparative analysis of how social communicational structures attribute
meaning to the world and organize explicit and implicit knowledge is the
basis of discursive approaches.
Discourses typically lead to a shortage of possible notions [Verknappung
von Aussagemglichkeiten] (we cannot say everything at all times) (Landwehr
2009, 92). Thus, the historicity of knowledge should not be misunderstood as arbitrariness. What a group of people in a given situation regards as accepted
knowledge is by no means arbitrary; it is the result of discursive formations
that critical scholarship can reconstruct and interpret.
This is even true for knowledge that is legitimized by empirical methods in
the exact sciences and thus based on what is seen as hard facts. Reconstructing the conditions of knowledge in the natural sciences is the goal of historical
epistemology, a division within the history of science that is closely related to
discursive approaches. The historicity of knowledge in the natural sciences
was famously discussed by Ludwik Fleck (Fleck 1935). Edmund Husserl, Gaston
Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and others have contributed to this debate and
helped us to understand that it is not nature that formulates natural laws but
that facts are produced in communicative and social processes (overview in
Rheinberger 2006, 21 72; see also Ashmore 1989; Ashmore, Myers and Potter
1995; Latour 2010). Under the label of discursive constructionism, Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn summarize what is at stake here:
Discursive constructionism (DC) is most distinctive in its foregrounding of the epistemic position of both the researcher and what is researched (texts or conversations). It studies a
world of descriptions, claims, reports, allegations, and assertions as parts of human practices, and it works to keep these as the central topic of research rather than trying to move
beyond them to the objects or events that seem to be the topic of such discourse. It is radically constructionist in that it is skeptical of any guarantee beyond local and contingent texts,
claims, arguments, demonstrations, exercises of logic, procedures of empiricism, and so on.
In this sense it can be described as antifoundationalist and poststructuralist. It takes seriously the work in rhetoric and the sociology of scientific knowledge that highlights the contingent, normative, and constructive work that goes into, say, logical demonstrations, mathematical proofs, or experimental replications (Potter and Hepburn 2008, 275).
In a similar vein, Hans-Jrg Rheinberger, former director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and one of the most influential authors in
the field, defines the concept of epistemology, with reference to the French
usage of the term, as the reflection on the historical conditions under which,
and the means with which things are made into objects that start up the process
of scientific inquiry [Prozess der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisgewinnung] and
that keep this process going (Rheinberger 2007, 11, italics original). Rheinberger
exemplifies this with the history and epistemology of experimentation in the life
sciences. One collaborative research project, on A Cultural History of Heredity,
aims at studying the juridical, medical, cultural, technical, and scientific practices and procedures in which knowledge of heredity became materially entrenched in different ways and by which it unfolded its often unprecedented effects over a period of several centuries (Mller-Wille and Rheinberger 2007, ix).
These discourses generate epistemic spaces in which shared knowledge is established and legitimized.
Put into the language of discourse theory, we can say that the practices and
procedures in the natural sciences are a materialization of a discourse on, in this
See Mller-Wille and Rheinberger 2007, 3 34; Rheinberger, Hagner, and Wahrig-Schmidt 1997.
Rheinberger uses the term infra-experimentality to indicate the close links between things and
acquired knowledge: Infra-experimentality seeks to understand the game of producing
knowledge effects under the hands of the experimenter, in the under-world beneath him. It seeks
to grasp and expose those momentschains of eventsin which matter is made to mean and
scientific meaning is made to matter. If we looked for a word that could convey the corresponding methodical effort, the choice would be subduction. It deals with the interface between
the agents of knowing and the objects of their desire (Rheinberger 2011, 337, italics original). As
an example of planetary theory as historical epistemology, see Schtte 2008, with the methodological explanation by Carrier 2008.
case, heredity. The discursive materializations, in their turn, stabilize and legitimize the discursive assumptions that have made them possible. By so doing,
discursive structures steer the attribution of meaning to things and establish
shared assumptions about accepted and unaccepted knowledge. The example
makes clear that discourse analysis breaks down the borders between the natural sciences and the social or cultural sciences. Despite their different methodologies to produce accepted knowledge, the natural sciences are no less discursively structured and thus socially steered than the humanities. As will be
demonstrated in this book, discursive approaches help us to overcome the conceptual boundaries between the natural sciences and the humanities in our attempt to understand the communal production of academic knowledge. It will
also become clear that academic producers of meaning form a discourse community with non-academic authors.
Consequently, discourse analysis argues that our knowledge is not about the
world out there (even if the existence of a world out there is not denied) and
that we should adopt a relativist rather than a realist position in the philosophical debate that is linked to these epistemological and ontological issues. The relativist position has led to many, often highly polemical objections. Derek Edwards, Malcolm Ashmore, and Jonathan Potter call the most prominent
rejection the Death and Furniture response:
Death and Furniture are emblems for two very common (predictable, even) objections to relativism. When relativists talk about the social construction of reality, truth, cognition, scientific
knowledge, technical capacity, social structure and so on, their realist opponents sooner or
later start hitting the furniture, invoking the Holocaust, talking about rocks, guns, killings,
human misery, tables and chairs. The force of these objections is to introduce a bottom line,
a bedrock of reality that places limits on what may be treated as epistemologically constructed
or deconstructible. There are two related kinds of moves: Furniture (tables, rocks, stones,
etc.the reality that cannot be denied) and Death (misery, genocide, poverty, powerthe reality
that should not be denied) (Edwards, Ashmore, and Potter 1995, 26, emphasis original; see also
Potter and Hepburn 2008, 287 288; Nikander 2008, 413; more generally Parker 1998).
What is at stake is not a lack of concern with that which may exist beyond discourse (Benavides 2010, 210, as a critique of my position) but an acknowledgment of the difference between something that simply happens (often without
being reported) and something that is made into a fact or event by discursive
and communicative procedures. As Antonio Gramsci reminds us, without an inventory that organizes our knowledge about ourselves and our history, understanding is impossible. The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is knowing thyself as a product of the
historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, with-
10
out leaving an inventory. Such an inventory must therefore be made at the outset (quoted from Forgacs 1988, 326).
See Sarasin 2003, 8 and 30; Bhrmann and Schneider 2008, 16; Nikander 2008, 414 (Specifying DA [=Discourse Analysis] as a method in any traditional way is difficult, if not impossible. Instead, DA is often described as a methodology or as a theoretical perspective rather than
a method); Landwehr 2009, 100; Keller 2011b, 9.
See Fairclough 1992, 37 61. If scholars choose the linguistic and textual orientation, it may be
easier to talk of a method, but it also means to limit the applicability of discourse theory.
Examples for such an understanding of discourse analysis are Schiffrin 1994; Schiffrin, Tannen,
and Hamilton 2001; Renkema 2009; Hjelm 2011 (this may be a reason why his chapter is
included in the section Methods of the Handbook).
11
in collecting and interpreting the data. I will explain these steps with direct reference to the argument and material of the present book.
On the notoriously difficult distinction between the discursive and the non-discursive see
Torfing 1999, 90 91.
12
13
make use of them just long enough to ask myself what unities they form; by what right they
can claim a field that specifies them in space and a continuity that individualizes them in
time; according to what laws they are formed; against the background of which discursive
events they stand out; and whether they are not, in their accepted and quasi-institutional
individuality, ultimately the surface effect of more firmly grounded unities. I shall accept
the groupings that history suggests only to subject them at once to interrogation; to
break them up and then to see whether they can be legitimately reformed; or whether
other groupings should be made; to replace them in a more general space which, while dissipating their apparent familiarity, makes it possible to construct a theory of them (ibid.,
26).
As a valuable attempt to provide a discursive analysis of sui generis religion see McCutcheon 1997. However, McCutcheon remains ambivalent in his use of the concept of discourse
and does not clearly distinguish it from, e. g., ideological strategies.
14
clarity of the object nor the scholarly rigor of the study of religion. It only moves
the obligation to define our objects from the level of communicational practices
to the level of discursive reflection. I make this distinction visible in a change of
typeface: religion refers to contributions to a discourse on religion, while religion refers to the discourse itself. After this clarification, we can go a step further and define religion simply as follows: religion is the societal organization
of knowledge about religion. In the same vein, science would be defined as the
societal organization of knowledge about science.
The definitions of discourse analysis and historical discourse analysis, as
given above, pertain to the discursive study of religion as well, only that now the
analysis is directed to the discourse on religion (i. e., to religion), the dispositives that serve as the infrastructure of religion, and possible entanglements
with other discourses. religion produces meanings and orders of knowledge
that materialize in concrete practices and institutions; these orders interact
with non-discursive practices and dispositives such as the organization of higher
education or the appearance of new media and technology. Moreover, as a discursive constellation religion is entangled with other discursive constellations,
which could be defined as law, science, spirituality, magic, health, economy, heredity, or any other discourse that may be of interest for scholarly analysis. Dispositives and discursive knots are subject to change, which means that
religion is fully historicized and open to intercultural comparison.
For the fact that scholars of religion are also agents in the field of religion and that discourse
analysis produces discourses on discourses, see von Stuckrad 2010b. As Achim Landwehr notes, this
is by no means a disadvantage of discourse analysis but the consequential application of its
research premises (2009, 98). On the discursive impact on the scholar of religion see also Bruce
Lincolns tenth thesis: Understanding the system of ideology that operates in ones own society is
made difficult by two factors: (i) ones consciousness is itself a product of that system, and (ii) the
systems very success renders its operations invisible, since one is so consistently immersed in and
bombarded by its products that one comes to mistake them (and the apparatus through which they
are produced and disseminated) for nothing other than nature (2005 [1996], 9). It should be noted
that Lincolns use of discourse is broader than Foucaults; for Lincoln, discourse refers to a wide
array of phenomena such as myth, ritual, and classification.
This resonates with Lincolns third thesis on method: To practice history of religions in a
fashion consistent with the disciplines claim of title is to insist on discussing the temporal,
contextual, situated, interested, human, and material dimensions of those discourses, practices,
and institutions that characteristically represent themselves as eternal, transcendent, spiritual,
and divine (2005 [1996], 8).
Methodological Implications
15
Methodological Implications
As noted above, we should not consider the study of discourse itself to be a
method. Rather, as a research perspective, or research style, the study of discourse is an interpretative endeavor and thus a hermeneutical strategy to scrutinize the organization of knowledge in a given societal and historical situation
(Keller 2005; Keller 2011a, 76 78). Nevertheless, despite the openness to apply
various methodological tools and the flexibility to adjust these tools to the research question that is at stake in a given project, there are a few basic considerations and implications that arise when one decides to engage a discursive research perspective. We can differentiate three important steps in designing and
carrying out an historical discourse analysis. I will briefly explain them, using
examples from the analysis of religion and science. This will also serve as
an introduction to the main argument of the present book.
16
posed to astronomy in Europe? (b) Why is shamanism so attractive to many people in Europe and North America? (c) How can we explain the rise of psychological interpretations and their link to metaphysical and religious ideas in the twenthieth century? (d) What is the role of religion in the field of natural sciences
today? To be sure, these are general questions that have to be broken down
into more concrete sets of subquestions, but the examples should make clear
what kind of questions we typically ask in a discursive analytical framework,
and which questions will be addressed in the subsequent chapters of this book.
We can translate these questions into discursive language and design a project that reconstructs the discursive entanglements of religion on the one hand
and astrology, shamanism, psychology, and science on the other. All these
discourses lead to further discourse strands that characterize the respective entangled discourse. After a thorough screening of the available data (see the next
passage), it turns out that in the case of shamanism, these further discourse
strands include healing, soul, nature, therapy, and consciousness. It depends on our research focus whether we will need to include all of these discourse strands or only a selection of them.
Methodological Implications
17
ing of the respective discourse and its historical development will be good
enough to be put into a thesis that is clearly based on relevant material.
Since discursive approaches are not limited to textual sources, data can be
found in all forms of communication that are operative in the attribution of
meaning. With regard to the research questions formulated above, possible
data sets would include (but are not limited to): (a) books about astrology and
astronomy, media and newspaper coverage, Internet discussions, official statements about astrology in governmental documents or scientific organizations
(research organizations, Nobel Prize documents, etc.); (b) books on shamanism
(often popularizing academic theories), workshop programs, Internet forums, interviews with shamanic practitioners; (c) academic as well as popular publications in the field of psychology, academic correspondence and ego-documents,
governmental documents that regulate the psychological and therapeutic market; (d) books on contemporary science, presentation of research results in the
media and on the Internet, museum exhibitions. In order to address the genealogy of the discourses under scrutiny, it is important to add an historical dimension to the research outline as well. My analyses in this book are clearly focused
on the genealogy and thus the formation of the discursive entanglements that
are derived from the overall research questions.
In addition to concrete sets of data, the research should also include an analysis of dispositives that serve as the infrastructure of the discourse under scrutiny: for the present study I looked at new technologies and media (electricity, television, Internet); the history of associations and scholarly organizations (such as
the Theosophical Society, the German Monist League, and new book series for a
lay audience); governmental rules (for instance with regard to the juridical and
tax status of shamanic, astrological, or pagan practitioners); the funding of scientific research; programs in teaching and research at universities; etc.
The lists of possibleor even necessarysets of data make it clear that a
full-blown discursive analysis requires a lot of time and resources. The selection
of data and the building of a research corpus will thus be dependent on possible
constraints and practicalities. Individual projects can be part of a larger research
program or even consider themselves simply as a contribution to an overall analysis of a discourse. It is methodologically acceptable to design an exemplary
study that highlights one aspect of a discourse. What is more, within a larger
Exemplary research here means that the study meets all three conditions of an exemplum:
First, that the exemplum has been well and fully understood. This requires a mastery of both
the relevant primary material and the history and tradition of its interpretation. Second, that the
exemplum be displayed in the service of some important theory, some paradigm, some fundamental question, some central element in the academic imagination of religion. Third, that
18
research program it may be necessary to set up small projects first that make relevant data available for further discursive analysis (such as the critical edition of
a text or a social-scientific survey).
there be some method for explicitly relating the exemplum to the theory, paradigm, or question
and some method for evaluating each in terms of the other (Smith 1982, xixii).
19
Indeed, the intellectual discussions in various disciplines throughout the twentieth century have made unmistakably clear that notions of hybridity or the
third space (Bhabha 2004, 53 56; see Bhabha 1990) not only represent a critique of binary constructions but also a new vocabulary that is needed to understand processes of cultural transformation (see also de Certeau 2010 as discursive considerations on the Other). Thinking in triads, in which the third is
not the synthesis of one of the opposites, is a red thread that runs through
many disciplinary contexts, from philosophy to anthropology to sociology to
the study of religion, and even to economy and law (Elinger et al. 2010, 35
149, see 316 322 for a list of relevant literature; see also Breger and Dring
1998). Gender studies and (post)colonial studies are heavily influenced by
these theories. In a recent research program, scholars have identified new figures (or, rather, figurations) of the third that have left their pariah position
and have become central analytical instruments, among them the messenger,
the cyborg, the parasite, the laughing third, the trickster, and the rival (Elinger
et al. 2010, 153 315). In the context of the present book, the amateur would also
qualify as a third that is not adequately described as the overcoming of either
20
21
26
sianic, and astrological expectations. The bitter conflict between the Christian
denominations also had a direct influence on astrology, particularly in regard
to permitted practices in learned circles. In responses to the Reformation, the
Catholic Church increased its pressure on science and philosophy considerably.
Many universities were run by Jesuits or Dominicans who vehemently opposed
the rising Platonism and instead spread a new scholastic philosophy. The Spanish Jesuit Suarez had revised Aristotelian teachings, which were now taught in
this form at leading universities, including Oxford, Paris, Padua, and Cologne.
Due to this development, astrology was crushed between the fronts. On one
side there were the new scholastic traditionalists, who opposed Copernicus system and continued to stick to an Aristotelian model that assumed the separation
of the sublunar and the heavenly worlds and constructed a dimension of first
movement (Primum Mobile) beyond the planetary spheres, which was not empirically provable (the example of the University of Louvain is discussed in detail in
vanden Broecke 2003). This model was, however, a sticky wicket, for on the
other hand, discoveries were being made annually that were simply incompatible with the model (on the instrumental role of early modern astronomy in establishing a mathematical scientific method see also Schtte 2008). Moreover, traditional astrology was being criticized, from the point of view of mechanisticmathematical natural philosophy, because it still worked with qualitative principles that defied any empirical explanation and were based on unprovable assumptions. Astrology found itself in trouble under the primacy of the new teaching, which related to purely quantitative and perceptible matter.
What we are seeing here can best be described as a differentiation of branches of knowledge (on this process see also Schmidt-Biggemann 1996). Any astrological tradition, which in the sense of an occulta philosophia had been a fixed
part of the academic sciences since the Renaissance, was gradually phased out
of the scientific discourse (and the corresponding dispositives). At the universities astrology no longer had any opportunity to develop and subsequently moved
into other cultural areasin private study, in a simplified popular form, in art,
and in literature. Only a few people heeded Keplers advice, that as long as astrology limited itself consistently to the symbolic interpretation of heavenly
events and left the physical explanation of the subject to others, it could cope
with the new paradigm (Rosen 1984; Field 1987; von Stuckrad 2007, 255 259;
on the complex history of the Copernican system and its controversy, with the
amazing example of Athanasius Kircher, see Siebert 2006). Instead, many astrologers stuck to the traditional view of the world and made themselves laughingstocks. In the long term, though, and effectively only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, astrology was consistently distinguished from astronomy;
qualitative-interpretative astrology lost its status as a scientific discipline over
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28
He considered the zodiacal signs, houses, aspects, and all the other factors to be
physically real elements that must be derived from natural principles. These
principles were mediated by light, which meant a direct influence of astrological
factors and not a simple qualitative correspondence. Instead of geometric divisions and their Platonic-mystical charge, in Keplers sense, Placidus insisted
on the Aristotelian physical-causal interpretation of astral effects.
In his main work, Physiomathematica sive coelestis philosophia (Physiomathematics or the Philosophy of the Sky), which was first published under a
pseudonym in 1650 and then posthumously in an improved version in 1675 in
Milan, Placidus turned against the purely geometrically derived systems of houses and direction methods, such as those by Campanus and Regiomontanus. Following Ptolemy, he claimedsince the light represented the real influencea division of houses by two temporal hours, i. e., by the proportional division of the
movement of the heavenly points from one to the next cusp. Cardano and Magini had already taught this method, and for purely geometric reasons, something
the author did not mention. Placidus teaching on the division of houses soon
became widespread; even today his method is the most used worldwide. Its
strong influence can be put down not only to the Physiomathematica but mostly
to the widely read tables Tabulae primi mobilis, which contained the principles of
his teaching in seventy theses, expanded by house tables for reference, as well
as instructions for calculation and thirty sample horoscopes.
Most Italian astrologers argued that in astrology real causal influences are at
stake, which in the Aristotelian theory ultimately stemmed from the Primum Mobile beyond the spheres. This reassured them of the Churchs acceptance. Mention should be made here of A. Francesco Bonatti from Padua, Antonio Tattoni
from Terni, and P. Giambattista Riccioli, whose extensive Almagestum novum followed Ptolemy. Riccioli formulated a sharp criticism of Copernicus and Galileo
and published an astrological historical reflection listing all the so-called
great conjunctions from 3980 BCE to 2358 CE. The works of Placidus and his colleagues were published with the Churchs permission, but in 1688 the curia
changed its mind and put all astrological books on the index of prohibited
books (including those by Placidus). The ban was made stricter in 1709, and
this led to the center of astrological practice moving from Italy to England and
the Netherlands. A reason for this disdain for astrology may have been the
well-known astronomer Giovanni Montanari, who published a prognosticon in
Cum vero domus dispertit per binas temporales horas, sint partes proportionales quartarum,
sit vt secundum influxum quales sint omnes ad inuicem, etiam si quantitate extensionis, nimiru
Arcus, sint inquales in Hemisphrijs (Placidus 1675, 189).
29
1676 in Bologna, which was continued until 1686; the accurate predictions in it
brought him recognition everywhere. In 1685, however, Montanari admitted in
another publication that he came to his previous prognostications entirely arbitrarily in order to prove that one can get just as many hits by chance as one can
with learned astrology. That was quite a blow for the astrological community.
There was also strong resistance against the new worldview in France, but
there were reputable advocates, too. The discussion in the Parisian Collge de
France can be seen as paradigmatic, and the positions taken there bounced directly off each other. On one side stood Jean-Baptiste Morin de Villefranche
(1583 1656), who was introduced to astrology later in life through his friendship
with the Scottish alchemist and astrologer William Davison (1593 1669), and
who, after his appointment as professor of mathematics at the Collge de France
in 1630, soon rose to become the most famous astrologer of his time. Morin was
highly respected by the queens of France, Sweden, and Poland, as well as by the
cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin; he was the court astrologer to Louis XIII and,
in this function, attended the birth of Louis XIV in 1638. Although he published
numerous works in which he discussed Copernicus and Placidus critically, Morins fame is based on his 26-volume lifes work, the Astrologia gallica, written in
Latin (and, therefore, broadly received only after later translations), which he
worked on for thirty years. The master did not live to see its publication in
The Hague (1661), financed by Queen Marie Louise of Poland, who was one of
his former clients. This enormous work consists of over 800 pages, 39 tables,
and 80 sample horoscopes and is suggested by the author to be a complete encyclopedia of astrology as it is practiced in the style of Francesco Giuntini,
known as Junctinus (1522 1590?). I cannot here go into the many innovative
techniques and highly complex rules for interpretation that Morin developed
(books are available in French and English; for the revivalist reception in France
and Germany see Selva 1897; see also Schwickert and Wei 1925, vol. 2). Nevertheless, one should bear in mind that Morin also saw the Primum Mobile as the
central physical cause of all events, located beyond the planetary spheres. From
there the astral powers radiate down and influence the sublunar world that, for
its part, is made up of four original qualities. The zodiac is strongly linked to the
Primum Mobile; the tragedy of Morin is that with the collapse of this Aristotelian
system, his conclusions also lost their power of persuasion.
This weak point was an invitation to his adversaries at the Collge de France,
in particular its provost, the physicist and mathematician Peter Gassendi (1592
1655). Gassendi refuted the Aristotelian idea of a first space that is filled with
power and set against it an Epicurean-mechanistic model that saw God as the
first cause of all events. The bodies of the atoms move around in an empty
space and through this movement produce earthly events. So Gassendi followed
30
Copernicus worldview but with the toned-down compromise of Tycho Brahethe sun still revolved around the earth as the center, but the five planets revolved around the sunsince this did not seem to contradict the Bible. That was
also the opinion of his friend Marinus Mersenne (1588 1648), who worked closely with Descartes, Hobbes, and the astrologer Campanella. In his work Quaestiones celeberrimae in genesin, which was published in 1623, he developed a mystical Platonic position similar to Keplers, to whom he later explicitly referred
(Harmonie universelle, 1636).
Despite these attempts to adapt astrology to the new worldview, astrology
managed to acquire the reputation in France, as it had in Italy, of being old-fashioned and unscientific. In 1666, the founder of the French academy, Minister J. B.
Colbert, personally acted against astrology in that he strictly forbade the members of his academy to study this science. The discursive changes became fully
apparent in the figure of King Louis XIV: while Morin was allowed to interpret
his birth horoscope, on 31 July 1682 the king extended the ban on astrological
calendars and almanacs, which had been in force in several provinces already,
so that it now covered the whole of France. Astrology was finally excluded
from the learned discourse in France.
History proceeded very differently in England. Even though the universitiesboth those that followed the empiricists and those that followed the Cambridge Platonistsrejected astrology as a serious discipline, and a few scholars
occupied themselves with it only in secret, this did not lead to the disappearance
of astrology from public discourse. On the contrary: in no other European country was there such a wide engagement with astrology outside the universities as
in England (see Curry 1989). We will see that this continued interest would essentially contribute to astrology being re-adopted in other parts of Europe toward
the end of the nineteenth century.
A large number of so-called professionals practiced horoscope interpretation
and published political-economic forecasts. They were always in danger of falling victim to the law issued by James I in 1603 against magicians, fortunetellers,
and astrologers. However, the law only made punishable such behavior that
transgressed the boundaries of allowed astrology, or that took place with intent to defraud. And since the client who felt himself defrauded had to come before the courts her- or himself, which was embarrassing enough for most people,
this law was not totally effective. Furthermore, due to political upheavals, official
censorship was completely abolished in 1641, and consequently a big market for
astrological literature suddenly became visibleCurry speaks here of the halcyon days of English astrology (1989, 19 22). Before 1640 there were no newspapers with astrological content, but by 1645 there were several hundred; while in
1640 there were only 22 new astrological publications to register, in 1642 there
31
were suddenly 1,966; in the following decades there were, on average, three pamphlets published every day (Curry 1989, 19).
Even the most famous of all professionals, William Lilly (1602 1681), often
called the true father of British astrology, was taken to court repeatedly; but he,
too, profited from the boom in astrology after 1641 (on Lillys biography see Parker 1975). Lilly came from a simple background. He had to give up Latin school in
1620 because his father was arrested for being in debt, and he got by in London
as an errand-boy and servant. However, he was fortunate; after the death of his
master, he married the rich widow and managed to increase his new wealth considerably by speculating on property. When he was thirty, he became interested
in astrology; the first results of his interest in mundane astrological techniques
were the political almanacs published under his pseudonym, Merlinus anglicus, in 1644 and 1645. For this work he found himself before the courts but, because of his clever defense, was not punished.
Lilly, who was outstanding at Latin and thus could read all the available literature on the subject, completely dedicated his life to astrology and contributed
to the development of the seventeenth century as the golden century of astrology in England. He fostered contact with many specialists, including Sir Elias
Ashmole (1617 1692), with whom he soon became close friends (Curry 1989,
35 40). Lilly also dedicated his autobiography to the founder of the famous Ashmolean museum. His autobiography appeared, under the title Mr. William Lillys
History of his Life and Times, in 1715, and revealed such interesting details as a
treasure hunt in Westminster Abbey. However, Lillys main work was Christian
Astrology, modestly Treated of in three Books, which was published in London
in 1647 and reprinted in 1659. The work, which consists of nearly 900 pages, introduces in its first part the principles of astrology with the use of many tables;
the second part is a very detailed description of horary astrology with dozens of
sample horoscopes from the authors own praxis; in the third part, the author
deals with birth horoscopes. There is a bibliography appended that contains astrological works (all in Lillys library) and an index.
Lilly raised so-called horary astrology (or interrogation, the analysis and prediction of a sequence of events in hours) to a high art, and the following generationsincluding such astrologers as W.J. Simmonite and Zadkiel in the nineteenth
centurystill more or less copied from his works. Lillys fame is not only based on
his virtuoso mastery of horary astrology but also on his predictions. King Charles I
consulted him on more than one occasion, but he did not take to heart Lillys advice
that he should leave London immediately and thus was executed in London, at
Cromwells instigation, on 30 January 1649. Another of his predictions made even
greater waves: in 1651, Lilly published the work Monarchy or No Monarchy in England, in which he predicted a catastrophe for London. When the plague broke out
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in 1665 and the capital fell prey to the Great Fire of London in the following year,
1666, Lilly was summoned before the commission investigating the fire and asked
about his prediction. He explained that he had not known the exact time in advance, but presented himself as convinced that the fire must have happened
through natural causes. The commission left it at that.
After the masters death, Lillys adopted son and pupil, Henry Coley, took over
responsibility for the almanacs. This genre maintained its popularity in England
into the nineteenth century (for a detailed overview see Capp 1979). It can be regarded as a dispositive that significantly stabilized the astrological attribution of
meaning in public discourse in Britain. In addition to Lilly and Coley, who
wrote two sophisticated manualsClavis astrologiae (London 1669) and Clavis astrologiae elimata (London 1676)there were other productive astrologers at the
time. John Gadbury (1627 1704) should be mentioned. At first he was a friend
and pupil of Lillys, but eventually he turned away from his successful teacher
and opened a counter school. This led to Londons astrologers having to decide
to which camp they wanted to belong. Even after Lillys death, the argument went
on and culminated in the publication of John Partridges polemical work Nebulo
Anglicanus, or the First Part of the Black Life of John Gadbury (London 1693).
John Partridge (1644 1715) was also the first English astrologer to spread the
system of the calculation of intermediate houses according to Placidus (Lilly knew
of the new system but continued to work with Regiomontanus system). In two
quite technical English booksOpus reformatum (London 1693) and Defectio geniturarum (London 1697)he described in detail why the new technique should be
preferred over the old ones. Moreover, Partridge wrote a very successful series of
almanacs, which from 1680 on appeared under the title Merlinus Liberatus. They
were continued until 1783 under his publishers pseudonym Merlinus redivivus.
It was not made easy for Partridge, though. Not only did he always have courts to
deal with, he also had to leave England for a while under the rule of King James II
until King William III reinstated him. In the public debate, another episode augured badly for him: under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff, Jonathan Swift published a satirical almanac for the year 1708, in which he prophesized Partridges
infallible death at 23.00 hours on 29 March 1709. Subsequently, Swift made
things even worse by publishing the letter The Accomplishment of the First of
Mr. Bickerstaffs Predictions, in which he announced the death of Partridge as
well as his admission of failure, a description of the funeral, and the text of the
inscription on the gravestone. He added, Weep all you customers that use/His
pills, his almanacks, or shoes. Partridge was, of course, not amused, especially
as this joke cost him a lot of money to prove to the confused public that he
was still alive. But the episode offers a glimpse into the climate and the public
role astrology had in England at that time.
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34
was the suppression of ephemerides, which are the most important tools for
practicing astrologers. The older tables were no longer published, and after
1710 no new lists came out. This was a major discursive shift, and without the
dispositive of ephemerides practical astrology was brought to its knees.
Enlightenment discourse constructed astrology from then on as pseudo-science or as superstition. When at the end of the eighteenth century Johann Christoph Adelung published his influential Geschichte der menschlichen Narrheit
(History of Human Folly, in 7 volumes), astrology was also on trial. Adelung
used Lucas Gauricus as his example and consigned the astrologers alleged competence to the derision of the eighteenth century. He explained that Gauricus
was known as a mathematician, but that this meant in fact that he was an astrologer. We can see how the discursive entanglement of mathematics and astrology
became a polemical comparison in this work. According to Adelung, in the Renaissance the astrologer had followers only because there were lots of fools in his
time who believed in [astrology]; hence it is no surprise that Gauricus became
famous through a few unsubstantiated prophecies that vaguely became true,
but which simplemindedness exaggerated after the fact.
A similar picture is given by one of the most important documents of the Enlightenment, the Encyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts, et
des mtiers (17 volumes, 1751 1765) published by Denis Diderot and others. The
article Astrology (vol. I, 780 783) distinguished between astrologie naturelle
and astrologie judiciaire. The article accepted more or less the natural variety,
such as the connection between the planets and the weather, but regarded horoscopic astrology as superstition with which, according to the authors, in previous centuries we ourselves were infected (p. 781). For the French followers of
the Enlightenment around Diderot and Voltaire, astrology was almost a delusionary science, which had been invented by priests in order to put the population under the yoke. The freedom of reason from the power claims of religious
doctrines inevitably led to freedom from astrological despotism. The condemnation of astrology was a confirmation of the times own enlightened progress.
If we want to understand the nuances of this polemic, it is helpful to include
scholarly discussion about esotericism and Hermeticism as an important component of European cultural discourse (von Stuckrad 2010a; Hanegraaff 2012). Despite the polemical character of the discourse on astrology, making a distinction
Allein unter der Mathematik mu man vornehmlich die Astrologie verstehen, denn die war
eigentlich seine Brotwissenschaft, und da es zu seiner Zeit eine Menge Thoren gab, welche an
dieselbe glaubten, so ist es kein Wunder, da Gauricus durch einige auf Schrauben gesetzte
Weissagungen, welche von ungefr eintrafen, und nach geschehener Sache von der lieben
Einfalt vergrert wurden, berhmt ward (Adelung 1785 1789, vol. 2, 256).
35
36
37
and Accepted Rite, known simply as the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, the
seven planets represented the seven Cherubim: Michael was Saturn, Gabriel
was Jupiter, Uriel was Mars, Chamaliel was Venus, Raphael was Mercury, Tsaphiel was the moon, and Zerachiel was the sun. The adept, on his spiritual
path, had to know and to integrate the spiritual and ethical principles represented by the corresponding divinities and angels; in the rituals, these divinities were
also performed and represented.
In Egyptian Masonry this could take the following form: the walls of the
room in which the magician from Memphis observed his ritualsthe sanctuary decorated with red damask on which likenesses of Saturn, Osiris, Isis,
Horus, and Harpocrates were fastened. The room would be illuminated by fifteen
candles, which were arranged on the compass points. The altar stood in the east.
Of Saturn, dressed in black and visible over the entrance, it was said he was the
father of the gods grown out of a tree trunk, and the symbol of original matter.
Osiris, in yellow and painted on the wall in the south, was the symbol of the hidden fire of the sun, kingly son of Saturn, husband of Isis, and father of Horus. Isis,
portrayed in white and symbolizing moisture, nature, and earth (moon), was the
eldest daughter of Saturn, and as queen she was sister and wife of Osiris. Hermes
(Mercury or Thot) was her minister. Finally, in the east was Horus, as god of reason, holding the figures of fortune and death in his hands. To the left was the representation of Harpocrates, the brother of Horus and god of silence. On the right
side of his chest, Saturn wore the sign of the sun, and on the left, that of the
moon; in front of him he held the scepter of Mercury, which separated light and
darkness. In the middle of the sanctuary stood a coffin between two palm trees,
and at the head there was a tamarind branch, and over that the sign of Mercury.
In front of the coffin there lay a rug similarly covered in symbols.
Basically, the performance served to outwardly display and to allow the
adepts to experience physically what takes place internallyan initiation into
new levels of consciousness, into knowledge processes that might help them
on their way to higher reason. Astrological and alchemistic semantics are integrated into an overall cosmic-religious system, which no longer has anything
to do with birth horoscopes or mundane astrology; but it was particularly suitable for understanding the elements of astrological interpretation as psychic
powers. Works that come out of this contextsuch as Georg Wellings Opus
mago-cabbalisticum et theosophicum (1735, reprinted 1760 and 1785) or the
work Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer aus dem 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Secret
Figures of the Rosicrucians in the 16th and 17th Centuries) (1789)consistently
describe astrology as an Urwissenschaft, or original science. Not at all interested in arguments about helio- or geocentric cosmological systems, this discourse
38
links cosmic symbolism to psychic dispositions. In doing so, this discourse ultimately forms the basis of the higher knowledge of the Enlightenment.
39
helfer), and to introduce or revive the tuition of midwives, which may have done some good
to those who were born after me.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe begins his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit
(Goethe 1811 1814) with these words. Starting with a description of his birth
horoscope puts him in a tradition that began in intellectual circles at the latest
with Girolamo Cardano (see von Stuckrad 2005a), and what he wrote shows a
positive attitude toward astrological interpretation. The gentle irony, evident in
the second paragraph, makes it clear that Goethe, like many of his contemporaries, did not rely on the interpretation of astrologers but rather dealt playfully
and creatively with astrology.
As noted before, Goethe was well versed in the esoteric, Hermetic tradition of
Europe from his youth. The esoteric branches of alchemy, magia naturalis, and
astrology are referred to explicitly in many places in his works, for instance in
Mrchen, in the fragment Die Geheimnisse, in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre,
and, obviously, in Faust, the work which occupied the second half of his life.
His Orphische Urworte, which to this day continue to influence the self-understanding of astrologers, became famous for their expression of the connection
between determinism and creative freedom in a particularly successful way:
As stood the sun to the salute of planets
Upon the day that gave you to the earth,
You grew forthwith, and prospered, in your growing
Heeded the law presiding at your birth.
Sibyls and prophets told it: You must be
None but yourself, from self you cannot flee.
No time there is, no power, can decompose
The minted form that lives and living grows.
English translation quoted from The Auto-Biography of Goethe. Truth and Poetry: From My
Life, ed. by Parke Godwin. 2 vols., New York: John Wiley 1849, vol. 1, 1.
Translation by Christopher Middleton, see http://taimur.org/goethe/selected-poems-of-goethe/
(accessed 23 July 2013). The original runs:
Wie an dem Tag, der dich der Welt verliehen,
Die Sonne stand zum Grue der Planeten,
Bist alsobald und fort und fort gediehen
Nach dem Gesetz, wonach du angetreten.
So mut du sein, dir kannst du nicht entfliehen,
So sagten schon Sibyllen, so Propheten;
Und keine Zeit und keine Macht zerstckelt
Geprgte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt.
40
Goethe was not only a poet but also an intellectual who participated in almost
all areas of science, politics, and art. His scientific efforts are to be seen in the
context of what German language referred to as Naturforschung, i. e., research
into nature that did not recognize a strict distinction between empirical natural
science and speculative Naturphilosophie. Like Schelling and other philosophers,
Goethe was interested in das Weltganze, or the whole of the world. This was a
living intellectual principle, perceptible and scientifically accessible in material
reality but not at all reduced to that.
The context of this position is the critical reflection on the scientific transformation that started with Copernicus, Newton, and others, which many began to
see as a dissouling or disenchantment of the cosmos. At the end of the eighteenth century, people were looking for alternatives to this conception and found
themagainin ancient Greece. When Goethe exclaimed, Everyone should be a
Greek in his own way! But a Greek he should be (Jeder sei auf seine Art ein
Grieche! Aber er seis. Goethe 1960 ff, vol. 20, 232), he was expressing the position of many of his contemporaries, who saw ancient Greece as a formative experience, which held all kinds of golden alternatives for the present; Greece
was past, it is true, but could be revived. In addition to pure rational science,
something else was found to be guilty of the miseries of the present, namely Jewish and Christian monotheisms, which had deprived the cheerful Greek culture of
power and, with it, had created a bourgeoisie and a society that was hostile to
real experience. Goethes friend, Friedrich Schiller, directly attacked Christian
monotheism and started a great controversy with his poem Die Gtter Griechenlands (The Gods of Greece):
Whilst the smiling earth ye governed still,
And with raptures soft and guiding hand
Led the happy nations at your will,
Beauteous beings from the fable-land! []
There, where now, as were by sages told,
Whirls on high a soulless fiery ball,
Helios guided then his car of gold,
In his silent majesty, oer all. []
Beauteous world, where art thou gone? O, thou,
Natures blooming youth, return once more!
Ah, but in songs fairy region now
Lives thy fabled trace so dear of yore!
Cold and perished, sorrow now the plains,
Not one godhead greets my longing sight;
41
In contrast to the soulless fiery ball of a Copernicus, here was the sun god, Helios, as a mythical countermeasure that could restore the lost unity of humankind with the cosmos.
As a result of the restoration of the ancient world of the gods, astrology also
gained a new literary respect since it seemed, at least in its scholarly philosophical
form, to be a model of the living cosmos that portrayed the dynamics of freedom
and necessity, of history and religion. How Schiller processed these dynamics can
be inferred from Wallenstein, whose horoscope, since Keplers famous interpretation, had repeatedly been the topic of public debate. Schiller was generally skeptical about astrology and asked Goethe and his friend from Jena, Christian Gottfried Krner, to tell him how a philosophically reflective astrology could be
42
possible and whether his understanding of astrology was correct (see Schielicke
2007, 66 70). Schiller revived the ancient art of astrological interpretation in
the character of the astrologer Seni. However, a new opinion of the role of astrology, which was to catch on in the nineteenth century, was also evident in Wallenstein, for instance in the figure of Max Piccolomini. Although Seni still represented
the strong power of fate perceptible in the stars, it was the critical position of enlightened intellectuals which now took the foreground. Astrology was no longer
science but rather playful art and religion, which claimed its cultural place as
the sign language of the living and ensouled universe, accessible to the loving
heart.
Schillers example was still received positively in the nineteenth century because it provided a discursive entanglement of science and astrology that fit understandings of German Geisteswissenschaft. The term Geisteswissenschaft
emerged in 1849 as a translation of moral science, but it had a meaning that
is not rendered correctly in the usual English translation of humanities or the
French sciences humaines (Regg 2004, 417). The meaning of Geisteswissenschaft
is linked to the fact that the term itself is a new discursive entanglement of spirit/
mind (Geist) and science (Wissenschaft). Regarding astrology, an example of a
positive evaluation along these lines is Robert Billwillers 1877 lecture On Astrology. Billwiller, who was the director of the Swiss Meteorological Station in
Zurich, opened his lecture with the apology that on the occasion of the 59th anniversary of the foundation of the Natural Scientific Association (Naturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft) he would speak about astrology:
While following the kind invitation, which brought me today to this place, with thankful
appreciation, I start with the confession that my topic does not really intend to expand
the knowledge of positive results in the field of the natural sciences, but rather to illuminate the cultural historical relevance of a phenomenon, which to call by the name science
in our days is rightly seen as a profanation, but which for thousands of years has been regarded as the most desirable knowledge, and a knowledge that was without doubt the topic
of many of the best thinkers.
Indem ich der freundlichen Einladung, die mich heute an diesen Platz gerufen, in dankbarer
Anerkennung dieses Wohlwollens Folge leiste, beginne ich mit dem Gestndniss, dass mein
Thema nicht in erster Linie eine Erweiterung der Kenntnisse an positiven Ergebnissen auf dem
Gebiete der Naturwissenschaft anstrebt, sondern vielmehr den Zweck hat, die culturhistorische
Bedeutung eines Gegenstandes zu beleuchten, welchem den Namen Wissenschaft zu geben in
unsern Tagen mit Recht als Profanation erscheint, der aber doch Jahrtausende hindurch als das
begehrteste alles Wissenswerthem galt und an dem sich unstreitig auch viele der besten Kpfe
gebt haben (Billwiller 1878, 3).
43
While this constellation of science and astrology entirely follows the new understanding, Billwiller reminds the audience that astrology is called the mother
of astronomy (1878, 5) and thus belongs to the historical and cultural heritage of
todays sciences. Instead of blaming ourselves for this great historical form of
superstition (ibid., 32), we should rather be proud of the way the human spirit
has freed itself from the imprisonment of earlier periods. This self-liberation
should also be a reconciliation with the past (ibid., 32). And this is exactly
where Schiller comes into play. Billwiller ended his lecture with a quote from
The Gods of Greece, and he introduced that quote as follows:
What can liberate us from the urge of the earthly is the conscious elevation of the spirit
above imperfect reality into the realm of poetry and the ideal, into the realm of complete
perfectness, the most sublime symbol of which forever remains the starry sky. In the
realm of the ideal we want to give the old gods and the old religion a friendly welcome,
and thus we can conclude with the deeply profound words of Schiller.
Was uns vom Drang des Irdischen befreien kann, das ist die bewusste Erhebung des Geistes
ber die unvollkommene Wirklichkeit in das Reich der Dichtung und des Ideals, in das Reich
aller Vollkommenheiten, dessen erhabenstes Symbol ewig der gestirnte Himmel bleibt. Im
Reiche des Ideals wollen wir sie wieder freundlich willkommen heissen, die alten Gtter und den
alten Glauben, und so knnen wir denn mit den tief bedeutungsvollen Worten Schillers
schliessen (Billwiller 1878, 33).
44
astrology again. We do not want to only count the stars, measure them, and follow their
paths with our telescopes; rather, we long to know the meaning of all this. Astrology, due
to its presumptuous claim of being a science, which it could not assert, is sunk in contempt;
however, contempt of its practice cannot discredit the idea of astrology, which is based on
everlasting truths. The dynamic influence of the stars, that they are animated by intelligences, and that they as a kind of subdivinities exert their creative power on the spheres below
themthese are doubtlessly much higher forms of ideas than if we think of them as dead,
mechanically reacting masses. [] The planetary influence on metals and some other discarded astrological ideas are brought up again by more thorough physics.
In this passage, all of the discourse strands are put together, trying to turn back
the clock and re-introduce the soul into science, astrology into astronomy, and
dynamism into physics. Again, Kepler is the ultimate personification of this ideal
state that has been lost in the wake of the changes in scientific method and philosophy. Consequently, Schlegel also pointed out that astrology is an indispensible idea for poetry (1994 [1802], 56), thus linking the discourse to the emerging
Romantic blending of art and science. He did the same with physics and magic,
arguing that what astrology is for poetry, magic is for physics.
What do we mean with this word [magic]? The minds direct rule over matter, which leads
to wondrous, incomprehensible effects. Magic is also brought into disrepute by the bad sorcerers. But for us, nature should become magical again, i. e., in all bodily things we should
only see signs, codes of spiritual intentions; we must regard all natural effects as if they
were caused by a word of higher spirits, by secret magic spells; only then will we be initi-
Auf hnliche Art haben die mathematischen Erklrungsarten alles erttet, und die mathematischen Physiker, die alles durch den bloen Kalkl ausmachen wollen, sind wiederum
Maschinen dieser ihrer Maschine geworden. Solange man bei Massen und Entfernungen und
mechanischen Wirkungsarten stehenbleibt, kann ich nichts sonderlich Erhebendes und das
Gemt Nhrendes in der Astronomie finden. In dem Sinne, wie man Keplern den letzten groen
Astrologen nennen kann, mu die Astronomie wieder zur Astrologie werden. Wir wollen nicht
blo die Gestirne zhlen und messen und ihrem Laufe mit den Fernglsern folgen, sondern die
Bedeutung von dem allen begehren wir zu wissen. Die Astrologie ist durch anmaliche Wissenschaftlichkeit, wobei sie sich nicht behaupten konnte, in Verachtung geraten; allein durch
die Art der Ausbung kann die Idee derselben nicht herabgewrdigt werden, welcher unvergngliche Wahrheiten zum Grunde liegen. Die dynamische Einwirkung der Gestirne, da sie von
Intelligenzen beseelt seien und gleichsam als Untergottheiten ber die ihnen unterworfnen
Sphren Schpferkraft ausben: dies sind unstreitig weit hhere Vorstellungsarten, als wenn
man sie sich wie tote, mechanisch regierte Massen denkt. [] Die Beziehung der Planeten auf die
Metalle und so manche verworfne Vorstellungsarten der Astrologie werden durch grndlichere
Physik wieder emporgebracht (Schlegel 1994 [1802], 55 56, emphasis original).
45
ated into the mysteries, as far as our limitation allows for that, and only then will we develop at least a vague idea of the endlessly renewing creation of the universe from nothing.
We can clearly see here how the discourses of astrology and astronomy on the
one hand and magic and physics on the other are interconnected in an overall
polemical discourse of spirit and philosophy of nature versus rational science.
The same line of argumentation is also dominant in the work of Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772 1801), who talked of the qualitative significance of
numbers and called astronomy the true metaphysics and right astrology. Following the work of Franz Anton Mesmerwhose dissertation carried the characteristic title De influxu astrorum in corpore humano (The Influence of the Stars
on the Human Body)numerous scholars of nature, including the poet Justinus
Kerner, tried to find in the whole universe and in matter an original principle that
was also present in astrology. Philosophers like Gustav Theodor Fechner came up
with speculative thoughts on endowing the planets with souls and on the part that
the ever-reincarnated human soul plays in the divine world soul (Erdbeer 2010,
335 506). All of these options were alternatives to those scientific paradigms
that start from the primacy of pure reason and the mechanistic rationalization
of the cosmos. This re-evaluation of astrology based on natural philosophy as
metaphysical astronomy is easily distinguishable from the practical interpretative
art of casting horoscopes as it was practiced in England. As the quotes from Schlegel make clear, practical astrology was criticized even by those scholars who otherwise lamented the disappearance of the mind from science.
On the continent in the nineteenth century, there were few people who had
the confidence to come out into the open with serious astrological works in the
classical and practical sense. One exception was the prophet and astrologer J.
K. Vogt from Munich. He is supposed to have forecast the fall of Sebastopol and
the downfall of Napoleon III and to have shot himself in 1860 when a lottery win
he had calculated did not materialize. More important than Vogt was Professor
Johann W. Pfaff (1774 1835) from Erlangen, who, in a work called Astrologie
Ebenso wie die Astrologie fordert die Poesie von der Physik die Magie. Was verstehen wir
unter diesem Worte? Unmittelbare Herrschaft des Geistes ber die Materie zu wunderbaren,
unbegreiflichen Wirkungen. Die Magie ist ebenfalls durch die schlechten Zauberer in Mikredit
gekommen. Die Natur soll uns aber wieder magisch werden, d. h., wir sollen in allen krperlichen Dingen nur Zeichen, Chiffren geistiger Intentionen erblicken; alle Naturwirkungen mssen
uns wie durch hheres Geisterwort, durch geheimnisvolle Zaubersprche hervorgerufen erscheinen, nur so werden wir in die Mysterien eingeweiht, soweit unsre Beschrnktheit das
erlaubt, und lernen die unaufhrlich sich erneuernde Schpfung des Universums aus Nichts
wenigstens ahnden (Schlegel 1994 [1802], 56 57, emphasis original).
46
(1816), talked of astrology attempting to come home into the circle of must-belearned sciences and of it necessarily being successful in that attempt since its
traditions are honorable and true. In 1822 and 1823, Pfaff, in collaboration with
his university colleague G.H. Schubert, published Astrologische Taschenbcher,
which contained a complete German translation of Ptolemys Tetrabiblos and
several essays on great conjunctions, the Star of Bethlehem, and other traditional themes. Pfaff was also of the opinion that a singular spiritual principle flows
through the universe, of which everything is part. This he detailed in his collection of essays Der Mensch und die Sterne: Fragmente zur Geschichte der Weltseele
(1834) (The Human Being and the Stars: Fragments on the History of the World
Soul).
However, with the exception of these attempts at the restoration of astrology
in scholarly circles, nineteenth-century astrology constituted a socially despised
entity. Although some practicing astrologers still carried on with their activities,
in the public perception and in the universities they could in no way make their
influence felt. The discursive differentiation between mythological astrology and
scientific astronomy had come to a conclusion, which can also be seen in the
change of dispositives that characterizes the period. When we look at the historiography of scientific instruments, which links the history of objects to the history
of experience, it is remarkable that the 19th century is the century when instruments were first considered to be explicitly scientific (Staubermann 2007, 10).
Focusing on astro-photometric instruments, Staubermann demonstrates how
an instrument became scientific and how instruments contributed to the making
of a new scientific discipline (2007, 10). When the experiential implementation of
new instruments created a dispositive that legitimated astronomy as science in
the nineteenth century, the same occurred for astronomical observatories. In the
first half of the eighteenth century, there were only some 30 observatories worldwide; around 1850 this number had increased significantly, but there were still
only 80 or 90 observatories worldwide (Schielicke 2008, 10). That is why observatories such as that at the University of Jena were influential elements in the
changing entanglements of astrology and science. Interestingly enough, even
in the Romantic period some non-polemical links between astronomy and astrology were visible, for instance in the fact that Goethe, an advocate of astrology, was
instrumental in establishing the Jena observatory, thus preparing the prosperous
career of Carl Zei in Jena (Schielicke 2008, 10, 65, 73 76, 97 99); it is also indicative of a more nuanced discursive constellation that the search for supernatural
causes of astronomical phenomena and alternatives to the Copernican system
were still discussed at the time (Schielicke 2008, 53 54).
47
Das Wissen, einst ungeschieden vom Meinen, dann der Macht des Glaubens untertan,
geht seit zwei Jahrtausenden immer ungebndigter auf selbstgebahnten Wegen; die Pflege des
Glaubens hier, des Wissens dort wurden einander fremd und fremder. Das Erlebnis eines
Weltsinnes, wie es noch die Werke eines Kepler warm durchstrahlt und wie es Kant in der
Naturgeschichte des Himmels glubig bekennt, hlt sich die moderne exakte Forschung bewut und strenge fern. Bisher wohl mit natrlichem Recht: die vergangenen Jahrhunderte
huften allzu viele Erfahrungen, die zunchst der rein logischen Bewltigung bedarf. Aber heute
48
Statements like these are clear examples of what Max Webernot by chance a
contemporary of Henseling and exposed to the same intellectual climate
would call the dialectic of disenchantment and re-enchantment. But discursive
analysis makes clear how this process is done concretely: it ultimately takes
the form of a re-entanglement of the discourse strands of knowledge, science,
astrology, and the spiritual (Geist). Robert Henseling was instrumental in popularizing this reconfiguration of knowledge. In his Umstrittenes Weltbild: Astrologie, Welteislehre, Um Erdgestalt und Weltmitte (Controversial Conception of the
World: Astrology, World Ice Theory, On the Form of the Earth and the Center of
the World), with a motto by Kepler, he again argued for a holistic interpretation
of astrology and criticized the world ice theory as unscientific (see Erdbeer 2010,
585 586; see also Erdbeers table 31 with astrological aesthetics linked to popularizing versions of the cosmic ice theory; cf. Wessely 2008). His book was published in 1939 and was good for no less than five reprints the same year.
Given this discursive impact, it is not surprising to find this blend of astrology, philosophy, and psychology also in other publications of that period. One
may think, for instance, of the paleontologist Edgar Dacqu (1878 1945) and
his speculation about the animistic character of the cosmos. Nature, the entire
cosmos, has in itself living meaning, an animate essence; it has soul; nowhere
can we see anything dead. With an implicit reference to Goethe, he noted
that the streaming of all of nature is not a formless flowing, even less a mechanistic collision; rather, these are powers that push to formation in animated
liveliness [zur Gestaltung drngen in seelenhafter Lebendigkeit] (Dacqu 1944
[1949], 147). This is what made the astrological symbol (Dacqu 1944 [1949],
147 166) a powerful metaphor for the animated cosmos.
German intellectuals around 1900 returned to Kepler as one of the greatest
and deepest thinkers of Germany (Zllner 1886, 5), as well as to Goethe, Schiller, and the Romantics in their search for a reconfiguration of the science of the
stars that would do justice both to scientific empiricism and spiritual quests. As I
ist die Kluft zwischen dem Tatsachenerkennen und dem Sinnerleben allzu gro geworden. Teile
haben wir in der Hand, am geistigen Bande fehlts. So fhlen wir denn wieder doppelt tief und
voller Sehnsucht, da der Mensch nur in der Totalitt, aus der er kommt und zu der er heimgehen wird, geistig wahrhaft zu wurzeln vermag.
Dies Suchen der grenden Zeit macht alle Mystik wuchern und lt auch manchen sich zur
astrologischen Lehre der Weltharmonie zurckverirren. Grer aber und lichter als irgend einer
vergangenen Zeit wird sich knftigem Glauben das Erlebnis der All-Einheit erschlieen. [] Von
Art und Kraft der eigenen Innerlichkeit hngt ab, was uns die Welt bedeutet und wie tief sie uns
zu beglcken vermag. Angelus Silesius wird recht behalten:
Ich selbst mu Sonne sein; ich mu mit meinen Strahlen
Das farbenlose Meer der ganzen Gottheit malen (Henseling 1924, 92, emphasis original).
49
have described elsewhere, this led to a renaissance of astrology in Germany, including new techniques and the formation of astrological associations at the beginning of the twentieth century. The center of learned astrology was slowly moving from Great Britain (Curry 1992) to the continent and the United States, but
particularly to Germany during that period (von Stuckrad 2007, 287 336).
What can be called the spiritualization of astrology was mainly fostered by
two important historical developments. The first was the foundation of the Theosophical Society in 1875, which marked a central turning point in preparation
for the discursive reconfiguration of religion, science, and esotericism in the
twentieth century. I will deal with these implications in Chapter 5 below (on Theosophical astrology see the overview in von Stuckrad 2007, 301 309; on Alan
Leo see Curry 1992, 122 159). The second development, which was discursively
linked to Theosophical movements, was the implementation of psychology as
an academic discipline on European universities, which further enhanced the
process of scientification of religion. When it comes to astrology, this is best exemplified in the work of Carl Gustav Jung.
50
But for astrology in particular (less so for academic psychology), the works
of Carl Gustav Jung (1875 1961) were of paramount importance. It was Jung who
combined religion, psychology, philosophy, and astrology in a way that has influenced astrological discourse until the present day. His depth psychology is
still authoritative for practical astrology to an astonishing degree, given the professional critique with which Jungs theory was confronted and which has more
or less excluded him from accepted knowledge in the field of academic psychology. One result of the primacy of symbolic and psychological interpretationparticularly in continental Europeis the fact that contemporary astrologers focus
on inner processes of the human soul rather than making prognostications
about future events. Individual psychological astrology is thus the most important branch in contemporary astrological practice, much more relevant than interrogations or mundane astrology.
Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, Jung extensively exchanged his
ideas with Theosophists and other representatives of occult and esoteric discourse
(Noll 1994; Hakl 2001, 81 92 and 121 156; Hanegraaff 2012, 277 295). He integrated esoteric concepts into his psychology and was particularly interested in the
transfers between the individual psyche and collective, or transpersonal, dimensions that he described with reference to European cultural history. His importance for esoteric discourse in the twentieth century lies in the religious charging
of the soul, which sacralized the psychological and at the same time psychologized the sacred. The idea of the unconscious had already been discussed by
Carl Gustav Carus in the Romantic period (on Carus contribution to esoteric discourse see Erdbeer 2010, 167 255), but it gained full academic acceptance only
through the works of Freud and particularly Jung. Jungs concept of the collective
unconscious refers to a universal symbolic system that is available to the individual psyche and becomes visible in dreams or myths. With such a dehistoricization
of spiritual processes, myths, and dreams, Jung was part of a larger discourse that
was characterized by the search for ultimate essences in religion and philosophy.
This discourse materialized, e.g., in the Eranos meetings in which Jung took part
(Wasserstrom 1999; Hakl 2001), but also in theories of religion that were developed
against the background of two World Wars (von Stuckrad 2010c).
To systematize the timeless symbols, Jung developed the doctrine of archetypes, universal forms of cultural and religious ideas that, according to Jung,
have retained their continuity until the present day. One example is the archetype that is linked to the female and that reveals qualities such as passivity, reception, and emotions. Discursively speaking, the concept of archetypesin this
case, the anima as the female part of the male soulstabilized and legitimized
gendered knowledge about what is the ultimate and timeless female principle.
We will see in Chapter 7 how this attribution of meaning even succeeded in cre-
51
ating new religious identities. As for astrology, the doctrine of the archetypes
proved successful as well. Most contemporary astrologers conceptualize the
twelve signs of the zodiac and the planetary powers as cosmic principles that
manifest in the human psyche. Most commonly, the moon became the receiving
female principle, the sun became the active male principle, Mars became the dynamically aggressive principle, and so forth. Jung himself supported this reading
of his theory, and his own esoteric interests were also combined with a study of
astrology. Following the publication of Theosophical works on astrology in 1910,
Jung wrote in a letter to Sigmund Freud:
My evenings are very much occupied by astrology. I calculate horoscopes in order to trace the
psychological truthfulness. Up to now [there have been] some remarkable things that you certainly would find unbelievable. For one lady, the calculation of the planets showed a certain
character profile with some details of destiny; however, this did not belong to her but to her
mother, for whom the character profile fitted like a glove. The lady is suffering from an extraordinary mother complex. I have to say that by all means we may discover in astrology
someday a significant portion of knowledge about ways of foreboding, which happened to
be seen in the heavens. It seems, for instance, that the zodiacal signs are character images,
i.e., libido symbols, which picture the respective typical libido characteristics.
On 8 December 1928, Jung wrote to L. Oswald that astrology, like Theosophy etc.,
tries to satisfy an irrational urge for knowledge, which however leads to a wrong
path (Jung 1981, 81). Nevertheless, with Tbingen University professors embracing astrology and with Cardiff University offering a course about astrology the
year before, astrology is standing in front of the doors of our universities
(ibid.). Astrology, according to Jung, is not pure superstition but contains, like
Theosophy, some relevant psychological insights. As a matter of fact, astrology
has nothing to do with the stars; it is the 5,000-year-old psychology of the ancient
times and the Middle Ages (Jung 1981, 82; see also Jungs letter to B. Baur from 29
January 1934 [Jung 1981, 181], in which he explains the precession of the equinoxes
and concludes that time is a stream of events, filled with qualities).
Meine Abende sind sehr in Anspruch genommen durch die Astrologie. Ich mache Horoskopberechnungen, um dem psychologischen Wahrheitsgehalt auf die Spur zu kommen. Bis
jetzt einige bemerkenswerte Dinge, die Ihnen gewi unglaublich erscheinen werden. Bei einer
Dame ergab sich durch die Berechnung der Gestirnstellungen ein ganz bestimmtes Charakterbild
mit einigen detaillierten Schicksalen, das aber nicht ihr zugehrte, sondern ihrer Mutter; dort aber
sa die Charakteristik wie angegossen. Die Dame leidet an einem auerordentlichen Mutterkomplex. Ich mu sagen, da in der Astrologie eines Tages sehr wohl ein gutes Stck Wissens von
Ahnungswegen, das an den Himmel geraten ist, entdeckt werden knnte. Es scheint z. B., da die
Tierkreisbilder Charakterbilder sind, d. h. Libidosymbole, welche die jeweiligen typischen Libidoeigenschaften schildern (Letter to Sigmund Freud, 12 June 1911, in Jung 1981, 45).
52
The Dialogue between Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Gustav Jung and Its Impact
Jungs strong interest in the intersections between psychology, philosophy, religion, and science brought him repeatedly into contact with natural scientists of
his time. With the rise of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which
questioned the deterministic paradigm of the physical theories prevalent since
the time of Isaac Newton, many philosophical and scientific interpretations of
new models were discussed. In fact, Thomas Arzt may have been right when he
wrote that even at the end of the twentieth century the implications of the new
paradigm have not yet been fully understood and appreciated (Arzt, Hippius-Grfin Drckheim, and Dollinger 1992, 14). Among the most distinguished physicists
of the twentieth century, Wolfgang Pauli (1900 1958), winner of the Nobel Prize in
1945, deserves special attention, because his thinking on the interface of the natural sciences, philosophy, and psychology very much stimulated later generations
(see especially Pauli 1994). Astonishingly enough, his work is not as appreciated
as that of his colleagues, Einstein, Heisenberg, or Bohr. It is especially in discussions about holism and the religious dimensions of science that Pauli has been
rediscovered (Laurikainen 1988; Laurikainen and Montonen 1993).
For Pauli, metaphysical dimensions were an integral element of physics itself.
In a letter to Markus Fierz in 1952, Pauli wrote that the non-determinacy of this
singular experiment was a return of the anima mundi (world soul), which had
been forced away in the seventeenth century (see also Pauli in Jung and Pauli
1952, 115). This notion already hints at the dialogue Pauli had with Carl Gustav
Jung (Atmanspacher 2012; Tagliagambe and Malinconico 2011; Miller 2009; Sparks
2007; Gieser 2005; Atmanspacher, Primas, and Wertenschlag-Birkhuser 1995; for
a translation of the Pauli-Jung letters see Meier 2001). Besides the alchemical connotations of modern science, it was the concept Jung called synchronicity that
was a major topic of their conversations. It became part of a book they published
together in 1952. Naturerklrung und Psyche (The Interpretation of Nature and the
Psyche) contains Jungs essay Synchronizitt als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhnge (Synchronicity: An A-causal Connecting Principle) and Paulis treatise on Der Einflu archetypischer Vorstellungen auf die Bildung naturwissenschaftlicher Ideen bei Kepler (translated as The Influence of Archetypal Ideas
on the Scientific Theories of Kepler). Again, we see how Keplers understanding
53
54
in the world in more detail than the quantum mechanical state. This conclusion
leads to paradoxical results, as Lszl E. Szab explains:
As Bell proved in 1964, under some further but quite plausible assumptions, this conclusion
that there are hidden variables implies that, in some spin-correlation experiments, the
measured quantum mechanical probabilities should satisfy particular inequalities (Belltype inequalities). The paradox consists in the fact that quantum probabilities do not satisfy
these inequalities. And this paradoxical fact has been confirmed by several laboratory experiments since the 1970s.
Some researchers have interpreted this result as showing that quantum mechanics is
telling us nature is non-local, that is, that particles can affect each other across great distances in a time too brief for the effect to have been due to ordinary causal interaction. Others object to this interpretation, and the problem is still open and hotly debated among
both physicists and philosophers. It has motivated a wide range of research from the
most fundamental quantum mechanical experiments through foundations of probability
theory to the theory of stochastic causality as well as the metaphysics of free will (2008).
55
Thus, the astrological premise of the cosmos as a holistic fabric, connecting all subsystems
that are part of it, is not only compatible with modern natural science, but even proven by
it. [] The basic astrological assumption that the cosmos is an organic process that connects all microcosmic and macrocosmic sub-processes into one unit, [proves to be] a progressive concept (1994, 28; emphasis original).
57
tury scholars adopted such a configuration as their analytical concept, indicating a unity of these various disciplines. While Keith Thomas (1971, 631 632) believed that astrology formed the basis of the occult sciencesand that consequently the decline of astrology would inevitably lead to the decline of
magic and alchemyBrian Vickers (1988, 265) encouraged this tendency by arguing that [t]here are sufficient internal resemblances among astrology, alchemy,
numerology, iatromathematics, and natural magic for one to be able to describe
the occult sciences as forming a unified system. All occult sciences share a
common mentality, or mental habit (1988, 266), that is clearly distinguished
from a rational scientific mentality. For Vickers, science as open and progressive is distinguished from the occult as having a closed system designed
to ignore criticism (Vickers 1984, 39, endorsing the position of Charles
Schmitt). This evaluation was also an expression of Vickers highly critical reaction against Frances A. Yates famous thesis (1964) that the Hermetic tradition
had a decisive impact on the scientific revolution (Linden 2007, x).
Even though a critique of Yates exaggerated conclusions is necessary, the
distinction proposed by Vickers and others is problematic for several reasons.
First, although these disciplines overlap in varied and complex ways, they
each have distinct histories with quite different and complex, diverging and mutually interacting trajectories. Even during the heyday of Renaissance neoplatonism, astrology and alchemy lived independent lives, despite the vast inkwells
devoted to the rhetorical embellishment of occult philosophy (Newman and
Grafton 2001, 26; see the whole passage pp. 18 27). In fact, it was the more recent discourse that entangled these systems of knowledge and produced the understanding that they belong together. Second, in the case of astrology there are
other systems of knowledge and practices that had direct and longstanding links
to that discipline, notably, mathematics, philosophy of nature, ethics, medicine,
historiography, theology, and politics (von Stuckrad 2010a, 115 134). Configuring astrology with the other occult sciences tends strongly to distort our understanding of its relationship with these other (and to many scholars more legitimate) areas of knowledge. Third, the analytical notion of hidden powers
continues to remain important within the legitimate sciences from the scientific revolution to the present. Wouter J. Hanegraaff concludes:
[I]n a context that insisted on science as a public and demonstrable rather than secret and
mysterious knowledge, the very notion of science came to be seen as incompatible ex
principio with anything called occult. As a result, any usage of the term occult science(s) henceforth implied a conscious and intentional polemic against mainstream or establishment science. Such polemics are typical of occultism in all its forms (Hanegraaff
2005, 887; see also Hutchison 1982).
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Consequently, it took a long time to distinguish between the old alchemy and
the new chemistry, and this was achievedmore or less, as we will seeonly
in the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, we encounter only a few scholars who tried to write an unbiased history of alchemy; Karl
Christoph Schmieder is one of them, and it comes as no surprise that his book
(Schmieder 1832), comprising more than 600 pages, was republished as a classic in 1997 by the biologist Wolfgang Roller in his Esoterischer Verlag Wolfgang
Roller, along with an invitation to the reader to report any practical alchemical
work to Roller himself.
But in general, at the end of the eighteenth century the domain of alchemy
was restricted to gold making or transmutational alchemy (alchemia transmutatoria or chrysopoeia in technical parlance). Indeed, for most writers and
thinkers of the eighteenth century, alchemy was synonymous with gold making
and fraud. [] These Enlightenment writers drew heavily on metaphors of light
and darkness to describe the dawning of chemistry out of the misty obscurity of
the medieval delusion of alchemy (Principe and Newman 2001, 386). This disjunctive strategy has led to a problematic historiographical framework of analysis that ultimately distorted the many links between empirical research into nature and metaphysical interpretations that both had been the characteristics of
59
so-called alchemy before it was pushed away in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One may think of Brian Vickers remark that some of the occult
sciencesalchemy and astrology, for examplemade a partial use of observational techniques, but the results were then subordinated to some preformed interpretative model, often magical or mystical, which was neither derived from reality nor testable by it (1988, 266). As I will make clear in what follows, things
became even more complicatedand discursively entangledwhen psychological interpretations focused on transformational alchemy; Carl Gustav Jung is
the most influential author here, but Mircea Eliade also had his share in this reconfiguration. In a parallel development of astrological and alchemical discourse, the negative understanding of the term was positively charged by
these scholars as a metaphor of spiritual developmentthe disjunction turned
into a positive earmark.
Recent scholarship has critically revisited our knowledge of alchemy and the
emergence of contemporary chemistry in the context of the history of science and
religion. In fact, [r]evisionary interpretations of works of persons who previously
were not readily admitted to have had alchemical interests are some of the proudest achievements of scholarship of the last few decades (Linden 2007, xi). This
also changed the attribution of meaning to the emergence of scientific chemistry,
further legitimated in dispositive changes through the launching of new scholarly
journalsthe best journals appear to welcome alchemical and Hermetic submissions for publication consideration, as long as they fit the journals criteria and are
of high quality. This was not always the case! (Linden 2007, xii)
Being part of this revisionist movement in the history of science, Lawrence
M. Principe and William R. Newman attempt to overcome the dichotomy between religious or pseudo-scientific alchemy on the one hand and empiric-scientific chemistry on the other. They (re)introduced the term chymistry to refer to
a scholarly engagement of the natural world that was not yet dichotomized by
post-Enlightenment discourse (Newman and Principe 1998) or embraced in a
positive way by psychological and esoteric readings of the twentieth century.
From a discursive point of view, such a distinction makes perfect sense. chymistry can be regarded as a discourse that includes various and quite different
subfields. Besides scholars who were entirely focused on processes within the
natural world (natura naturata), there were others who saw the natural world
as revelation of and interacting with transcendent levels of reality and subsequently searched for the power behind these processes (natura naturans). Leading alchemists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries applied both scientificempirical strategies and metaphysical ones, such as communicating with angels
and superior beings or directly addressing the divine. Notable examples are John
Dee (Clucas 2006; von Stuckrad 2010a, 146 155) and Robert Boyle (Principe
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1998; Newman and Principe 2002). William R. Newman has recently demonstrated that it was not the newly established dominance of physics and mathematics
that led to the scientific change of paradigm in the seventeenth century but rather the experiments of early modern chymists who elaborated medieval corpuscular theory (Newman 2006; see particularly pp. 1 20 on The Problematic Position of Alchemy in the Scientific Revolution).
In general, recent research has made it clear that the lines demarcating
chemistry from alchemy, and real science from pseudo-science, are much fuzzier than had long been assumed. The issue is not only that chymists of the seventeenth century helped develop new scientific paradigms; the polemical discussion about the differentiation between good science and bad science itself is
much older than has often been assumed (as, e. g., in McKnight 1992; see the editors introduction on p. vii). Over against this assumption, Ute Frietsch points
out that certain forms of alchemy already in the early modern period were evaluated as pseudo. In the context of Paracelsian medical alchemy of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, the buzzword pseudo was put forward in various
combinations (2008, 51 52; see also Moran 2005, 67 98). The seventeenth-century debate about Paracelsian medical alchemy, denoted by Libavius and others
as chymiatry, created the model that served to disavow competing forms of
knowledge using the Latin term pseudo-scientia. Even Galileos laws of falling
bodies were in 1645 attacked as pseudo-scientia. Thus, in the 1640s, the new alchemical medical doctrine and the new physics found themselves stigmatized
with the same pseudo-label (Frietsch 2008, 54; see also Schmitt-Biggemann
1996, 497). Institutional developments mirror this complex discursive configuration: Paracelsian medicine was introduced in several European university curricula around 1600, for instance at the Universities of Montpellier, Valencia, or Wittenberg. But the real shock for Libavius and other critics came when the
University of Marburg in 1609, at the instigation of the German prince Moritz
of Hesse-Kassel, hired Johannes Hartmann as professor of chymiatria. Hartmann
embraced divine mysteries and used a magical symbol as his personal letter
seal. This was the shocking part of Hartmanns appointment. A Paracelsian
was going to teach chymia with the university. [] Regardless of the ridicule,
Hartmanns instruction in the art of chymiatry (chemical medicine) was one of
the earliest examples of laboratory-based chemical teaching within a university
curriculum (Moran 2005, 108).
In general, when it comes to pseudo-science, Roger Cooter notes that the
eighteenth century had understood quackery as blatant fraud (especially in relation to medicine) but lacked a developed concept of pseudo-science. For the
stuff of belief (religion) and the stuff of experiment and analysis (science or natural philosophy) had not yet undergone their rhetorical separation and ranking
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(2003, 683). Cooter draws the only feasible conclusion: From the history of phrenology and other such pseudo-sciences, it is clear there is more to be lost than
gained historically by seeking retrospectively to draw sharp distinctions between
the real and the pseudo in science (2003, 684). As a consequence of this conceptual thicket, I will avoid the terms alchemy and chemistry as generic analytical concepts, and rather will look at their respective configurations in scientific, philosophical, and religious discourse (for similar suggestions, see Cooter
2003). If we disassemble the discourse strands that constitute alchemy (or
chymistry) and do the same with chemistry, we will be able to see the transformations of meaning that have taken place since the eighteenth century. We
can then also identify at which point certain elements of this discourse have
adopted new meanings and in which form they perhaps have been continued
in contemporary science.
In this regard, the turn of the nineteenth century was an important break.
One of the major shifts in the evaluation of alchemy was the move away from
its understanding of the nature of matter. While alchemy had been linked to
the idea that the elements can be reduced to a proto hyleprima materia or primary matternow chemists held that the smallest particles were atoms (Keller
1983, 9 10). John Dalton set the new tone in his New System of Chemical Philosophy, which was published in two parts between 1808 and 1810. Interestingly
enough, the work originated from Lectures on Natural Philosophy at the
Royal Institution in London. The author has ever since been occasionally
urged by several of his philosophical friends to lose no time in communicating
the results of his enquiries to the public, alledging [sic], that the interests in science, and his own reputation, might suffer by delay (1808/1810, vvi). Dalton
still referred to his scholarship as natural philosophy, and throughout his
book he spoke of philosophical chemists, philosophers, experimental philosophy (already in the title), etc. At the same time, it is characteristic that the
terms alchemy, chymistry, transmutation, god, and related concepts were
completely absent in Daltons work. The new configurations were atom, elementary bodies, and the material basis of chemical science (see, e. g., page
474). Not surprisingly, then, Dalton dedicated the second part to Humphry
Davy and William Henry as a testimony to their distinguished merit in the promotion of chemical science. Dalton also introduced the genre of chemical tables: Nothing of the kind has been published to my knowledge; yet, such tables
appear to me so necessary to the practice of chemical enquiries, that I have wondered how the science could be so long cultivated without them (496). This new
aesthetic device changed the way the systematization of chemical knowledge
was (and still is) legitimized. Like tables of historical epochs (on which see Steiner 2008), this dispositive stabilized the new order of knowledge.
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The author points out in his introduction to the second part that it took him
so long to write the almost 600 pages because he decided to rely as little as possible on other chemists work and instead to use his own experiments to test the
new theories. In order to convey a knowledge of chemical facts and experience, he begins with the most simple elements, subsequently looking at the
combination of two and then three simple elements. By elementary principles,
or simple bodies, Dalton explains, we mean such as have not been decomposed, but are found to enter into combination with other bodies. We do not
know that any one of the bodies denominated elementary, is absolutely indecomposable; but it ought to be called simple, till it can be analyzed (1808/
1810, 221 222).
The new ideas about the nature of matter and the new vocabulary that found
expression in works such as Daltonswith a total lack of terms that had been
related to alchemy, while retaining the link between science and philosophypaved the way for the new understanding of alchemy as the other of scientific chemistry. It was the same period that saw the general introduction of the
English terms pseudo-science and pseudo-scientist. After William Whewell had
coined the term scientist in 1840 (see Ross 1962; Yeo 1993), the term pseudo-science gained in popularity and was used to critique, e. g., Samuel Hahnemanns
homeopathy or Gustave Le Bons mass psychology (Hagner 2008, 24). But most
scientists, like Dalton, simply neglected the older vocabulary, and it was the job
of nineteenth-century historians to make the shift visible in explicit wordings.
When Heinrich Wilhelm Schaefer in 1887 defined alchemy as the art of transforming ignoble metal into silver and particularly into gold (1887, 1), he expressed the now-common understanding of alchemy as something distinct
from modern science. For these authors, alchemy only continues to be interesting from an historical point of view, for those who want to understand the psychology of human folly and the achievements of contemporary science.
Alchemy is of rich interest to the scholar in various regards. We may want to study it from a
psychological perspective, which offers particularly good insight into how, based on a few
facts, which were observed inaccurately, using a few unclear words behind which one suspected mysterious content that people thought they usefully interpreted, there developed a
huge network of false doctrines; these doctrines occupied the human mind for over a millennium and, in combination with mystical ideas, held it captive entirely. We may also discuss from a practical point of view the value of the chemical processes that alchemy applied to reach its goal; in doing soby reviewing from the perspective of scientific
chemistry the importance of the existing theoretical ideas and the results that alchemists
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achieved as a preliminary stage of contemporary chemistrywe also contribute to the history of this science itself.
Die Alchemie bietet dem Forscher in mannigfacher Hinsicht reiches Interesse. Man kann sie
vom rein psychologischen Standpunkte aus betrachten wollen und findet grade hier besondere
Gelegenheit zu erkennen, wie aus wenigen Thatsachen, die man ungenau beobachtete, aus
wenigen unklaren Worten, hinter denen man geheimnisvollen Inhalt vermutete, welchen man
wertvoll herauszudeuten glaubte, sich ein umfangreiches Gewebe von Irrlehren entwickelte,
welche den menschlichen Geist weit lnger als ein Jahrtausend beschftigten und durch Hinzunahme mystischer Vorstellungen vollstndig gefangen hielten. Man kann andererseits aus
praktischen Rcksichten den Wert der chemischen Prozesse errtern, durch welche die Alchemie
ihr Ziel zu erreichen hoffte, und gewinnt dabei, indem man vom Standpunkte der wissenschaftlichen Chemie aus die Bedeutung der auftretenden theoretischen Ansichten prft und die
gewonnenen Resultate der Alchemisten als Vorstufen fr die heutige Chemie ansieht, zugleich
einen Beitrag zur Geschichte dieser Wissenschaft selbst (Schaefer 1887, 1).
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that the neat distinction between alchemy and chemistry was not always easy to
maintain in the light of emerging theories of the nature of matter.
VITALISM:
The discursive reconfiguration that has taken place since the eighteenth century
can also be framed as a conflict between Aristotelian philosophical tradition and
Greek atomic, corpuscular philosophy. The new development dramatically challenged the Aristotelian interpretation of material change that was common until
the seventeenth century, explaining alterations of chemical properties or substances by the addition or subtraction of forms. As mentioned above, underlying these processes was a speculative substrate of matter, called the proto hyle or
prima materia, that remained unchanged throughout the process. Linked to the
forms or qualities of wet, dry, hot, and cold, the proto hyle produced the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water, which in turn could be mixed to generate the
material substances that the chemists examined. Over against this Aristotelian
theory, the Greek corpuscular philosophy gained influence in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, speculating about atoms being the smallest units of
material substances, which may or may not be understood as unsplittable. However, as William H. Brock aptly remarks,
although enlivened by Boyle, Newton and their successors with gravitational force, chemical affinity and electrical properties, the earlier corpuscular philosophy or atomic theory
was of little use to chemists until it was married to the modern doctrine of elements by
John Dalton at the beginning of the nineteenth century. [] Dalton abandoned at a stroke
the age-old belief of philosophers in the simplicity of matterthat there was a unique, homogeneous primary matter (1985, viiviii).
For many, however, giving up the idea of a simple and unifying principle that
underlies the processes of nature was too high a price to pay for scientific progress (cf. also the detailed discussion in Asprem 2013, Chapters 4 and 5). One of
these was William Prout (1785 1850), who in 1816 put forward his hypothesis
that all of the elements and their constituent atoms were in fact compounds
of one basic homogeneous material. He coined the term protyle for this speculative basis, which he then identified with hydrogen, the lightest known element.
Prout became known for a second hypothesis as well, namely the idea that if we
accept that expression of the atomic weight of hydrogen as a unity, the relative
atomic weights of all the known elements are whole numbers. Consequently, hydrogen came to be regarded as the primary matter from which all of the elements
were composed. What was subsequently discussed as Prouts hypothesis had
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Along the same line of argumentation, what I call vitalism here is a collection of
discourse strands that are linked to the historical tradition of vitalism but not
limited to it. When it comes to historical vitalisma movement with many different branches in different countrieswe can identify as a common denominator
the critical attitude toward Newtonian mechanics, which is complemented by the
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idea of a life force that explains the nature of living things. In this general form,
[v]italism seems to belong to the very origins of alchemy (Dobbs 1992, 58). Already part of scientific discourse in the eighteenth century (Rey 2000; Reill 2005;
on the Scottish Enlightenment, see Packham 2012), the search for the vital powers of nature in the nineteenth century was linked to the concept of natura naturans (as in Schellings philosophy of nature), to animal magnetism (as in
Franz Anton Mesmers theories and experiments), and later to the concept of
ether. It is the entanglement of these strands that constitute the discursive
knot of vitalism.
The form of scientific and philosophical vitalism that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century took on features from various new disciplines.
Hans Driesch (1867 1941), the German biologist noted for his early experimental
work in embryology and one of the first to perform the cloning of an animal in
the 1880s, is certainly the best-known representative of what he himself called
neo-vitalism (Driesch 1922, 167). In various publications he positioned himself
against materialistic philosophies of science, particularly Darwinism. And he
made explicit what we see many times in the present studythe emergence of
psychology as an integrating factor between religion, philosophy, and science:
As is well known, writes Driesch, the problem of vitalism is expanded considerably when we include in it the question of the relations between the inner life
[Seelenleben] and nature. Against this background, Driesch is surprised that
psychologists do not really engage the issue: almost nobody has seen the
close relation between the body/mind problem and vitalism as such in its actual
sharpness; indeed, it is strange that not even physiologists such as Pflger and
Goltz have seen the close link that is operative here (1922, 157).
It is through psychology that Driesch also endorsed the work of another famous vitalistHenri Bergson (1859 1941; see Burwick and Douglass 2010). Both
scholars fought against mechanistic and finalistic philosophies of science, even
though their conclusions differed in some ways (Driesch 1922, 178 180). Driesch
was convinced of the relevance of occultism and psychology for the emergence
of a new understanding of science, and he used the label para for these sciences without the pejorative charging that this label assumes in other contexts.
Now at last a field seems to become science on which as yet only casuistic statements
were made, more guessing than knowing: the field of parapsychology and paraphysics,
i. e., those fields that are unfortunately still called occultism [Okkultismus], even though,
it seems to me, not much is still occult [verborgen] here. [] We state it frankly: Paraphysics is our hope when it comes to biology, just as parapsychology [Parapsychik] is our hope
when it comes to psychology. Together, however, they express our hope when it comes to a
well-founded metaphysics and worldview [Weltanschauung] (1922, 208 and 209, emphasis original).
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Statements like these make it clear how closely this discourse is linked to the discourse of monism, which I will discuss in the next chapter. Even if we should
keep in mind that Drieschs notion of entelechy was ultimately a dualistic concept, which makes the discursive knot more complex, we can see the link between those discourses in what Monika Fick calls the sensualization of the spiritual (Versinnlichung des Geistigen) and the spiritualization of the physical
(Beseelung des Physischen); at the end of her study of fin de sicle literature,
in which Gustav Theodor Fechner and other Romantic authors were positively
received and linked to spiritualism as a biology of the beyond, she draws
the conclusion that we can even speak of (literary) modernity as a monistic
movement (Fick 1993, 354 365). It is noteworthy in this regard that Fechner
had decisive influence on Sigmund Freud and on psychoanalysis in general.
A large part of the theoretical framework of psychoanalysis would hardly
have come into being without the speculations of the man whom Freud called
the great Fechner (Ellenberger 1970, 218). In a parallel dynamic, vitalism has
powerfully inflected the literary sensibility of the last two centuries, and these
cultural effects were empowered by the residual prestige vitalism enjoyed from
its discursive apprenticeship in the scientific academy. The transition of vitalism
from science, to a scientific ideology, to a social ideology shows this complex historical dynamic in action (Clarke 1996, 28).
To be sure, in order to clearly see these discursive links we need to broaden
our perspective from historical monism and vitalism to monism and vitalism;
we can then see how influential this discourse indeed was in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. William Prout can also be addressed as a vitalist, since
he argued that living systems also contained vital principles. With this thesis,
Prout was part of a heated debate among chemists of his generation (Brock
1985, 70 80), long before occultists and Theosophists jumped on the bandwagon
and both spiritualized the life force and scientificized spirituality. Hence, there
are different forms of vitalist theory, and it is important to remember
that chemists like Prout were deploying the language of vitalism in order to explain the behaviour of organised living systems rather than of the organic substances which could be
extracted from them. The distinction is crucial, for whereas an organised body like a cat, or
a tree, or a stomach in vivo, is living and vital, an organic body like sugar, or urea, or even
albumin, which is a constituent of these bodies, is as lifeless as a mass of zinc oxide (Brock
1985, 74).
But despite these differences, the contribution of Prout and his chemical colleagues introduced the relevant terms to vitalism that prepared the discursive
changes. When we look at German Romanticism, we encounter many more driving forces of this discursive change. In critical conversation with German ideal-
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Carus was an early representative of this development. He contributed to the discussion by aestheticizing and psychologizing philosophical as well as scientific
concepts of nature in a discourse of Empfindsamkeit (sensitivity). As Robert
Matthias Erdbeer demonstrated (2010, 167 255), these works were a major contribution to a discursive change that prepared what the author calls the esoteric
modern. However, when Erdbeer describes these contributions judgmentally as
strategic dilettantism (see the title of his chapter, and passim), he strips such
discourses of their scientific legitimacy and thus adopts uncritically the dichotomizing structure that he is analyzing. That people like Carus were active both as
scientists and authors of popular works not only marks their discursive impact
(Erdbeer 2010, 170); it also reminds us of the fact that the world of scientists
and that of a popular audience are not so far apart as labels like dilettantism
and amateurism vis--vis exact science seem to suggest.
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In this regard, the situation in England was not fundamentally different. People from various backgrounds responded to the Victorian crisis of faith and reassembled discourses of vitalism and others (on this topic see also the material presented in Renk 2012, even though her analysis is unfortunately too uncritical).
Critique of scientific naturalism was one of the driving forces behind these activities, as Frank Miller Turner (1974) demonstrated. Henry Sidgwick and James
Ward, both Cambridge philosophers; Alfred Russel Wallace and George John Romanes, both scientists; Frederic W. H. Myers, the poet, classicist, and founding figure of the Society for Psychical Research; and Samuel Butler, the novelistthey
were all united in their quest to link emotion and religion to scientific endeavors.
In his introduction to Phantasms of the Living, Myers put it thus:
[J]ust as the old orthodoxy of religion was too narrow to contain mens knowledge, so now
the new orthodoxy of materialistic science is too narrow to contain their feelings and aspirations; and consequently [] just as the fabric of religious orthodoxy used to be strained in
order to admit the discoveries of geology or astronomy, so now also the obvious deductions
of materialistic science are strained or overpassed in order to give sanction to feelings and
aspirations which it is found impossible to ignore (1886, 1; quoted from Turner 1974, 2).
Routh remarked that the problem with the terms spirit and spiritual is that all
people use them but [n]one of them has explained what he means by the expression, but all use it as frequently and consistently as if they had privately
agreed on its significance (Routh 1937, 4). Indeed, this could have been written
at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The same is true for his comparison
of spirituality and religion:
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Such an explanation does not exclude the idea of religion, but it does exclude the specially
doctrinal and pneumatological associations which once adhered to the word. In this secular, nineteenth-century sense, spirit might rise to the lips of any humanist (an agnostic,
or a pagan, no less than a saint) and would connote an impulse towards intellectual or
imaginative creativeness; not necessarily to the writing of poetry or the painting of pictures;
but to the identification of ones best self with the best things (1937, 4).
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pended at the atomic level. The idea is that the closer one gets to the core of things, to their
intrinsic structure, the more the differences perceived on the everyday macro level are suspended. Here we recognize again the positivistic wish to create a unitary science. The important difference is, however, that Pauli did not want to see a reductionist model, in which
everything can be reduced to an existing science, like logic or physics. He sought rather a
wholly new scientific approach which does not disregard the unique character of the individual sciences, but which attempts to find certain common denominatorsa deep level
based on the belief in certain universal structural elements which reveal themselves in
all areas of experience (2005, 208).
All of the ingredients of the new discursive constellation are clearly visible here;
Eliade, the professor of religion, lends authority to the combination of religion,
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science, nature, magic, experience, mother earth, vitalism, transmutation, and alchemy. Eliades book is not without academic bloopers, such as
using the distillation of sperm as a link between spiritual alchemy, biology,
and what today is known as cognitive science of religion:
But cinnabar can also be made inside the human body, mainly by means of the distillation
of sperm. The Taoist, imitating animals and vegetables, hangs himself upside down, causing the essence of his sperm to flow up to his brain. The tan-tien, the famous fields of
cinnabar, are to be found in the most secret recesses of the brain and belly: there it is
that the embryo of immortality is alchemically prepared (Eliade 1978a, 117; as source of
the quote Eliade gives Rolf Stein, Jardins en miniature dExtrme-Orient, p. 86).
In his preface to the 1978 Phoenix Edition, Eliade expressed his thanks to historians of science who received his book favorably, among them A.G. Debus, J.
Needham, and W.-E. Peuckert (Eliade 1978a, 16). And indeed, the spiritual interpretation of alchemy was still en vogue in academic literature of the 1980s (see
Hoheisel 1986 as an example).
Another materialization of this discursive knot can be mentioned herethe
merging of occultist and psychological interpretations with new age and psychedelic discourses. From Helena P. Blavatsky to Arthur Machen and Alan Watts,
psychedelic experiences with drugs have repeatedly been linked to interpretations of alchemical processes (Morrisson 2007, 191 193; see also Hanegraaff
2013), and psychedelic alchemy is a recurring keyword on the Internet today.
Mark S. Morrisson notes:
Alchemy is no longer the central trope for discussing and understanding nuclear physics
and radiochemistry that it was through the 1930s, but its connection to atomic science persisted across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first in occult alchemy circles. Its
move into the realms of psychoanalysis and brain chemistry suggests that its ability to destabilize boundaries between religion and scienceand even between the sciencesremains alive and well (Morrisson 2007, 193).
This is only partly true, however. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, alchemy still resonates in the work of physicists and philosophers. One prominent
example is David Deutsch, mentioned already in the last chapter. Deutsch pioneered the field of quantum computation by formulating a description for a
quantum Turing machine as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run
I do not regard New Age or New Age religion as a useful analytical category (see von
Stuckrad 2005b, 140). In this book, I either refer to it as the discourse on New Age, which
certainly had a lot of impact (indicated as new age), or as a scholarly construct, the dubious
character of which I indicate as New Age.
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on a quantum computer. But more importantly for us, he is one of the leading
intellectuals who are interested in the links between quantum mechanics and
philosophy. Being an advocate of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics, Deutsch writes about the general implications of this theory, including time travel (Deutsch 1997, 289 320) and other things that appear counter-intuitive but are in accordance with the theories discussed by physicists today. In
The Beginning of Infinity, the author seeks to find the basis of progress in human
development. He describes this progress in very optimistic ways and argues that
from all fields of science and philosophy
we learn that, although progress has no necessary end, it does have a necessary condition
for it to take off and to thrive. Each of the beginnings is the beginning of infinity as viewed
from the perspective of that field. Many seem, superficially, to be unconnected. But they are
all facets of a single attribute of reality, which I call the beginning of infinity (Deutsch 2012,
viii, emphasis original).
The subtitle of this book is Explanations that Transform the World. The discourse
strand of transformation is not by chance woven into the authors narrative.
Deutsch explicitly links his project to the alchemical quest, though in a modernized form. He explains that the stars shine because they are powered by the nuclear energy that is released by transmutation, i.e., the conversion of one chemical
element (mainly hydrogen) into another (mainly helium). There are some forms of
transmutation that happen on earth, such as the decay of radioactive elements.
Scientifically demonstrated for radioactivity only in 1901, the concept of transmutation, however, was ancient. Alchemists had dreamed for centuries of transmuting base metals, such as iron or lead, into gold. They never came close to understanding what it would take to achieve that, so they never did so. But scientists in
the twentieth century did (Deutsch 2012, 1). With his narrative of a general transformation of the entire world and the quest for complete understanding of the
human being, Deutsch participates in the Dreams of a Final Theory (Weinberg
1992), but he also stands in a long tradition of esoteric discoursefrom the Further
Reformation of the seventeenth century (von Stuckrad 2010a, 178 179) to the New
Age movement speculating about the breakthrough of human consciousness
that has been reactivated by contemporary scientists.
Deutsch is very critical about the limits of reductionist approaches in physics
and the natural sciences, but he is as critical of their opposite, i. e., holism
(Deutsch 1997, 20 21). Perhaps this is what makes his contribution to alchemy
typical of the twenty-first century. With an awareness of the limits of science, he
nonetheless retains an ideology of progress and perfect knowledge. The universal laws are adopted and integrated into physical laws in the nascent Theory of
Everything. He argues that if we understand knowledge and adaptation as
75
structure which extends across large numbers of universes, then we expect the
principles of epistemology and evolution to be expressed directly as laws
about the structure of the multiverse. That is, they are physical laws, but at an
emergent level (Deutsch 1997, 345, emphasis original). Weaving together epistemology and physicsor knowledge and transmutationin a Fabric of Reality
(the title of his 1997 book), he reassembles the discourse strands of alchemy in a
creative way. For instance, he links the natural conditions to create an openended stream of explanatory knowledge (Deutsch 2012, 60) to the laws of physics, since many of the necessary transformations require energy: something
must power conjectures and scientific experiments and all those manufacturing
processes (Deutsch 2012, 61, emphasis original)energy here is the concept as
it is used in theoretical physics, but at the same time it is a general metaphor of
powering the progress of knowledge accumulation in the evolution of the multiverse. As we will see in the next chapter, the term energy plays a significant role
in monistic discourse as well.
77
narrow and poor not-knowing. Only the painstaking conclusions of our investigations will sometime make us similar to the pure mind.
Es gengt, den Begriff des Lebens sowohl nach seinem Princip wie nach seiner Bethtigung
durch die drei Stufen des vegetativen, sensitiven und intellectuellen Lebens zu verfolgen, um an
der Schwelle einer hheren geistigen Welt mehr ahnend als wissend stehen zu bleiben und
unser Wissen selbst gleichsam als ein enges und armes Nichtwissen zu erkennen. Je weiter wir
aber durch mhsame Folgerung in unserer Erkenntniss fortschreiten, desto hnlicher werden wir
dem reinen Geiste, der mhelos seiner Erkenntniss geniesst (Commer 1884, 258).
78
ing in German universities. Only the reunion of both disciplines would be worthy
of the term philosophy of nature. Haeckel conceded that the doctrine of evolution is the major achievement of the nineteenth century, but he thought Darwin should be seen alongside Jean Lamarck and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
as a trio of brilliant philosophers of nature, three stars of the greatest magnitude among all other men of our century (Haeckel 1903, 8; see also p. 14 and
passim). Haeckel later would add Baruch Spinoza to his pantheon, as Spinoza
cogently developed pantheistic thought, juxtaposing it with Judeo-Christian anthropomorphism. Haeckel saw the hypostatization of the human being as the
center of the universe as the crucial problem facing contemporary philosophy
and religion, a position that surpassed Darwin. The human being should not
be regarded as the premeditated goal of organic creation nor as a creature similar to God (1903, 11), but as an organic component of the entire universe. He
concluded: Our pure monism is not identical with theoretical materialism,
which negates the mind and dissolves the world in a sum of dead atoms; nor
is it identical with theoretical spiritualism (now called Energetics by Ostwald),
which negates matter and regards the world simply as a spatially ordered
group of energies or immaterial powers of nature (1903, 14, emphasis original).
Such a monism excludes the existence of anthropomorphic deities, and
Haeckel never tired of polemicizing against monotheistic religions and even
against polytheistic ones, since they contradict monism. His monism led him
to a pantheism, which he conceived, contrary to the evolutionary models of comparative religion of his generation, as the overcoming of monotheistic religions
rather than their archaic predecessor. Pantheism is the product of a civilized
human beings refined observation of nature, in contrast to theism, whose
crudest forms were already evident among primitive peoples more than ten thousand years ago (1903, 116).
Like many natural scientists since his time, Ernst Haeckel found the divine
in nature (Gladigow 1986, 1989, Taylor 2010, 155 157). Far from personifying nature, he sought the solution to the world riddles in the mystical unity of spirit
and matter, which reveals itself in strict laws but without the evolutionary goal of
perfecting the human being. Creation always remains incomplete, because organic nature, like inorganic nature, is characterized only by a constant flow
of development (Haeckel 1903, 107). Here Haeckel echoes the supreme principle
described by Schelling, which would find later votaries in the philosophy of life.
In his last book, Kristallseelen (Crystal Souls), published two years before his
death, Haeckel sought to make this more concrete by combining crystallography
and psychology. Haeckel admired Goethe as a model sensitive natural scientistthree quotations formed the books epigraph. Referring to Goethe, Haeckel
79
regarded the year 1904 to be a crucial turning point of science, because that year
saw the publication of studies that realized Goethes prophetic program:
The artificial boundaries previously erected between inorganic and organic nature, between
death and life, between natural sciences and the humanities fell at a single blow. All substance possesses life, inorganic as well as organic; all things are animated, crystals as well
as organisms. The ancient conviction of the inner, unified linkage of all events, of the unlimited dominion of generally valid laws of nature reasserts itself as an unshakeable truth
(1917, viii, emphasis original).
But Haeckel went even further in his religious conception and constructs a causal relation between science, art, and religion. In Die Weltrthsel there is a section
entitled Monistic Churches in which the author explicitly states:
The modern human being who possesses science, art, and thus also religion, has no need
of a particular church, no narrow, enclosed space. For everywhere in open nature where his
gaze falls upon the infinite universe or a part of it, he finds the harsh battle for existence
but also the true, the beautiful, and the good. Everywhere he finds his church in magnificent nature itself (1903, 138, emphasis original).
With such utterances Haeckel enters the same field of discourse as had been
mapped out by German Romanticism (Jacobsen 2005, 9 89) and American transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson, albeit coming
from a different direction (Obuchowski 2005).
As this quotation shows, Haeckel is not only an example of the entanglement of discourses on religion and science, but also of the reconfiguration of
this discursive knot with art. Haeckel saw the power of creation active in nature,
which also links him to vitalism; from his first monograph on the aesthetics of
radiolars (1862) until his death, Haeckel was fascinated by what he used to call
the absolute beauty of nature (see Di Gregorio 2005, 515 519); he regarded nature in general, and animals in particular, as artists; for him, nature even has a
sense of art that had evolved to full consciousness in the human being. Since
1899, Haeckel had published several volumes on Art Forms of Nature (Kunstformen der Natur; see, e.g., Haeckel 1904) that significantly impacted the understanding of art in Germany around 1900 (Kockerbeck 1989; on literature and psychology see Fick 1993). Not surprisingly, then, in Die Natur als Knstlerin
(Nature as Artist, a sort of Festschrift, published with a print run of 30,000
This is an implicit reference to Goethes formulation: Wer Wissenschaft und Kunst besitzt,
hat auch Religion. Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt, der habe Religion (Those who have science
and art, also have religion; those who dont have them, should have religion; see also the
monistic interpretation in Ostwald 1911, 32).
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81
82
the early nineteenth-century philosophy of nature, which essentially was mysticism, people
have now begun to write new commentaries on Schelling, the leader of the former movement, and to publish his work as the leader of the new movement (1910, 87).
But this, of course, would only be a transitional phase prior to the real marriage
of science and philosophy under the umbrella of energetics and monism.
As part of this transition, the concept of energy can easily be applied to
psychological phenomena (see also Daser 1980, 39 188). Here, Ostwald enters
the same field of discourse that we have encountered already, which is an entanglement of occult and scientific discourse strands (see again Oppenheim 1985;
Crabtree 1993; Treitel 2004). The energetic approach to psychological phenomena, Ostwald explained, is a particularly striking example of the characteristic
of energetics, mentioned above, to unconsciously and almost against their will
infiltrate assumptions of presumably fully unrelated areas as a principle of explanation (1910, 211).
The monistic interpretation of energy led Ostwald to a critique of religion
that resembles his understanding of mysticism. Ironically, however, he used
for this critique a dispositive that is most directly linked to religionthe Sunday
sermon. In a book entitled Monistische Sonntagspredigten (Monistic Sunday Sermons), the monistic preacher gave words of exhortation and encouragement to
his followers. In short chapters, Ostwald mused about [w]hy [we are] monists,
[h]ow evil came into the world, [r]eligion and science, [t]he energetic imperative, [t]he development of God, [p]rayer, and other themes. In the
Fourth Sermon: Religion and Science, Ostwald provided a textbook example
of the optimistic belief in scientific progress that would overcome all forms of
religious superstition. About the general relationship between religion and science, he noted: The more our culture declines, the more cherished religion
proves to be; the more our culture rises, the more religion will take a backseat
and will be substituted by science. Will religion become completely dispensable
some day? (1911, 30). Later, he answered this question in the affirmative, but
without a clear prognosis: Hence, it is to be expected historically that one social
class after the other will rise from the sea of religious ideas and will form a fruitful land for humanity. That religion will slowly become dispensable is therefore a
process that develops in steps, and it is not yet clear when this process will have
reached all of humankind (1911, 32).
In a parallel argument, Ostwald envisaged a religion after religion (to borrow the apt formulation of Wasserstrom 1999) in the new form of a monistic understanding of god.
Looking at the entire development of the concept of god, we can conclude that now we can
ultimately leave behind the dualism of the past four centuries or so, and approach a mon-
83
ism. However, the earlier religious monism must be substituted today with a scientific monism. This is not the old monism that is organized on an animistic, anthropomorphic, or
priestly foundation, but a new monism based on the highest cognitive performances that
our brain, which is far more developed than in earlier stages, enables us to achieve (Ostwald 1911, 199, emphasis original).
What we see here is a creative re-entanglement of religion, science, and evolutionary biology (even the current fashion to return to biological, evolutionary explanations in the cognitive science of religion is prefigured in Ostwalds
discursive blending).
Like Haeckel and other scientists of his generation, Ostwald chose the
genre of popularizing books to convey his religious message to a broad audience,
and the discursive impact of this genre was significantly higher than his scientific writings. What is more, writing for a popular audience made the entanglement of seemingly disparate discourses much easier. We should not misinterpret
this as a less scientific or pseudo-scientific amateurism, but as a change of dispositive that multiplied the discursive reconfiguration of religion and science at
the beginning of the twentieth century and legitimated new meanings that were
shared by a large audience in Germany. This confirms the arguments that Peter J.
Bowler made for the British book market:
The early twentieth century was a period in which there were major developments within
both the publishing industry and the scientific community. Publishers thought that there
was a major revival of interest in science by ordinary readers. Mass-circulation newspapers
and the advent of photography transformed the way science (like many other topics) could
be presented to the public. The expansion of secondary education created a market for literature aimed at those seeking to improve themselves by home study or by taking evening
classes. Yet the scientific community had by this time become fully professionalizedand
there is a widespread belief that one consequence of professionalization was a reluctance
to engage with the general public (2009, 1 2).
84
One such dispositive was the series Zellenbcherei (Cell Library) that was
published by Drr & Weber in Leipzig. The press advertised its series with the
slogan The Cell Library does without dry theory and profound scholarly wisdom. It is a cultural, aesthetical, and economical-political collection that gains
its materials from everyday life and presents knowledge and benefit, happiness
and instruction, in a cheerful, often humorous way, in a chatty and narrative
tone. This, the advertisement added, was particularly necessary in a period
that experienced dramatic educational damage due to war and revolution, particularly in Germany. In a discursive framework of analysis, it becomes clear how
discursive structures direct the emergence of new dispositives, and how in turn
the attribution of meaning is stabilized by dispositive changes.
Wilhelm Ostwald actively participated in this discourse. The first volume of the
Zellenbcherei was Ostwalds Das groe Elixier: Die Wissenschaftslehre (The great
elixir: Scientific epistemology), published with a print run of 5,000. For twenty
marks excluding tax, readers could also buy a numbered luxury edition, printed
on hand-made paper, with a hand-colored cover, and with the authors signature
(see the last page of Ostwald 1920). The cover of the standard edition aestheticized
the books content, depicting a bottle of alchemical elixir against a background pattern of a cell structure. Many times in this book, the author linked religion to science, alchemy to chemistry, and magic to cognition. He described [t]he scientist
as magician (Der Forscher als Zauberer; Ostwald 1920, 6 7) and referred to
the alchemical dream as a positive foundation of modern science.
Among the first dreams that inspired the beginning of scientific-technological thinking, the
great elixir plays a very significant role. The search for the Philosophers Stone or the tincture that was able to turn base metals into gold and to give eternal health to the human
body was a major source of chemistry, this science that reveals not less than in other sciences how much of these dreams can be made real, and in fact have become true. The
great elixir has not fully been found today, but we know large parts of it. [] All these realizations of old dreams of humankind have been achieved on one single path. This path is
called science.
Die Zellenbcherei verzichtet auf graue Theorie und tiefgrndige Gelehrtenweisheit. Sie ist eine
kulturelle, schngeistige und wirtschaftlich-politische Sammlung, die ihre Stoffe aus dem tglichen
Leben schpft und in frhlicher, oft humorvoller Weise, in Plauder- und Erzhlerton Wissen und
Nutz, Freude und Belehrung bietet (quoted from the advertisement in Ostwald 1920, 89).
Unter den ersten Trumen, welche das beginnende wissenschaftlich-technische Denken
erfllten, spielt das groe Elixier eine sehr hervorragende Rolle. Das Suchen nach dem Stein der
Weisen oder der Tinktur, die aus unedlen Metallen Gold zu machen und dem menschlichen
Krper dauernde Gesundheit zu verleihen vermochte, ist eine Hauptquelle der Chemie gewesen,
dieser Wissenschaft, in der sich nicht weniger deutlich wie in anderen darstellt, wieviel von
solchen Trumen erreichbar ist, da es tatschlich erreicht worden ist. Das groe Elixier ist heute
85
After having explained to his readers that such an elixir is particularly necessary
for the German people after the lost warand for the preparation of using Germanys scientific superiority against its enemiesOstwald gave a popular version of his understanding of a unified system of the natural and human sciences.
On the foundation of what he called the Ordnungswissenschaften (systematic
sciences), he described a pyramidal structure, consisting of Arbeitswissenschaften (sciences of work/energy), Lebenswissenschaften (life sciences), and Gesellschaftswissenschaften (social sciences). It is necessary to go through all
these sciences in exactly this order, otherwise the so-called Geisteswissenschaften will continue doing useless work and paper science (1920, 87, with diagram of the pyramid of scientific epistemology).
Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Ostwald were not the only academics who were
actively involved in public debate. In Germany between 1900 and 1930, there
emerged a whole movement of scientists, philosophers, and lay authors who
speculated about the spiritual dimensions of nature. This movement was to
some extent part of what is referred to as Kulturkampf, i.e., a nationalistic insistence on German cultural heritage vis--vis French rationalism. Three examples
stand for many others: in 1920, August Messer (1867 1937), professor of philosophy
in Gieen, published articles on Nature and Spirit (Messer 1920), popularized in
order to be read in philosophical coffee morning circles, work groups, adult education centers, and the like, as the preface tells us. In the same year, the medical
practitioner Franz Kleinschrod (1860 1934) dared to write an essay on The Problem of Life and the Positive Principle in Time and Space; and Einsteins Principle of
Relativity in Space and Time: A Principal Study, at the Same Time a New Way to
Solve the Problem of Life (Kleinschrod 1920). Kleinschrods earlier attempt to scientifically prove naturopathy was even translated into English (Kleinschrod 1910).
Finally, let me mention once more the paleontologist Edgar Dacqu who in 1926
published a book with the intriguing title Nature and Soul: A Contribution to
the Magical World Doctrine (Dacqu 1926; see Mildenberger 2009). In 1944, Dacqu collected revised versions of articles under the title From the Depth of Nature; the book could not be published before 1949 because of the dramatic situation at the end of World War II. Dacqu referred to these calamities in his preface
and linked this to his decision to include more chapters on religion than on natural
sciences. It cannot be stressed enough, he wrote, that worldview and religion
are two separate spheres of the general human life, but also the personal life
zwar noch nicht restlos, aber doch zu einem sehr groen Teile gefunden. [] Alle diese Verwirklichungen alter Menschheitstrume sind auf einem einzigen Wege gewonnen worden. Dieser
Weg heit Wissenschaft (Ostwald 1920, 7 8, emphasis original).
86
and experience; too many people today think that true religion can be substituted
with worldview (Dacqu 1944 [1949], 7).
Contributions like these have only rarely been looked at by historians, although they had decisive influence on how Germans of the Weimar Republic
and later periods conceptualized nature, science, and culture. These contributions to the discourse on nature and science stabilized frameworks of meaning
that informed religious movements and environmental policy after 1960 (both
in the Green Party and conservative milieus; on the background see Engels
2006; Bemmann 2012, 453 470).
Hence, the discourse on monism comprised more than the contributions of
representatives of the Monistenbund (see also Jacobsen 2005, 329 365 on monist musings in the twentieth century). An important link between various discourse strands was, again, the occultist and Theosophical movement of the
time. When Demeter Georgievitz Weitzer (1873 1949)who defined himself as
an occultist (Surya 1923, 6) and used the pseudonym G.W. Suryapublished a
1920 lecture in Munich as the first contribution to his Sammlung Geistiger Monismus (Collection of Spiritual Monism), he linked monistic philosophy to occultism, magic, mysticism, Oriental fascinations, and German nationalism. The
lecture started with the following statements:
We are living in an extraordinarily difficult, serious, and critical time. Every day confirms
this anew. What we experience, indeed what humanity will experience with a thousand
pains, is a global turning point as is not often seen in thousands of years. In the sea of
flames of the World War there began the downfall of all spiritual and material pseudo-values, of all hyper- and pseudo-culture. And if it now looks as if the evil, the low, and the
profane have fully gained power, in fact we should regard this downfall, this shifting of
human society, this re-evaluation of all values, as a great purification in which in every individual human soul, but also in entire nations the gold is separated from the slag.
Wir leben in einer auerordentlich schweren, ernsten und kritischen Zeit. Jeder Tag besttigt
uns dies aufs Neue. Was wir erleben, ja was die ganze Menschheit noch unter tausend Schmerzen
erleben wird, ist eine Weltwende, wie solche sich in Jahrtausenden nur selten wiederholt. Mit dem
Flammenmeere des Weltkrieges begann der Zusammenbruch aller geistigen und materiellen
Scheinwerte, aller ber- und Scheinkultur. Und wenn es auch augenblicklich so aussieht, als ob
das Bse, Niedrige und Gemeine erst recht zur Herrschaft gelangt ist, so ist dieser Zusammenbruch, diese Umschichtung der menschlichen Gesellschaft, diese Umwertung aller Werte nur als
eine groe Luterung aufzufassen, durch welche in jeder einzelnen Menschenseele, sowie in
ganzen Nationen das Gold von der Schlacke geschieden wird (Surya 1923, 11).
Discursive Implications
87
88
ence and religion have been instrumental in establishing new meanings that
are attributed to nature, ecology, religion, and science. The field that these intellectuals inhabit is often called New Age science (Hanegraaff 1996, 62 76), but
such a label is problematic. It participates in a discourse of separating real science from pseudo-science and professional knowledge about nature from
amateur knowledge. Interestingly enough, many of the authors writing in the
field of new age science had been distinguished scholars in their disciplines before they turned to theories that lack the approval of the majority of their peers;
it is this social aspect, rather than the empirical status of their adopted theories,
that allows scientists to transmutate into pseudo-scientists (cf. also Restivo
1983). In the following passage, I will give a brief overview of the most important
representatives of this discursive field.
Fritjof Capra
Theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra (b. 1939) is one of the most influential protagonists of new age science. His Tao of Physics (1975) made issues of global environmental crises and the requirement for new thinking in science and society
known to a wider public. The book has gone through 43 editions in 23 languages.
In it, Capra dwelled on the parallels between quantum mechanics and east Asian
mysticisma parallelism that became almost canonical in this discursive knot.
Furthermore, he referred to physicist Geoffrey Chew and his so-called bootstrap
philosophy, which appears to be very similar to Leibniz monadology. Using
the concept of self-organized individual entities, Capra developed a philosophy
of nature that comprises both science and the humanities, leading from theory to
action, from fundamental laws to dynamic events, and from separateness to mutual connectedness.
In the following years, Capra was heavily influenced by the systems theory
of Gregory Bateson, and he adjusted his former concept accordingly. In The Turning Point (1982) it was no longer the bootstrap philosophy or the model of quantum mechanics that grounded his argument, but the holistic and ecological systems view of reality, which he presented as the common denominator of both
modern science and ancient mysticism. According to Capra, Western society
is in need of a new paradigm, because the old mechanistic Newtonian and Cartesian paradigm has led modern society to an alienation from, if not a total destruction of, nature. This old paradigm is in a state of decline and the global crises are reaching their culminating point. At the same time the new holistic
paradigm is emerging rapidly, bringing forth a society that is holistic, open
to spiritual dimensions of life, and healthy for all its members. The juxtaposition
Discursive Implications
89
of those two paradigms serves as a universal key to interpret almost every part of
contemporary culture.
Generally speaking, Capras books are an easily accessible compilation of
two authors more complicated ideas, namely Ilya Prigogines and Gregory Batesons (see below). While Capra interprets their thinking in great detail (and sometimes eclectically), he omits references to the founders of systems theory, such
as Ervin Laszlo. This is also true for his most recent major book The Web of Life
(1997). Here, he establishes what he calls the Capra-synthesis, consisting of his
former contributions and an additional application of H. Maturana and F. Varelas so-called Santiago Theory, which Capra describes as a parallelism of learning and living, of knowledge and creativity. He also includes concepts of deep
ecology and sustainability.
Capras impact on new age, on environmentalism, and recently also on the
counter-movement against uncontrolled globalization has been decisive. Actively supporting political and economic efforts to arrive at a holistic and sustainable culture, he is the founder and president of the Elmwood Institute and the
Center for Ecoliteracy (founded in 1995) in Berkeley, California, an ecological
think tank dedicated to fostering new concepts and values for a sustainable future. Furthermore, he is a lecturer at the influential Schumacher College in Darlington, Devon (United Kingdom), an international center for ecological studies.
His course titles include Life, Mind and Society (2002), in which he attempts to
integrate deep ecological concerns into a general systems theory of culture.
Ilya Prigogine
Ilya Prigogine (1917 2003), a Belgian scientist of Russian descent, contributed
considerably to the contemporary discourse on physics, nature, religion, and
the humanities. Although Prigogine, who won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his
work on the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems, writes in a very sophisticated scientific style, his books gained enormous influence in a wider context
of nature spirituality and philosophy.
The starting point to understand Prigogines theory is his new reading of
thermodynamics. Newtonian dynamics is purely mechanical and treats time as
reversible, while classical thermodynamics talks of an arrow of time that
moves toward increased entropy and loss of energy. Prigogine refuted both models and proposed his theory of dissipative structures. Dynamic and open systems that are far from equilibrium (such as organic systems), he argued, bring
forth new orders of higher complexity. In so doing, they do not follow universal
laws, but develop according to their own systems dynamics. And what is more,
90
such open systems advance in constant exchange with the environment (dissipation) and are able to repair themselves on their evolutionary path (this process is
totally different and much more complex than Darwins paradigm had suggested). Prigogines well-received discovery was the birth of a new discipline: synergetics. Although living organisms are the most obvious examples of thisin contrast to apparently closed systems such as clockworkPrigogine, like other
adherents to systems theories, maintained that dissipative structures can also
be found in human artifacts that show a considerable capacity for self-organization. Consequently, he applied this model to social systems and human interaction. In this view, the human place is within nature, since human culture is a
subsystem with countless interrelations to neighboring systems. Hence, humanitys role is neither domination nor stewardship, but involvement and empathy
(Prigogine and Stengers 1984; Prigogine 1997).
It is important to note that dissipative structures do not necessarily tend to
gain a state of increased structure; they just reach higher orders of instability and
fluctuation. Indeed, similar to other philosophies (for instance, Schelling or
Bergson), it is the becoming and not the being that is essential for Prigogines
theory (Prigogine 1980). Therefore, he was critical of belief in cosmic harmony
or eternal laws and looked at the universe as always endangered, fragile, and
uncertain. This attitude brought Prigogine into opposition with both scientists
who strive for a Grand Unified Theory (Steven W. Hawking, for instance,
whom Prigogine sees as clinging to the old paradigm of being) and with teleological models prominent in New Age milieus. There is no telos, Prigogine argued; instead of being a simple consequence of the present, the future must be
addressed as a lively process with a whole spectrum of possibilities.
The theory of dissipative structures and the interdependence of natural and
social subsystemshence, the entanglement of mind and matter in self-organizing systemsleads to the assumption that small systems are able to influence
the overall structure of nature and the universe. Humanity and even the individual are no longer passive objects but acknowledge their responsibility and power
to influence the whole system. This in particular has attracted New Age thinkers
who at the same time played down the more disconcerting features of Prigogines theory, like his refutation of teleological or causal assumptions, which
goes along with his notion of contingency and the possibility of failure. As a consequence, Prigogine has gained a selective reception by authors such as Erich
Jantsch, Fritjof Capra, David Bohm, and Marilyn Ferguson, all of them bringing
into his theory a more mystical and teleological understanding.
Discursive Implications
91
Gregory Bateson
The work of Gregory Bateson (1904 1980), anthropologist, psychiatrist, biologist, sociologist, and philosopher, is a highly original and thought-provoking
contribution to the interface of a number of different academic disciplines.
While psychologists use his concept of double-bind (a kind of communicative
entanglement of two persons), authors who are linked to new age and naturebased spirituality refer to his philosophical and ecological concepts as testimony
for their own thoughts. The latter is due to Batesons time at the Human Potential
Center Esalen in the last years of his life (Kripal 2007, 306 308). Bateson himself
never accepted his being associated with the New Age movement.
As far as the discourses on nature and religion are concerned, Batesons
most important ideas can be seen in his concept of mind and substance,
which is part of a larger systems theory (Bateson 1979, 2000). Making use of
C.G. Jungs notion of the two worlds, pleroma and creatura, Bateson argued
that the former is the realm of undifferentiated causal relations, whereas the latter views the same phenomena in a contextual way that makes visible the differences. The creatura is analogous to mind. It is the world, seen from a certain
perspective. If mind in general is characterized as such, the question arises:
what does its relation to individual minds look like? At this point, Bateson introduced a cybernetic model. The individual me is not limited to body or sensual perceptions, but must be addressed as a subsystem of the encompassing
mind system. It is a unity set up by an analysis of the circumstances and not explainable by intrinsic characteristics. Furthermore, the individual minds unity is
identical with the unity of evolutionary survival; it cannot be separated from the
surrounding life-systems.
This perhaps is the most radical consequence, because it puts the relation
between humanity and nature in a context of mutual dependence. When
mind is immanent to the ecological system, human thought and action have decisive impact on the whole of nature. Conversely, humanity is totally dependent
on nature and its own survival is linked to the survival of nature. Therefore, Bateson advised a fundamental new orientation in several disciplines: ecology and
psychology have to acknowledge that the human mind transgresses the borders
of its body and is present in ideas and artifacts that can even survive the physical
death of a person (Bateson talked of the ecology of ideas). Theology, likewise,
has to overcome the dichotomy of transcendent versus immanent deities and can
approach the human being as part of the gods, who need the human mind just as
the human being needs the gods (Bateson and Bateson 1987).
In sum, Bateson called for a shift of paradigm, because otherwise the human
being will be extinct within a short span of time. It is this claim that made Ba-
92
Rupert Sheldrake
Biologist Rupert Sheldrake (b. 1942) has become another famous author of new
age science since he proposed his controversial theory of morphogenetic fields
in the early 1980s (Sheldrake 1981). The hypothesis of formative causation postulates the existence of invisible organizing fields that are able to transmit information to seemingly independent parts of reality, for instance to the genes of other
members of the species on another continent. This is made possible by what Sheldrake terms morphic resonance (Sheldrake 1988). Although his theory has been
refuted by the majority of empirical scientists, a set of independent experiments
show it to be at least not improbable. Like Wolfgang Paulis doctrine of synchronicity, the concept of morphogenetic fields is able to explain phenomena that
seem to be mysterious to traditional physics and biology. If the theorys propositions were accepted, the consequences would totally change our view of nature
and the cosmos. Therefore, Sheldrake elaborated a vitalist, holistic theory that
is empirical at the start and purely metaphysical in its implications (Sheldrake
1990). In the end, the universe for Sheldrake is a conscious and creative power,
which brings forth morphogenetic fields. All single, yet resonating, entities take
part in this cosmic dance of creativity, including the human mind.
As can easily be imagined, this proposition enthralled environmentalists
and theorists of ecological concerns. First, it provides an explanation for the mutual dependence of all levels of nature; second, it places the human in a cosmos
of encompassing energy and the vitality of cosmic intelligence; third, it appreciates all forms of lifehumans, animals, and plantsas equally intelligent and
therefore as carrying intrinsic value. All three conclusions are crucial elements
of deep ecology as well as of the discursive knot that we have encountered
many times in the present book.
David Bohm
Also in the 1980s, acclaimed physicist David Bohm (1917 1992) presented the socalled holographic paradigm, which was the result of thirty years research into
quantum mechanics and its philosophical implications. While his early work focused on the strictly scientific aspects of quantum mechanicsalthough from
the beginning he refused to separate science and philosophyBohms perspec-
Discursive Implications
93
tive changed when he met the Indian thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti in 1961, after
the latters separation from the Theosophical Society. Bohms Wholeness and
the Implicit Order (1980), although presented as a work in progress, became influential in modern philosophy of nature and the debates on holism. In this
book, Bohm presented a theory that describes the phenomenal world as the unfolding of a more fundamental implicit order. This implicit order is characterized by an unbroken dynamic wholenessa holomovementthat comprises
both matter and consciousness.
In later publications, Bohm expanded his theory, describing a hierarchy of
orders beyond the implicate (the super-implicate order, the generative order,
etc.) and presented a theory of soma-significance, which intends to reconcile
the domains of matter and meaning. As can easily be recognized, his later
thought carries strong metaphysical and mystical connotations (Bohm and
Hiley 1993). This led to a kind of alienation from the traditional physicists
and, simultaneously, to a broad appreciation in a philosophical, theological,
and esoteric field of discourse. It is important to note that his theories are in
fact deterministic and thus in opposition to other strands of quantum mysticism
that focus on a-causality and indeterminacy. While Bohm did not engage in direct political or environmental activities, his influence is nevertheless important
because he provided those endeavors with a theoretical holistic framework that
can easily be attached to environmental concerns (see also Forstner 2008).
I conclude my overview at this point. It should have become clear by now that
the discursive entanglement of monism, vitalism, science, philosophy, and religion has been a significant contribution to intellectual discourse of the twentieth
century and beyond. We are not dealing with a marginal movement here. The discursive knot under consideration is one of the most important reasons for the steady
growth of concerns about nature in Europe as well as of religious options that seek
an alternative to traditional monotheistic interpretations.
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surrounded by Russian nobility. Her father, Peter A. von Hahn, was descended
from a noble German family and served in the army, while her mother, Helena
A. de Fadeyev (von Hahn), achieved renown as a novelist but died young, so Blavatsky grew up with her aristocratic maternal grandparents. In 1849 she married
the vice-governor of Erevan, Nikifor Blavatsky, but their union was unhappy and
brief. She soon left her husband and embarked on an adventurous life of travels
that are still not fully documented. She visited Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and
France, arriving in London in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition.
According to her own account, it was in Hyde Park that Blavatsky met her
Master, whom she had known in her dreams since childhood. He came toward
her in the company of an Indian delegation. Later she wrote to A.P. Sinnet, [I]
saw Master in my visions ever since my childhood. In the year of the first Nepaul
Embassy (when?) saw and recognised him. Saw him twice. Once he came out of
the crowd, then He ordered me to meet Him in Hyde Park. I cannot, I must not
speak of this. I would not publish it for the world (Barker 1999 [1926], 150 151).
Henceforth, Blavatsky claimed to live in continuous contact with these Masters.
Who they exactly were is not easy to establish, even within the Theosophical Society. Sometimes they are simply distinguished individuals who can materialize
and incarnate at various places; sometimes they are subtle forces of energy that
only assume corporeal form in order to appear visible to humans.
The first model was Blavatskys choice (see also Johnson 1994), for she described her teachers as Indian gurus, namely Mahatma Moryaknown as Master Mborn in the Punjab, and Mahatma Koot Hoomi (Master KH), from Kashmir. The Theosophist of October 1907 printed Blavatskys following account:
There is beyond the Himalayas a nucleus of Adepts, of various nationalities, and the Teshu
[Panchen] Lama knows them, and they act together, and some of them are with him and yet
remain unknown in their true character even to the average lamaswho are ignorant fools
mostly. My Master and KH and several others I know personally are there, coming and
going, and they are all in communication with Adepts in Egypt and Syria, and even Europe
(quoted in Cranston 1994, 83).
The idea of a White Brotherhood, long current in Europe, merges here with mystical notions of the Orient. The notion of a mysterious community of sages has
recurred in esoteric discourse ever since Platos philosopher-kings gave rise to
utopias with an ideal and sometimes transcendent government. The Renaissance
conceived of a succession of distinguished world teachers bearing the prisca theologia, an idea further elaborated by the Rosicrucians as a secret society. This
tradition was now supplemented by European fantasies concerning sages of
the Orient, the Mahatmas (Great Souls) who, either from the mythical paradise
of Shambala or from spheres beyond the material world, mysteriously directed
96
the destinies of human beings. I will come back to this idea, which was taken up
by others at the end of the nineteenth century.
After the first contact with her Master, Blavatsky led an extremely turbulent
life, which led her on journeys to Canada, Mexico, Latin America, the West Indies, Ceylon, and India. In 1854 she allegedly crossed the Rocky Mountains
with settlers in covered wagons. Many biographers accept her account of journeys to India, Kashmir, Russia, the Caucasus, France, Germany, Egypt, and
Italy, but her alleged visit to Tibet, where she claimed to study secret documents
in Lamaist monasteries, is not confirmed by scholarship. Whatever ones view,
these extensive journeys to mythically charged places in the history of humankind represent an important instrument for the legitimization of esoteric knowledge (Hammer 2001). Even if Blavatsky had undertaken only half of these journeys, it would have been a clear indication of her extraordinary character and
her driving ambition to abandon bourgeois mores and to achieve an education
and self-emancipation denied to most women of her generation. Her whole
life was a provocation to the guardians of Victorian etiquette.
Blavatskys public career really began in 1872 with her attempt to found a
magical club or a socit spirite in Cairo and her arrival in New York in 1873.
By this time Blavatsky was already an experienced medium, and she soon
made contact with the spiritualist scene, increasingly popular in America
since the 1850s. The development of American spiritualism is usually reckoned
to date from the events that occurred at Hydesville, New York, in 1847. Soon
after John D. Fox, his wife, and six children had moved into their new house
in Hydesville, they began to hear mysterious rapping sounds. These raps were
attributed to the ghost of a murdered peddler, whose body had been buried in
the cellar of the house. Two of the daughters, Margaret and Kate, developed a
form of communication with the ghost, and more importantly, they discovered
the commercial success of such conversations with spirits. The novelty spread
like wildfire in the United States, and the Fox sisters became national celebrities
who could charge for their performances.
Other mediums lost no time in jumping on the bandwagon. By 1855 two
million Americans were said to be convinced of the truth of the observed phenomena, which were now reported from many farms. Research groups were
founded in order to study the matter scientifically, and the famous Society for
Psychical Research, which became even better known for its clash with Madame
Blavatsky, owed its origin to these inquiries. Many of the alleged spirit communications were unmasked as hoaxes, and when Margaret Fox, some forty years
after the Hydesville incident, publicly confessed that she and her sister had staged the whole affair, the movement suffered a severe blow (Jenkins 2000, 39 41).
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Of course, spiritualism did not begin with the events at Hydesville. The only
novelty in these circumstances was their becoming an object of public debate
(Godwin 1993, 187 204). Communication with ascended beingswhether the
souls of the deceased or with other spiritshas a long history, in which the mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg is an important chapter. But spiritualism was significant for the history of American religion, as it influenced many Christian denominations and led to a series of new religions. Under the name of Allen
Kardec, Hyppolyte Leon Denizard Rivail (1804 1869), well versed in magnetism,
Mesmerism, and esoteric traditions, founded an important new religion, after a
Druid spirit source had revealed messages to him. His work, Le livre des esprits
(The Book of Spirits, 1857), became a fundamental text of the colorful spiritualist movement, which according to conservative estimates today numbers over
one hundred million followers worldwide, the majority living in Latin America.
Spiritualism was also an important factor for religious seekers outside the institutional churches, which Robert C. Fuller calls the emergence of unchurched
America (Fuller 2001, 38 44). What is more, in conjunction with Mesmerism
and animal magnetism, it had a strong impact on the emergence of psychology
as an academic discipline (Ellenberger 1970, 53 102).
Blavatsky was in any case very interested in the spiritualist debates of her
time. In October 1874 she met Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832 1907), who
was at that moment publishing a series of newspaper articles on spiritualist phenomena taking place at a farm in Vermont. For all their differences of personality, a close relationship developed between Blavatsky and her Theosophical
twin. Olcott was a lawyer with a flourishing practice specializing in commercial
law, and had earlier undertaken the public inquiry into the assassination of
Abraham Lincoln. He had long been interested in esoteric subjects and was
close to the Freemasons. He became Blavatskys principal partner and was chiefly responsible for organizing what would become the Theosophical Society.
On 9 March 1875, Colonel Olcott received a mysterious letter, written in golden
ink and addressed to the Neophytos Olcott. The sender identified himself as a certain Tuitit Bey, Grand Master of the mystical Brotherhood of Luxor. Further letters
followed from the Masters, in which Olcott was summoned to publish various articles in a New York newspaper about occultism and similar topics. Later he was
encouraged to concern himself with Blavatsky and her public influence.
In May 1875, Olcott founded the Miracle Club, without knowing that a group
of that name already existed in London. Blavatsky was probably not a member of
this club, but wrote in her scrapbook in July 1875: Orders received from India
direct to establish a philosophic-religious Society & choose a name for italso
to choose Olcott (quoted from Cranston 1994, 143). This commission was shortly
fulfilled, for at a lecture by the architect and engineer George H. Felt on The lost
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canon of proportion of the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, held on 7 September 1875 in Blavatskys apartment before an audience of seventeen persons, Olcott had the idea of founding a new society. At successive meetings Olcott was
elected president, and after some leafing through a dictionary it was decided
to call it the Theosophical Society.
The goals of the organization were later defined as follows: (1) to form the
nucleus of a universal brotherhood of humanity, without distinction of race,
creed, sex, caste, or color; (2) to study ancient and modern religions, philosophies, and sciences; and (3) to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and
psychical powers latent in humankind. These very goals demonstrate that the
Theosophical Society bridged esotericism, the comparative study of religion,
and the heritage of the Enlightenment.
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Modern Science and Theology (1877), with a print run of one thousand, had sold
out within ten days, and some 500,000 copies have been sold up to the present
day.
For the purpose of this study, it is particularly interesting to have a closer
look at the discursive re-entanglement that Blavatsky achieved in her writing.
Sheand the Theosophical Society in generalis certainly not the founder of
these discourses, but she played a significant role in the multiplication of discursive constellations that had influence in the twentieth century and are still in
place today. Isis Unveiled collects the knowledge of the nineteenth century and
assembles it in a way that intends to demonstrate the anti-materialist truth of
eternal Eastern wisdom. Even the books title was anticipated by others. It
was none other than Carl Gustav Carus who wrote in his Zwlf Briefe ber das
Erdleben (1841):
To be sure, when after learning about Oersteds discovery I understood this view of the magnetic life of the earth, it felt as if I suddenly got much closer to the secret of this whole planetary being.Hence, if this particular view as yet has not been your own, I hope that its
realization will now be a welcome enrichment of your inner vision and thinking.Indeed,
we can hardly enjoy a higher and purer pleasure than when one veil after the other is stripped off the deeply covered image of Isis, and we thus learn to increasingly perceive ourselves as being part of a general divine life.
Carus here refers to Hans Christian rsted (1777 1851), the Danish physicist and
chemist who discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields, which was
an important step in the development of electromagnetism. rsted influenced
post-Kantian philosophy and nineteenth-century interpretation of science. Blavatsky was familiar with this research and interpreted it in a similar fashion
as Carus, but her undertone is less Romantically inspired and less eroticized,
and much more polemical in its anti-Christian and anti-materialist attack.
Gewi, als mir damals durch das Studium der Oerstedschen Entedeckung diese Ansicht
vom magnetischen Leben der Erde aufging, was es mir, als wre ich mit einem Male dem
Geheimnis dieses ganzen planetarischen Daseins um ein groes Teil nhergekommen.Ist
daher Dir gerade diese Betrachtungsweise bisher noch nicht eigen gewesen, so hoffe ich, da
nun auch Dir deren Aufnahme eine erfreuliche Bereicherung des innern Schauens und Denkens
sein werde.Knnen wir doch berhaupt kaum einer hhern und reinern Freude genieen, als
indem ein Schleier nach dem andern von dem tiefverhllten Isisbilde sich lst und wir somit
mehr und mehr im Innern eines allgemeinen gttlichen Lebens uns fhlen lernen (Carus 1926
[1841], 241, emphasis original). German Romanticism is not mentioned in Coleman 1895 as a
source of inspiration for Blavatsky.
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These guerilla-skirmishes between the champions of the clergy and the materialistic Academy of Science, prove abundantly how little the latter has done toward uprooting blind fanaticism from the minds of even very educated persons. Evidently science has neither completely conquered nor muzzled theology. She will master her only on that day when she will
condescend to see in the spiritual phenomenon something besides mere hallucination and
charlatanry. But how can she do it without investigating it thoroughly? Let us suppose that
before the time when electro-magnetism was publicly acknowledged, the Copenhagen Professor Oersted, its discoverer, had been suffering from an attack of what we call psychophobia, or pneumatophobia. He notices that the wire along which a voltaic current is passing
shows a tendency to turn the magnetic needle from its natural position to one perpendicular to the direction of the current. Suppose, moreover, that the professor had heard much
of certain superstitious people who used that kind of magnetized needles to converse with
unseen intelligences. That they received signals and even held correct conversations with
them by means of the tippings of such a needle, and that in consequence he suddenly
felt a scientific horror and disgust for such an ignorant belief, and refused, point-blank,
to have anything to do with such a needle. What would have been the result? Electro-magnetism might not have been discovered till now, and our experimentalists would have been
the principal losers thereby (Blavatsky 2006 [1877], vol. 1, 92, emphasis original).
This is a typical example of how Blavatsky presents her reading of the history of
religion, science, and culture. Later in her narrative, she states that electromagnetism, the so-called discovery of Professor Oersted, had been used by Paracelsus three centuries before (2006 [1877], vol. 1, 146, emphasis original). Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler (the forerunner of Newton in many great
truths, 2006 [1877], vol. 1, 185), Robert Fludd, Cagliostro, Eliphas Lvi, and other
well-known persons in what is presented by Blavatsky and other occultists as an
anti-clerical tradition, are the major authorities when it comes to the legitimization of genuine science, astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and Hermetic philosophy (see, e. g., Blavatsky 2006 [1877], vol. 1, xl).
The discourse strands of alchemy, vitalism, and astrology are omnipresent in Isis Unveiled (on kabbalah see Huss 2010, 184 187 and Chapter 6
below). A few examples stand for an abundance of others. As regards alchemy
and chemistry, Blavatsky notes:
The Rosicrucians of the middle ages, such as Robertus de Fluctibus (Robert Fludd), Paracelsus, Thomas Vaughan (Eugenius Philalethes), Van Helmont, and others, were all alchemists, who sought for the hidden spirit in every inorganic matter. Some peoplenay, the great
majorityhave accused alchemists of charlatanry and false pretending. Surely such men as
Roger Bacon, Agrippa, Henry Kunrath, and the Arabian Geber (the first to introduce into
Europe some of the secrets of chemistry), can hardly be treated as impostorsleast of all
as fools. Scientists who are reforming the science of physics upon the basis of the atomic
theory of Demokritus, as restated by John Dalton, conveniently forget that Demokritus, of
Abdera, was an alchemist, and that the mind that was capable of penetrating so far into
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the secret operations of nature in one direction must have had good reasons to study and
become a Hermetic philosopher (vol. 1, xxxiixxxiii).
Blavatsky directly refers to the polemical disjunction that accompanied the emergence of modern chemistry through the works of Dalton and others. To bridge
over the narrow gulf which now separates the new chemistry from old alchemy, is
little, if any harder than what they have done in going from dualism to the law of
Avogadro (vol. 1, 145, emphasis original, with link to Paracelsus). This non-dualism is also a discursive link to monism.
When we look at vitalism, we find passages such as the following ones.
The unprofitableness of modern scientific research is evinced in the fact that while we have
a name for the most trivial particle of mineral, plant, animal, and man, the wisest of our
teachers are unable to tell us anything definite about the vital force which produces the
changes in these several kingdoms. It is necessary to seek further for corroboration of
this statement than the works of our highest scientific authorities themselves (vol. 1, 212).
Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life,
says the evangelist. Both are electricitythe life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the
universe, the electric vivifier of all things. Light is the great Protean magician, and under
the Divine Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every
form as well as to every living being. From its swelling, electric bosom, springs matter
and spirit. Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and
of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its primordial point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of
worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies (vol. 1, 231, emphasis original).
It has been the speculation of men of science from time immemorial what this vital
force or life-principle is. To our mind the secret doctrine alone is able to furnish the
clew. Exact science recognizes only five powers in natureone molar, and four molecular;
kabalists, seven; and in these two additional ones is enwrapped the whole mystery of life.
One of these is immortal spirit, whose reflection is connected by invisible links even with
inorganic matter; the other, we leave to every one to discover for himself (vol. 1, 419, emphasis original; see also vol. 2, 540).
Finally, there are long passages and dozens of references to astrology, in which
the author links astrological doctrine and tradition to the other esoteric lines of
thought. Blavatsky also includes the new discipline of psychology in her conceptualization of astrology:
Astrology is to exact astronomy what psychology is to exact physiology. In astrology and
psychology one has to step beyond the visible world of matter, and enter into the domain
of transcendent spirit. It is the old struggle between the Platonic and Aristotelean schools,
and it is not in our century of Sadducean skepticism that the former will prevail over the
latter (vol. 1, 232, spelling original).
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As references, the author invokes the heroes of what is constructed as esoteric tradition, but also contemporary authors such as Johann W. Pfaff and his Astrologie
(1816; see Chapter 2 above; see Blavatsky 2006 [1877], vol. 1, 45 46). Indeed, it is
of crucial importance for the discursive impact of Blavatskys work that she not
only polemically attacked what she thought was a wrong understanding of science,
but that she actively engaged the academic discourse of her time, entirely in line
with the goals of the Theosophical Society. Quotes and counter-quotes abound in
Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, and the author demonstrates an acquaintance
with the discussions in the natural sciences, Indology, and history. The Indologist
Friedrich Max Mller is one of the major references when it comes to Blavatskys
construction of an ancient Indian (Aryan) wisdom tradition. John Dalton was mentioned earlier. A third example is Thomas Wright:
As a commentary on this, the modern historian remarks: This may be taken as a sort of
exemplification of the class of exhibitions which were probably the result of a superior
knowledge of natural sciences. No one ever doubted that it was the result of precisely
such a knowledge, and the hermetists, magicians, astrologers and alchemists never claimed anything else. It certainly was not their fault that the ignorant masses, under the influence of an unscrupulous and fanatic clergy, should have attributed all such works to the
agency of the devil (vol. 1, 58, emphasis original, with a reference in a footnote without
page number to Wrights Narratives of Sorcery and Magic, i. e., Wright 1855).
Mark S. Morrisson correctly remarked that much of the success of the Theosophical
movement stemmed from Blavatskys imaginative synthesis of Western occultism
and Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, and her efforts to situate the new religion as essentially an ancient science (Morrisson 2007, 70, emphasis original). In its
formal appearance, Blavatskys work is a mixture of genres that combines elements
of academic argumentation (with footnotes being an aesthetic device that adds to
authority), philosophical essay, and religious polemics. Undoubtedly, this combination has added to the discursive impact of her writings.
After the publication of Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky travelled to India and settled
in Bombay, where the Theosophical Society enjoyed an extremely positive response. Its construction of an Oriental spirituality as the ancient wisdom of
humankind significantly contributed to the strengthening of an anti-colonial
identity in India (on the link between the academic study of religion, Orientalism, and Indian politics see King 2011; Lubelsky 2012, 1 76). In 1882, the headquarters of the Society were moved to Adyar, near Madras. The wave of sympathy
embracing the Theosophists in India and Ceylon had strong political implications. One may cite the example of S. Radhakrishnan, the philosopher and president of India, who stated:
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When, with all kinds of political failures and economic breakdowns we (Indians) were suspecting the values and vitality of our culture, when everything round about us and secular
education happened to discredit the value of Indian culture, the Theosophical Movement rendered great service by vindicating those values and ideas. The influence of the Theosophical
Movement on general Indian society is incalculable (quoted in Cranston 1994, 192).
The most prominent example of this influence is Mahatma Gandhi, who became
acquainted with the Theosophical Society during his law studies in London in
1889. In his autobiography he describes how, like many other intellectuals of
his time, he first gained access to his own culture through his encounter with
the Theosophical Society. For the first time he read the Bhagavad Gita, which
later became a central reference point in his philosophy and politics (Cranston
1994, 194 195; cf. now the much more academic analysis in Lubelsky 2012,
270 284). During their time in India the Theosophists would also experience serious setbacks. There were increasing accusations of fraud, whereby the Mahatma letters were alleged to be forgeries, and Blavatsky was supposed to have supplemented her mediumistic powers with all sorts of tricks, which led to a loss of
prestige for the Theosophical Society in Europe and North America. Space does
not permit a detailed account here of how the relationship between Blavatsky
and Olcott deteriorated. More important is Blavatskys major work, which she
wrote as if possessed in the last years of her life.
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of Isis Unveiled. It was, however, soon found that the explanations which could
be added to those already put before the world in the last-named and other
works dealing with esoteric science, were such as to require a different method
of treatment (Blavatsky 2013 [1888], vol. 1, vii, emphasis added). As to esoteric
discourse, it is noteworthy that Blavatsky points out that
[t]hese truths are in no sense put forward as a revelation; nor does the author claim the position of a revealer of mystic lore, now made public for the first time in the worlds history.
For what is contained in this work is to be found scattered throughout thousands of volumes
embodying the scriptures of the great Asiatic and early European religions, hidden under
glyph and symbol, and hitherto left unnoticed because of this veil (2013 [1888], vol. 1, vii).
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This, Science will not deny, since Astronomy knows of the fixed cycle of eleven years
when the number of solar spots increases,* which is due to the contraction of the Solar
HEART. The universe (our world in this case) breathes, just as man and every living creature, plant, and even mineral does upon the earth; and as our globe itself breathes
every twenty-four hours. The dark region is not due to the absorption exerted by the vapours issuing from the bosom of the sun and interposed between the observer and the photosphere, as Father Secchi would have it (Le Soleil II., 184), nor are the spots formed by
the matter (heated gaseous matter) which the irruption projects upon the solar disc (ibid).
It is similar to the regular and healthy pulsation of the heart, as the life fluid passes through
its hollow muscles (2013 [1888], vol. 1, 540 541).
Let me refer here to Blavatskys article Kosmic Mind in Lucifer, which clearly
expresses what is at stake for our analysis.
Now to lay at rest once for all in the minds of Theosophists this vexed question, we intend
to prove that modern science, owing to physiology, is itself on the eve of discovering that
consciousness is universalthus justifying Edisons dreams. But before we do this, we
mean also to show that though many a man of science is soaked through and through
with such belief, very few are brave enough to openly admit it, as the late Dr. Pirogoff of
St. Petersburg has done in his posthumous Memoirs. Indeed that great surgeon and pathologist raised by their publication quite a howl of indignation among his colleagues. How
then? the public asked: He, Dr. Pirogoff, whom we regarded as almost the embodiment of
European learning, believing in the superstitions of crazy alchemists? He, who in the words
of a contemporary:
was the very incarnation of exact science and methods of thought; who had dissected hundreds and thousands of human organs, making himself as acquainted
with all the mysteries of surgery and anatomy as we are with our familiar furniture;
the savant for whom physiology had no secrets and who, above all men was one to
whom Voltaire might have ironically asked whether he had not found immortal soul
between the bladder and the blind gut, that same Pirogoff is found after his death
devoting whole chapters in his literary Will to the scientific demonstration (Novoye Vremya of 1887)
of what? Why, of the existence in every organism of a distinct VITAL FORCE independent of any physical or chemical process. Like Liebig he accepted the derided and
tabooed homogeneity of naturea Life Principlethat persecuted and hapless teleology,
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In other passages in The Secret Doctrine we see Blavatsky adding even more discourse strands to her already complex knot. In her musings on Ancient and
Modern Prophecies, she adds paganism and Asian religion to the mlange
and makes sure to use this in her sideswipe at modern materialist science.
But with the pagans, with whom, as Coleridge has it Time, cyclical time, was their abstraction of the Deity that Deity manifesting co-ordinately with, and only through
Karma, and being that KARMA-NEMESIS itself, the cycles meant something more than a
mere succession of events, or a periodical space of time of more or less prolonged duration.
For they were generally marked with recurrences of a more varied and intellectual character than are exhibited in the periodical return of seasons or of certain constellations. Modern wisdom is satisfied with astronomical computations and prophecies based on unerring
mathematical laws. Ancient Wisdom added to the cold shell of astronomy the vivifying elements of its soul and spiritASTROLOGY. And, as the sidereal motions do regulate and
determine other events on Earthbesides potatoes and the periodical disease of that useful
vegetable(a statement which, not being amenable to scientific explanation, is merely derided, while accepted) those events have to be allowed to find themselves predetermined
by even simple astronomical computations. Believers in astrology will understand our
meaning, sceptics will laugh at the belief and mock the idea. Thus they shut their eyes, ostrich-like, to their own fate (Blavatsky 2013 [1888], vol. 1, 645).
Blavatskys ability to weave together all of these diverse discourse strands into
one historical narrative and to lend it authority in different directions with her
mixing of genresmost prominently academic argument, philosophical musings, religious polemics, and presumed contact with the astral planeare doubtless the main reasons for the success of her writing. Whether we call this fraud,
chutzpa, or genius is beside the point. What is important is the discursive impact
that this construction exerted on subsequent readings of religious history and
esoteric claims of knowledge.
Blavatskys final years were marked by conflict, and even after her death the
Theosophical Society was riven by disputes over succession. Moreover, the ascended Masters were by no means free of such earthbound emotions. The Mahatma letters, which were sent beginning in 1880 to leading members of the Society, chiefly A.P. Sinnett and A.O. Hume, reflected the only too human. The
Masters complain about a lack of paper, take sideswipes at other rival Masters,
deprecate human weakness, and evince a misogyny that seems astonishing
given Blavatskys prominent role. For instance, Sinnett received a letter that ridiculed Blavatsky as the gifted editor of the Theosophist, who has been off her
107
head since the accusation. Verily womanis a dreadful calamity in this fifth
race! (Barker 2013 [1923], Letter No. 93).
After her move to London in 1887, Blavatskys activities demonstrate the increasing tension between individual wings of the Theosophical Society, but also between
herself and Olcott. She was still busy writing in her final years. In 1889 she published The Key to Theosophy and The Voice of Silence (for which the Dalai Lama wrote a
warm acknowledgment in 1993), but much of her energy was directed toward securing her own position. The power struggle between Olcott and Blavatsky was initially
defused by Blavatsky founding her own Esoteric Section (or Esoteric School) in England, whose members were chiefly drawn from the previously formed Blavatsky
Lodge, while Olcott was responsible for the affairs of the Indian Section (Adyar).
The Esoteric School effectively acted as an inner circle of Blavatskys closest male
and female followers, and its teachings, initiations, and courses of instruction remained largely secret. By re-founding a British Section, Blavatsky claimed yet
more authority for herself, which Olcott, as president of the Society, would no longer
tolerate. Blavatsky therefore declared her own British lodges independent of Adyar
in 1890, simultaneously claiming to represent all of Europe. The break was thereby
complete and would continue to influence the later history of the Theosophical Society, after Blavatsky passed away on 8 May 1891.
Wars of Succession
After Blavatskys death the Theosophical Society continued to be led by Olcott
and other disputants. At this time Annie Besant (1847 1933) came to the fore.
Besant had first joined the Society after writing a review of The Secret Doctrine.
Her discovery of this book marked the close of a painful time in her life, when the
quest for religious fulfillment had led her to break away from her marriage to an
Anglican clergyman. Parallels with the life of Blavatsky will be evident. Besant
strengthened the orientation toward India during the whole period of her leadership of the Society, which led to further schisms (on Steiner see below; on the
response from the Toronto Theosophical Society see McCann 2012, 135 136).
In 1917, Besant was elected president of the Indian National Congress. This parliament was instrumental in leading India to independence under the guidance
of Mahatma Gandhi (see the detailed analysis in Lubelsky 2012, 190 284).
Katherine Tingley (1847 1929) pursued a very different agenda by placing
practical and social interests at the heart of her teachings. Supported by W.Q.
Judge, a co-founder of the Theosophical Society, Tingley sought to give this movement an institutional basis by founding her own center in 1897 in Pasadena near
Los Angeles. Its guiding principle was the foundation of a new global society with
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new educational systems, new forms of horticulture, and provision for theater and
the arts. Many ideas of the later New Age movement, especially in their political
aspects, are borrowed from Tingleys brand of Theosophy. The Pasadena center
still publishes the magazine Sunrise, and according to its own report there are almost fifty centers with approximately one hundred groups worldwide.
Joy Dixon remarked about the change within the Theosophical Society:
In the 1890s a new variant of eastern mysticism, the East as the locus of a manly and rational spirituality, became a key element in the scientific spirituality of the Theosophical
Society in England. This scientific spirituality was used to authorize a particular kind of spiritual authority and spiritual experience. Scientific spirituality was modeled on the academic study of religions: techniques developed within the emerging sciences of anthropology and the comparative study of religions (especially through philology) were redeployed
in the service of a more modern spirituality (2001, 42 43).
The gendered configuration of discourses of mysticism and Orientalism is of crucial importance, and in Chapter 6 I will come back to this in more detail. However, one may doubt whether there really was a significant change from Blavatsky to her followers in this regard. Dixons argument that after Blavatskys death
the Theosophical Society in England became something like a self-consciously
gentlemanly variant of theosophy, which emphasized above all theosophys rational, scholarly, and scientific character (Dixon 2001, 41), may also be attributed to the Societys crisis of reputation rather than to a fundamental break with
Theosophys esoteric sideletters from the Masters, precipitations and materializations, initiations and Masonic rites (ibid.). In 1903, when Rudolf Steiner
tried to counter the critique that Theosophy was a female philosophy, noting
that this could be changed and that in critical Germany Theosophy could be
turned into a male philosophy, he dramatically underestimated the emancipated Theosophical women (Zander 2011, 167).
Another aspect of scientific spirituality is at stake here. We have seen above
that Blavatsky herself was keen to present Theosophy as an ancient science. To understand the changes in Theosophical discourse, it is also important to keep in
mind that major discoveries in the natural sciences were made after Blavatskys
death. In Morrissons words: If Blavatsky meant to make Theosophy a science
whose ultimate goal was spiritual wisdom, her methods of scientific engagement
were beginning to show their limitations within a few years after her death (2007,
70). That is why around 1900, the Theosophical journals augmented the work of
sanitizing Blavatskys doctrines. They acted as clearinghouses for information
about the latest scientific discoveries gleaned from newspapers, scientific journals,
and current science books (ibid., 71).
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At this point, yet another schism should be mentioned, which became particularly important in the United States because of its strong Christian bent.
Born into a Christian fundamentalist milieu, Alice Ann Bailey (1880 1949)
joined the Theosophical Society in 1915 but was expelled in 1923 on account
of her Christian creed, whereupon she founded the Arcane School, which is
still internationally active today. The objective of Arcane School Theosophy,
which only admits adults according to strict criteria, is the recognition of the individual balance of karma. At the heart of its teachings lies the Great Invocation, a sort of mantra or magical formula, which should be recited as often
as possible by the adepts. This serves to restore cosmic harmony and prepare
for the Second Coming of Christ.
Like Blavatsky before her, Bailey also claimed that her writings had been
written by an ascended Master (in her case the Tibetan Dhwal Khul) and
only received by her. Bailey also practiced a form of astrology mystically influenced by Theosophy. She published a five-volume work under the title A Treatise
on the Seven Rays, whose third volume, Esoteric Astrology, was devoted entirely to
this mystical astrology. Even if there are few readers who have worked right
through this extensive and often impenetrable book, the influence of esoteric astrology was immense. The work has the authority of revelation for many spiritually minded astrologers, and it is still available in esoteric bookshops today.
The impact of Baileys Arcane School upon esoteric discourse in the second
half of the twentieth century can be deduced from the fact that it maintains centers in New York, London, Geneva, and Buenos Aires. A leaflet entitled What Is
an Esoteric School? published around 1998 by the Lucis Trust in Geneva reads
as follows: Today there exists no esoteric school which prepares individuals for
initiation. Those that claim this are deceiving the public. One can teach followers
in an academic sense, but by contrast initiation is always an individual goal,
which each person can reach only by contact with the world of spiritual
being (p. 12, quoted from the German edition). An esoteric school comes into
existence, the leaflet continues, as advanced disciples recognize their task
in the world. The life of the disciple thereby becomes magnetic, radiant, and
dynamic, whereby he attracts and gathers those whom he can help. He thereby
becomes the living center of a vital organism, but not the leader of an organization (ibid., emphasis original). In New Age jargon such disciples are frequently
called light workers. This reflects the notion that the world will be transformed
into light by a group of elect persons playing a key role.
A final schism from the parent Adyar movement should be mentioned here.
The United Lodge of Theosophists, founded in 1919 by Robert Crosby (1849
1919) as a reaction to the disputes between the various Theosophical splinter
groups, is still active today. The United Lodge attempts to avoid any kind of per-
110
sonality cult and the tendency toward bureaucracy; there is no membership, and
lectures and publications are largely anonymous. One might describe this as the
anarchistic section of the Theosophical Society.
There is a whole range of further groups close to the Theosophical Society, but
as institutionalized associations they have little significance. Today the total membership of the Adyar Society is estimated at 40,000, the Pasadena Society deriving
from Tingley at 2,000, and the United Lodge at 1,000 persons worldwide.
111
112
examines his lectures prior to 1910, the close relationship between their contents
and the writings of Blavatsky are apparent. The borrowing of the magazine title
Luzifer (Light Bringer), from Blavatskys London journal founded in September
1887, demonstrates Steiners proximity to Theosophy. Even in this case, Steiner
advertised the idea as his own.
Nevertheless, Steiner subsequently developed his own particular combination of discourse strands. The Theosophical idea of initiated adepts that line
up in a long historical tradition was part of Anthroposophical thinking too.
Steiner took this from Blavatsky, but also from Edouard Schur (1841 1929). In
his book Les grands initis (1889, translated into English as The Great Initiates),
Schur presented a tradition that replaced Persia with India, as might be expected at this time, giving the lineage Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and Jesus. The German edition of The Great Initiates, with a foreword by Rudolf Steiner, appeared in its twentieth edition in 1992. Schur was
friendly with Rudolf Steiner and his wife Marie Steiner-von Sivers, who not
only translated the book from French into German, but also produced Schurs
mystery-dramas on the stage (Zander 2007, 1019 1028; Zander 2011, 155 156,
291 300). Helmut Zander notes that the historical value of Schurs drama is
of secondary importance. More important is that he used the medium of archaizing [antikisierend] drama to take a stand in the problems of self-positioning of
alternative-religious dissenters around 1900 (Zander 2007, 1027).
Steiners involvement in the philosophical and intellectual debates of Germany,
however, represented an important difference between his interests and the BritishIndian brand of Theosophy. In the course of time he found himself at odds with the
Theosophical emphasis on Oriental wisdom-teachings. He opposed this with his
own Christian worldview, which interpreted the development of human history as
the product of so-called Christ impulses, a scheme that combined the doctrine
of successive world-teachers with the Christian mystical tradition. But whether in
the Theosophical form or in the garb of Anthroposophical Christ impulses, the
idea of a transcendent world of sages who safeguard the memory of ancient wisdom
has cardinal importance for twentieth-century esoteric discourse. This discourse reappears, for instance, in the many channeled messages of those entities, which
make their knowledge available to select individuals.
In sum, there can be no doubt that the specific constellation of discourse
strands that representatives of Theosophy and Anthroposophy provided to various milieus was instrumental in establishing new meanings of religion and science in the twentieth century. It is of relevance for the present study that the
same discursive knots reappear in academic writings of the same period, thus
stabilizing and further legitimizing the underlying attributions of meaning. To
these academics I will turn in the next chapters.
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ideas being advanced; we dont hear the resonances of words; we dont see all of
the symbols containedfor examplein a piece of cloth that serves as a veil
(Scott 2007, 8). So, let us turn to the origin of this discourse.
The Jews and the so-called Jewish question were vehicles of mythologized colonialism in Germany, and Jewish emancipation could assume the function of an
internal colonization (Hess 1998). To be sure, this was not a uniquely German
phenomenon; one may think of the United States when, after the end of slavery,
colonial imagination was looking for a new colonized Other; Ireland would also
be an example, with its unique combination of Orientalism, nationalism, and occultism (Lennon 2004; Nally 2010, 146 148, and 223 227 on Yeats anti-Semitism). But in Germany a special constellation developed in which the Jewish
question was linked to anti-Semitism and the search for national identity after
1871 (Geller 2011; Davis 2012; Rash 2012).
Jewish historians and Christian (mainly Protestant) theologians were actively
involved in this debate, constructing a historical narrative that served their respec-
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119
Yes, prayer is still loud in the East. In each hour of praying, bit by bit, the embers from the
charge toward the height of the Lord are kindled. And for superficial and Western eyes and
ears, this leaves an embarrassing and tasteless impression: these relentless voices, these jolting figures, these foreign articulated, wailing, groaning melodies that storm together in a
wild, screaming chorus and that resonate like the rush of a distant surge, like the shouting
of a wild mass, even outside the buildings walls. Yet anyone who has been able to experience
an Islamic mosque during prayer would recognize the oriental in the Jew. The rhythm that
moves the body there is more despiritualized, less personal, more structured by order; it
has left its mark on the more objective part of prayer. With the Jew, it remained more subjective, more formed by the drive of prayer and out of the individual soul of the worshiper according to the force of the hour. But this, too, exists in the Orient: put briefly, the praying
eastern Jew in his most extreme rapture is more closely related to the dervish than to any
kind of modern Jew. That form of prayerthe self-absorption, the opening of oneself silently,
in the Western gesture, to receiving heavenly peaceis exactly the opposite of the praying
eastern Jews essence, motorized, dynamically driven like an arrow shot from a bow
(Zweig 1922, 46 47; translation quoted from Isenberg 2005, 101).
Indeed, to pray like an eastern Jew, as Zweig would have it, is to pray like a dervish (Isenberg 2005, 103). Martin Buber fully embraced this interpretation. Already in 1909, he had published his collection of ecstatic confessions, mystical
documents ranging from ancient Gnosticism and Platonism to Hinduism, Sufism, Christian medieval mysticism (with a clear focus on female mystics), and
mystical documents from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, including
evidence from ecstatics who could count as mentally ill (Buber 1923 [1909]).
As the bibliographical references make clear, Buber here summarized the academically accepted knowledge of his generation regarding these mystical traditions (ibid., 196 200). In his introduction to the highly diverse documents,
Buber tried to establish a common pattern of the ecstatic form of being in the
world, an experiential form of myth: But is myth a phantasm? Isnt it a revelation of the final reality of being? Isnt the experience of the ecstatic a synonym
for the original experience of the World Spirit? Arent both an experience? We
listen into ourselvesand we dont know which rushing sea we are listening to.
Bubers interest in Hasidic mysticism was not historical or scholarly. This led
to criticism, most famously by Gershom Scholem. But Buber had an agenda that
was different from that of the historian of Jewish mysticism. The Hasidic legend,
he explained, is a category of meaning anchored in transformative religious values or qualities, and as such it promotes an ethos of action. The historical-phi-
Aber ist der Mythus ein Phantasma? Ist er nicht eine Offenbarung der letzten Wirklichkeit des
Seins? Ist nicht das Erlebnis des Ekstatikers ein Sinnbild des Urerlebnisses des Weltgeistes? Ist
nicht beides ein Erlebnis? Wir horchen in uns hineinund wissen nicht, welches Meeres Rauschen wir hren (ibid., 22).
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Buber wove together the discourse strands that we have identified as the main
ingredients of the transformation of religion and sciencevitalism, monism,
energy, power (Kraft), biology, soul, nature (natura naturans)and linked
them to his understanding of experiential mysticism. In his conceptualization
it was the essence of Judaism that carried in it the full realization of this mystical
completion of the human being. As he explained in his Reden ber das Judentum
(Speeches about Judaism), original, essential Judaism was characterized by the
ideas of unity, deed (Tat), and future. This Urjudentum was also Oriental Judaism. In his speech Das Judentum und die Menschheit, Buber praised Asia as
the origin of this spirit:
Because this is the primordial process [Urproze] of the Jew, the primordial process that the
great Jews, in whom the deepest Judaism became alive, in their personal life have demonstrated with the profound power of Asian ingenuity: the unification of the soul. Great Asia
was the living model for the Occident, the Asia of boundlessness and sacred unity, the Asia
of Laotse and Buddha, which is also the Asia of Moses and the Isaiahs, of John, Jesus, and
Paul. The search for unity ignites the Jews creative power.
Gott und Natur sind ihm eins, wie Seele und Krper, oder vielmehr wie Energie und Organismus Was wir Gott nennen, ist die wirkende Lebensidee. Weil aber die Einheit aller
Kraft nur durch das Wirken der Krfte in der Natur offenbar wird, darum ist die Welt kein Sein,
sondern ein Werden. Die Wirklichkeit selbst aber ist neu an jedem Tag und an jedem Morgen
bietet sie sich aufs Neue unseren gestaltenden Hnden dar. So sind wir nicht die Sklaven,
sondern die Geliebten unserer Welt (handwritten manuscript among Bubers notes on his
dissertation; quoted from Mendes-Flohr 1978, 67).
Denn das ist der Urproze des Juden, der Urproze, den die groen Juden, in denen das
tiefste Judentum lebendig wurde, an ihrem persnlichen Leben mit der ganzen Gewalt asiatischer Genialitt zur Erscheinung gebracht haben: das Einswerden der Seele. Das groe Asien
lebte sich in ihnen dem Okzident vor, das Asien der Schrankenlosigkeit und der heiligen Einheit,
121
Consequently, Buber regarded everything creative in Christianity as fundamentally Jewish, and everything that was not Jewish in Christianity as fundamentally
uncreative. A dialogue between Christianity and Judaism is therefore futile
(Die Erneuerung des Judentums, Buber 1919, 85). In its pure, original form, Judaism was the Orients apostle for humanity [der Apostel des Orients vor der
Menschheit]; it was the Orients apostle because from its experience of inner rupture and the redemption from it Judaism received the power and the passion to
teach humankind what was necessary (Das Judentum und die Menschheit,
Buber 1919, 56). In Die Erneuerung des Judentums he claimed: This must legitimately be regarded as the fundamental difference between Orient and Occident: for the Oriental it is deed, for the Occidental it is belief that provides the
decisive link between the human being and God. This difference has taken
shape in the Jew in a most significant way (Buber 1919, 79).
With his presentation of Oriental Judaism as the essential teacher of humanity, Buber participated in an Orientalist discourse as it crystallized around the
writings of Helena P. Blavatsky and other Theosophists, but in contrast to the
at times anti-Jewish attitudes in their writings, Buber glorified an Asian Jewish
tradition. Although he regarded Judaism as a nation, the unity of which was
based on blood (Buber 1919, 14 22, describing blood as the deepest level of
power in the soul [das Blut als die tiefste Machtschicht der Seele], p. 22), Oriental Judaism could serve as a model for all human beings. In the great process
of Judaism everyone partakes who achieves the unity of his soul, who internally
chooses the pure over the impure, the free over the not free, the fruitful over the
fruitless, everyone who drives the hagglers out of his temple. This ideal type is
what Buber called the Urjude in contrast to the Galuthjude (i. e., the Jew living in
the diaspora). Urjude I call the person who becomes conscious of the great
power of the original Judaism [der groen Krfte des Urjudentums] and who
opts for it, for its activation, for its working [Werkwerden] (Das Judentum
und die Menschheit, Buber 1919, 52 53). It is remarkable that Buber here
opens the theoretical opportunity for non-Jews to participate in the essentialized
idea of the Urjudentum. Exactly this interpretation gained currency in the course
of the twentieth century, when the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition was increasingly
globalized and extended beyond the confines of the Jewish community.
das Asien Laotses und Buddhas, welches das Asien des Moses und der Jesaiasse, des Johannes,
des Jesus und des Paulus ist. Am Streben nach Einheit entznden sich im Juden die schpferischen Krfte (Buber 1919, 48).
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123
264). Scholems dilemma was that his Gnostically inspired Zionism constructed
Judaism in just as essentialist a way as did the scholars whom he abhorred.
His Zionist inclination was early on linked to an Occidentalist discourse. As
a young man, Scholem noted in his diaries:
If you look deep below the surface, youll see that all truly valuable people are in one way
or another sunk into the inescapable abyss of misery. They live among others, cut off from
the Teaching and Tradition. To change this would be the first and most essential task to be
accomplished among men. In its deepest strata, Zionism shall bring Tikkun to our lives
(Scholem 2007, 213).
Zionism is a movement within the Torah. Zionism can only be grounded within the
world of the Teaching. Zion is the collective loneliness of all people, and hence the source
for the messianic community of men and of mankind. Zionism makes just one claim:
that the final center of mans loneliness is the place where all men can meet together,
and there can be no other such gathering place. All of us can succeed in restoring a connection to the Teaching through this loneliness, a connection we lost after we sold ourselves to
Europe. The community of men requires everyone to be given an identical foundation.
This foundation has two names: Silence and Revelation. [] Tradition is the only absolute
object of mysticism. [] The only organization Zionism haswhich is identical with the
truthis the unification of all those who possess the truth. What is commonly called the
Zionist organization has nothing in common with Zionism as a spiritual entity (Scholem
2007, 217 219, emphasis added).
Scholems third space was constructed around the concepts of exile and loneliness,
in German Verlorenheit (state of being lost). This experience is linked to a nihilism
that Scholem, like Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, took from a reading of
Nietzsche (Roemer 2010): I glide ever more beautifully into the arms of nihilism
[] I believe, I must admit, I believe in nothing, in nothing more at all. No longer
in God, world, parents, family, friendsgirlfriends!and all the ideological and material things that go with them (quoted in Lazier 2002, 39 40).
When Scholem found a new homeland in spiritual Zionism, which would restore the authentic Gnostic Judaism, this ideal was constructed as an alternative
to Europe. Interestingly enough, Scholem himself was aware of the dilemma
into which this brought him. On 4 January 1916 he noted in his diary:
By the way, it seemsdoes it only seem so or is it really the case?to be a paradox that I,
being a complete and unchanged enemy of Europe [Europafeind] and follower of the new
Orient, which will bear on its strong wave also the new Juda, for the time being must be
content with making the move [to Palestine] precisely as the teacher of European science
[Wissenschaft] (Scholem 1995, vol. 1, 226).
This was also an element of political Zionism, as in Erwin Rosenbergers and Theodor Herzls
idealization of the prototype of a handsome Oriental in 1896, on which see Peleg 2005, 7.
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6 The Trouble with Europe: Academic Orientalism and New Mystical Religions
Hence, with Klaus Samuel Davidowicz we can call Scholems Zionism a utopian
retreat into the history of the Jews as a whole, compared to Bubers Zionism as a
gaze into his own person in order to dig up the other tradition (Davidowicz
1995, 67; see also Aschheim 2001, 9 40 [Gershom Scholem and the Creation
of Jewish Self-Certitude]). Later in his life, after being disillusioned with political Zionism, Scholem still clung to a nihilistic theology that paradoxically argued for a total absence of God, who nevertheless was the ultimate horizon of
human existence. He found this expressed not only in Kabbalistic texts but
also in literary ones, particularly in Kafka (Moses 1999, 157). Again, as we saw
in Buber, access to the absolute ground of Jewish existence is an awareness of
the existential crisis of the human being, which also means that the Jewish mystical tradition can be a teacher for all humankind. Kabbalah provided the most
sophisticated response to the drama of the conditio humana, and while Jews with
their Gnostic spiritualityreceived from outside Europe and cherished as the
heart of their teachingwere the guardians of tradition, their wisdom could be
opened up for the benefit of others.
Jewish Mysticism (note the capital M) became the key to solve the plight
of modernity. This construction of Jewish history left its mark on subsequent
practices of Kabbalah, but it also inspired intellectuals who came after Scholem.
For instance, it is by no means clear whether David Biale in his 1979 Epilogue
only summarized Scholems view, or whether Biale was actually presenting his
own views:
The failure of the secular sciences of Marxism and psychoanalysis may itself be a sign of the
hidden dialectic of the divine. Only now, in full awareness of the crisis of secularism, can the
potential in tradition be unearthed from under the debris of centuries. The study of esoteric
Jewish mysticism is perhaps the best preparation for the contemporary search for the religious spark that is now so well hidden. By presenting Jewish mysticism in a modern and accessible idiom while preserving the archaic and foreign intonation of its voice, Scholem has
put us in touch with forces at once alien and yet paradoxically familiar (Biale 1979, 211).
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Rudolf Otto
When it comes to discursive impact, the work of the Protestant theologian Rudolf
Otto (1869 1937) is of special importance. His contributions to a comparative
study of religion influenced not only academic theories but also public understanding of religion and mysticism. Being part of a larger academic transition
from functionalism to existentialism (Krech 2002, 60 83), Otto used Friedrich
Schleiermachers nineteenth-century Romantic understanding of religion and
adapted it to the demands of his own generation. In 1917, when World War I
was reaching its final phase, he published his famous Das Heilige: ber das Irrationale in der Idee des Gttlichen und sein Verhltnis zum Rationalen. The book
went through 30 editions before 1936 and is still reprinted with thousands of
copies; translations into many languages made it known to an international audience. Ottos book, due to its enormous spread, managed not only to influence
the zeitgeist [] it also concretely determined the hypotheses and methodological consideration of almost the entire study of religion during the Weimar period (Flasche 1982, 267; see also Gooch 2000, 1 8, 104 159). Central to Ottos
analysis of the sacred is the concept of the numinous as a pre-rational expe-
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6 The Trouble with Europe: Academic Orientalism and New Mystical Religions
rience of infinity (see also his collection of essays published in 1923). Religion
as a category sui generis refers to the ultimate experience of the sacred that reveals itself to the human being in what Otto called mysterium tremendum and
mysterium fascinans. With such a configuration, Otto certainly touched a nerve
in his generation.
Ottos contribution to European Orientalist discourses becomes visible in depictions such as the following:
The desire for and the experience of salvation is also typical of Islam, not only as a mere
hope (namely for the pleasures in paradise); rather, the most important aspect of Islam is
Islam itself, the loyalty to Allah, which is not only devotion of the will but also the desired
and intended state of being full of Allah; this state is a salvation that is owned and enjoyed as a kind of drunkenness, and in its progression it can almost become a mystical frenzy of bliss.
In 1926 Otto published his attempt to systematically compare Eastern and Western mysticism. The book was based on the Haskell Lectures that the author had
delivered at Oberlin College in Ohio in the year 1924, when Rudolf Otto was already a well-known academic author on mysticism outside the German-speaking
world. In this work, Otto focused on the German mystic Meister Eckhart, the Indian mystic ankara, the Greek philosopher Plotinus, and several mystics from
the Buddhist Mahyna tradition. These persons were mainly used to exemplify
the categories that Otto had outlined earlier in Das Heilige and his 1923 book on
the numinous (see the preface in Otto 1979 [1926], viiiix).
Heils-Verlangen und -Erlebnis ist auch der Islam und dieses nicht nur in Hoffnung,
nmlich auf die Lust des Paradieses: vielmehr das Wichtigste im Islam ist eben der Islam selber,
die Ergebenheit an Allah die nicht nur Willenshingabe ist sondern zugleich die gewnschte und
erstrebte Allah-Erflltheit ist und als solche ein Heil, das wie eine Art Trunkenheit besessen
und genossen werden und in ihrer Steigerung geradezu zum mystischen Seligkeits-Rausch
werden kann (2004 [1917], 193).
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in the Netherlands (1916 1918), in 1918 he was appointed Professor of Geschiedenis van de godsdiensten in t algemeen en de Geschiedenis van de leer aangaande God (History of religions in general and the history of theology) in
the Faculty of Theology at the University of Groningen; after 1945, the chair
was renamed as Phenomenology of Religion.
Van der Leeuw was instrumental not only for the phenomenology of religion
in Europe; his work also comprised political and cultural activities (Hofstee 1997;
Waardenburg 1978, 187 192). He served as Minister of Education, Arts, and Sciences in the first Dutch cabinet after World War I (1945 1946) and was instrumental in the foundation of the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion (Nederlands Genootschap voor Godsdienstgeschiedenis) in 1947. In the last year of his
life, the International Association for the History of Religion was founded at the
Seventh International Congress of the History of Religions in Amsterdam. He was
also the president of the Dutch Bach Society, the Groningen Orchestra Society,
and other cultural organizations. He played the organ and was active as a singer
as well; as Minister of Education, Arts, and Sciences he actively supported Dutch
artists. We can justifiably conclude that his work had a decisive discursive impact
on the attribution of meaning regarding religion in the Netherlands and abroad.
For our concerns here, it is also of relevance that van der Leeuw participated in
the 1948, 1949, and 1950 Eranos meetings at Ascona.
The breadth of his scholarly and cultural interests is reflected in the books
that he published during his long career. Important stepping stones were Inleiding tot de godsdienstgeschiedenis (Introduction to the history of religions,
1924); Mystiek (Mysticism, 1924); La structure de la mentalit primitive (The
structure of primitive mentality, 1928); Phnomenologie der Religion (Phenomenology of religion, 1933); Inleiding tot de Theologie (Introduction to theology,
1935); Uren met Novalis (Hours with Novalis, 1943); De godsdienst van het oude
Aegypte (The religion of ancient Egypt, 1944); Wegen en grenzen: Een studie
over de verhouding van religie en kunst (Roads and boundaries: A study of the
relation between religion and art, 1932, third edition 1955).
Phenomenology of religion was a broad and diverse movement in the twentieth-century study of religion. As a reception of Romantic aestheticization of religion as experience (Friedrich Schleiermacher), scholars interpreted the phenomena as the results of the working of a transcendent Sacred, or Holy, that
manifests itself in the history of religion. Despite their different approaches,
these scholars were united in their critique of reductionist approaches in sociology or empiricism and in their assumption that religion is a category sui generis.
While van der Leeuw agreed with the basic ideas of this interpretation, his theoretical insights were much more nuanced than those of other phenomenologists, particularly those of Rudolf Otto. Van der Leeuw reflected critically on
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the place of theology in the study of religion, and he clearly differentiated between the role of the scholar and the role of the theologian. In his understanding, phenomenology is not a form of theology. The phenomenologist first and
foremost studies the action of people; even if a power drives the phenomena,
scholars study the acts of religious people, not the power (see James 1995,
203 263; Waardenburg 1978, 222 241).
Van der Leeuw conceptualized religion as part of cultural processes. In particular, it was religion as an aesthetically communicated phenomenon that
found his interest. That is why he looked in detail at the media in which religion
is transmitted and made accessible. Highly relevant for the discursive analysis of
this book, van der Leeuw was a representative of his generations huge fascination with mysticism, Romanticism, ecstatic forms of religion, and art (an aspect
that is neglected in James 1995). In his book on mysticism, he again invoked
Goethe as a culmination of scholarly understanding of religion and mysticism:
There is a sort of international and interconfessional theory of mysticism, an
own interpretation of the mystical process, which Goethe, in succession of
Plato and Plotinus, formulated in a classical way (van der Leeuw 1924, 4; on
Goethe as the thinker who said practically everything that has been said in
the 19th and 20th centuries in more or less clear opposition to Christianity, see
van der Leeuw 1959, 164).
As a public intellectual, van der Leeuw often mixed the genres of his writing
and made it clear that his scholarship was also an answer to the pressing issues
of his time. His fascination with dance, eroticism, and mysticism was clearly
linked to his diagnosis of modernity. In Wegen en grenzen he mentioned the
fact that in Germany around 1700 it was customary that on the occasion of a
doctoral graduation in theology the dean and the professors would perform a
dance around the new Doctor Theologiae. Is it by chance that it was theology
that applied the dance as a ritual? The dance that in essence is a ritus? And
he adds: For us the graduation dance seems a little bit strange. But this is
only because we have almost completely lost dancing as an element of civilization (1955, 34, emphasis original). For van der Leeuw, however, dance was the
oldest human language with which to express and contact the divine. This could
take on an Orientalized and eroticized form, as in van der Leeuws adoration of
the Californian dancer Isadora Duncan (1877 1927), who made a career in Europe dancing in Wagners Tannhuser in Bayreuth and in other well-known productions. She reflected on her art in her autobiography My Life, published in
1927. This is what van der Leeuw had to say about her:
In this context let me mention again with reverence the name of her who has revealed to us
the grandeur of dance for the first time again: ISADORA DUNCAN. She has already had a
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number of excellent successors, but she was the beginning. Only if dance fully regains its
honor as art, if the possibility of universal expression that it offers is demonstrated by pure
examples, only then will it again be a manifestation of the Sacred (1955, 78).
In the original Dutch version of his study of religion and art, an appendix with 26
pages of photographs and illustrations was added to the text. This important element of van der Leeuws book was left out of the German edition Vom Heiligen
in der Kunst. It was particularly Duncans Grecian-inspired pose and her signature Grecian tunic that found approval with the Dutch professor. He probably
saw in her what he described elsewhere, with reference to Rudolf Otto, as the
sacramental as the opposite pole of the technical (van der Leeuw 1959, 151). Sacramental sexuality in general and sexual intercourse in particular were endangered by the processes of technological modernity, a danger that threatens
the entire modern life (ibid.). But van der Leeuw also abhorred the PlatonicChristian idea, paralyzed in prudery, of the sexual act as the sin. He goes on:
Luckily, the modern world looks at the sexual in a more relaxed way, and this in particular
gives us hope that our times will rediscover the sacramental. Today this is easier than in the
Victorian age, whenaccording to Punchit was an unresolved question whether women
had legs, and when the sexual was an issue that people kept silent or smiled to themselves
about (ibid., emphasis original).
Van der Leeuw described bodily movement as the most elementary performance
in life, and it is apparent that no sacramental action is thinkable without movement. Movement is even more important for the sacrament than the word
(1959, 162). And again, he mentioned dance as the oldest of all arts (ibid.)
that with its fixed and structured rhythmhere van der Leeuw subsumed procession under the category of danceconnects the human being with the Sacred.
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the naked truth in racist discourse around 1900 (Frietsch 2012). In 1887, the occultist Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers translated the Kabbalah denudata as
Kabbalah Unveiled (see Kilcher 2006).
The neo-Orientalist discourse, mentioned above, which is visible in contemporary European societies, is a late expression of this dynamic. But to understand the discursive knot in its complexity, we will have to add to the setting
the self-Orientalization of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals, the construction
of national identities, as well as the academic fascination with religious and erotic dance. All these aspects crystallized around the biblical figure of Salome.
Around 1900, Salome was the most famous (un)veiled woman in Europe.
The biblical figure of this Jewish princess represented an imaginary Muslim or
inner Jewish Orient. It was linked to the history of womens emancipation,
which ultimately shaped the figure of the New Woman. In visual arts, music,
literature, and popular culture her veil-dance unleashed a veritable Salomania.
Salome played an important role in European Orientalist, anti-Semitic, and aesthetic discourses (Koritz 1994; Walkowitz 2003; Brunotte 2012). Salome and her
lethal dance can be seen as a focal point of the ambivalence of the Orientalist
stereotype of the (un)veiled woman that connected the Jewish with the Oriental
Other. Interestingly enough, Salome was received differently in various European
countries. In France and the Netherlands, she was embodied by the Dutch and
presumed Jewish dancer Mata Hari, representing the seductive Oriental femme
fatale; in Great Britain, Salome personified the Oriental transgender icon of
crime and perversion; in Germany, she dominated anti-Semitic discourse as
the dangerous schne Jdin.
Besides the odalisque and the desired Oriental male, the figure of the belle
Juive loomed large in nineteenth-century Orientalism (Ludewig 2008; Fournier
2012). Around 1900, an Asian-Oriental stereotype became dominant and
merged with that of the femme fatale. This figure became a homosexualized
third sex through the discursive conflation of Oscar Wilde and Salome (Gilman
1993). Like Flaubert and Huysmans before him, Wilde depicted Salome not only
as a femme fatale, but also as a mystic, the sister of Salammb, a Sainte Thrse
who worships the moon (Koritz 1994, 78; see also Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 42). Chiming in with leading esoteric and mystical notions of his time, Wilde connected
Salomes veil to the veil that covered the holy of holies in the Jewish temple,
and her dance to Ishtars descent into the underworld (Ziolkowski 2008; Brunotte 2012, 104). This resonates with Georges Batailles philosophical and pornographic novella Madame Edwarda (published under a pseudonym in 1937).
Both writers put forward a vision of erotic transgression and physical obscenity
as a kind of secular ecstasy [] it is a secular modernist transformation of the
religious ecstasy of the Christian mystics (Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 50; see also 54
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Neo-Sufism may be defined as any form of Sufism that differs significantly from regular
Sufism the standard models found in the Islamic world, especially when the differences result
from factors extraneous to the Islamic world. Neo-Sufis are generally born into religions other
than Islam, but this need not be the case (Sedgwick 2008, 183).
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Indeed, the discursive blending of the religious, esoteric, and Orientalist/Occidentalist stereotypes created a third space that has been inhabited by many people in Europe after World War II. Gurdjieff and Schuon still have a considerable
amount of followers and their books are widely read. Idries Shah (1924 1996)
had even more impact. A personal friend of Gerald Gardner and Robert Graves
(who will return in the next chapter) and inspiration to the celebrated German
author and Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, Shah became a major representative of esoteric Islam in Europe. His Oriental Magic (1956) communicated the entanglement of the discourse strands discussed above to a wide audience. We also
see institutionalizations and the establishment of new dispositives that stabilize
the related attributions of meaning. In 1965, Shah founded the Society for Understanding Fundamental Ideas (SUFI), later renamed the Institute for Cultural Research (ICR). The ICR, according to its website, is an educational charity which
aims to stimulate study, debate, education and research into all aspects of
human thought, behaviour and culture (http://www.i-c-r.org.uk/, accessed 26
April 2013). It is not by chance that this mission statement is reminiscent of
the motto of the Theosophical Society, as is the case with the Society for Sufi
Studies (SSS), another dispositive introduced by Shah.
When we turn our focus to the discursive impact of Kabbalah and Jewish
mysticism, the picture is very similar. To begin with, the Theosophical Societys
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influence blurred the differences between Kabbalah and Sufism. Already at the
end of the nineteenth century, A.D. Ezekiel (whose full name was Abraham
David Salman Hai Ezekiel) called the Theosophical Society the Sufi Society
from America. Having a Jewish Baghdadi family background and being a member of the Theosophical Society most likely since 1882, Ezekiel published a translation of the Idra Zuta (translated into English as The Lesser Holy Assembly) in
1887, the same year that Samuel Liddel MacGregor Mathers published his translation of the same text from the Kabbalah Denudata (see Huss 2010). The blurring of borders between different wisdom traditions remained a characteristic
of religious history in Europe and North America also in the twentieth century.
And despite the fact that influential scholarsmost prominently Gershom Scholem and Moshe Idelwere convinced that nineteenth-century Hasidism was the
last expression of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah (see the critique in Huss
2005), there emerged a broad and diverse movement of new forms of Kabbalistic
spirituality and practice in the second half of the twentieth century. Again, dispositives legitimated these new interpretations of Kabbalah, particularly the
Kabbalah Centre (founded in 1969) and Bnei Baruch (founded in 1991). It is
only recently that these forms of Kabbalah have been taken seriously by scholars
of religion (see Myers 2007; Huss, Pasi, and von Stuckrad 2010).
Jody Myers (2011) identified a number of pathways to the revival of Kabbalah that partly correspond with the discursive reconfigurations that I have elaborated so far. Although her analysis focuses on North American fields of discourse, and hence the American Metaphysical Religion (Albanese 2007)
figures more prominently than in Europe, it is true that the influence of the Theosophical Society and the impact of academic scholarship itself are of crucial importance. Gershom Scholems Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1954) was (and
still is) widely read. Already in the 1960s, Jewish artists and poets in Los Angeles
and the San Francisco Bay area utilized academic constructions of Kabbalah;
they took the symbols and Hebrew letter combinations for their artwork directly
from Scholems book (Myers 2011, 179).
The argument that Kabbalah could be used to provide a Jewish option for
non-theistic alternatives to traditional readings of the cosmos (Myers 2011, 181)
can also be turned around; as we have seen, already in Bubers and Scholems
writings there was an option present to open up the Jewish tradition to a nonJewish audience as a universal wisdom tradition and metaphysical interpretation
of the conditio humana. This interpretation could easily be linked to the search
for universal wisdom in Theosophy and Traditionalism.
Finally, Myers is right when she points out that Kabbalists from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries
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believed that Kabbalah provided an accurate guide to the operations of the universe, and
[that] this belief has reappeared in the modern era as the conviction that Kabbalah contains
within it the most advanced scientific knowledge and is the authoritative guide to the mysteries of the universe. This is not simple biblical fundamentalism or the explicit rejection of
science; on the contrary, it is an expression of the desire to equate ones faith with science
(Myers 2011, 184).
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Clinton was aware of the transgressive potential of the Human Genome Project
vis--vis theologically defined borders. Learning the language of God means
that we can also write it. So he warned his audience:
The third horizon that lies before us is one that science cannot approach alone. It is the
horizon that represents the ethical, moral and spiritual dimension of the power we now
possess. We must not shrink from exploring that far frontier of science. But as we consider
how to use new discoveries, we must also not retreat from our oldest and most cherished
human values (ibid.).
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6 The Trouble with Europe: Academic Orientalism and New Mystical Religions
Francis S. Collins was also very much aware of the transgressive potential of his
endeavor. In his speech at the same conference, he addressed this potential right
away: Alexander Pope wrote: Know then, thyself. Presume not God to scan. The
proper study of mankind is man. What more powerful form of study of mankind
[sic] could there be than to read our own instruction book? (ibid.) It may be
questioned whether Alexander Popes prescription is a solution to the transgressive danger that Collins intended to avoid, but it clearly shows his concerns. Collins then proclaimed, Today we celebrate the revelation of the first draft of the
human book of life. But again, he felt the need to put forward an ethical disclaimer: It is humbling for me and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught
the first glimpse of our own instruction book, previously known only to God.
What a profound responsibility it is to do this work. Historians will consider
this a turning point (ibid.).
I now come to a more recent event in the history of science. This event is
closely related to J. Craig Venter, who is a representative of the field of synthetic
biology. As we have seen already, Venter was involved with the Human Genome
Project, though in a competitive research group. After 2000, Venter took his career in various directions. Using 100 million US-dollars from Celera and other
stock holdings, he started a non-profit organization, the J. Craig Venter Science
Foundation. This organization freed him to do any kind of science he wanted
without obligation to an academic review panel or other constraints. In 2002,
the foundation launched the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives in Rockville, Maryland. In May 2010, Venters team succeeded in creating, for the first
time, a fully synthetic new cell; in other words, a new life form. In The New
York Times we read:
At a press conference Thursday, Dr. Venter described the converted cell as the first self-replicating species weve had on the planet whose parent is a computer. This is a philosophical advance as much as a technical advance, he said, suggesting that the synthetic cell
raised new questions about the nature of life. [] Its very powerful to be able to reconstruct and own every letter in a genome because that means you can put in different
genes, said Gerald Joyce, a biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif.
In response to the scientific report, President Obama asked the White House bioethics commission on Thursday to complete a study of the issues raised by synthetic biology within
six months and report back to him on its findings. He said the new development raised
genuine concerns, though he did not specify them further (Wade 2010).
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any proteins, but they contain the names of 46 scientists that were involved with
the project, as well as several quotations written out in a secret code. The markers also contain the key to the code. It is necessary to crack the code in order to
read the messages. But Venter provided some hints as to the content of these
quotations: To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,
which is taken from James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man;
See things not as they are but as they might be, which comes from American
Prometheus, a biography of nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer; and the famous words by physicist Richard Feynman: What I cannot build I cannot understand (Callaway 2010).
These examples from contemporary life sciences and synthetic biology are
clear evidence of the scientification of religion; they reveal how scientific knowledge is aesthetically represented and communicated; and they take place in a
public sphere that includes political actors, scientists, and a large audience
that is interested in popularized forms of scientific claims. These truth claims
transgress the borders of scientific thinking in immanent and empirically testable models. They stand in the line of esoteric quests to unlock the ultimate secrets of the cosmos and to reveal the hidden meaning of human history.
In their quest, J. Craig Venter and Francis S. Collins have embarked on the
same journey as Stephen W. Hawking, celebrated physicist and successful author
of many works of popularized science. Hawking also transgresses the borders of
science and takes on the role of religious expert and esoteric teacher:
Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have not been content to see events as unconnected and inexplicable. They have craved an understanding of the underlying order in the
world. Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we have come from. Humanitys deepest desire for knowledge is justification enough for our continuing quest.
And our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in (Hawking 1988, 15).
The discursive impact of books such as A Brief History of Time lies in the blending of the discourses of science, religion, quest, understanding, and cosmos. With his search for a Grand Unified Theory, Hawking also partakes in
the discourse of monism that has dominated much of early twentieth-century intellectual debate (see Asprem 2013, Chapter 6, for a detailed analysis of this earlier discourse, particularly the contributions by James Jeans and Arthur Eddington, who attributed philosophical and religious signficance to cosmology and
wrote about it in popular publications). Later, Hawking adds human existence
to this discursive knot, making his claims even more metaphysical: A complete,
consistent, unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence (ibid., 187).
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6 The Trouble with Europe: Academic Orientalism and New Mystical Religions
It seems we have come a long way from German Jewish intellectual circles, from
scholars of religion theorizing about the mystic East and the Sacred, to representatives of the life sciences and contemporary physics. Indeed, the journey from academic Orientalism to monistic discourses in physics almost a hundred years later
may appear as a tour de force when framed in conventional groupings of historical
events and narratives. However, the reconstruction of discursive links is an historical
exercise that leads to new and sometimes unexpected unities (Foucault). These
unities have the potential to tell us more about the role of religion in twentieth-century Europe than the more conventional unities and narratives.
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Bachofen (1815 1887), a well-situated jurist from Basle, was convinced that the
current patriarchal order was preceded by a matriarchal one. Strangely enough,
he came to this thesis through the examination of the symbolism of ancient
tombs. Fascinated by the newly discovered wall paintings in a columbarium of
the Villa Pamfili in Romewhich he visited in 1842Bachofen had the idea
that these tomb paintings were evidence of the oldest cult of humankind, and
he believed it was his duty to decipher these cults. A good example of his way
of academic reasoning is the interpretation he gave to the picture of Ocnus
the rope plaiter. Ocnus, being punished by pursuing futile works in the underworld, appears in the funerary images as being free and relaxed (Bachofen
1984, 53 74). Originally, the penitent and his rope-plaiting represented the working of the natural powers, while the accompanying donkey that eats up the rope
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stood for the inherent destructive principle. The Roman tomb paintings, wrote
Bachofen, turned this symbol of an unwept creation into an image of salvation,
thus expressing liberation from the meaningless cycle of nature.
In his description of a culture dominated by material understandings of natural symbols Bachofen followed Plutarch, who claimed that the creating male
principle was giving form, while the receiving female principle was the material
for this form (Gossman 2000, 171 200). Bachofens study, published as Das Mutterrecht, with its enigmatic subtitle Eine Untersuchung ber die Gynaikokratie der
alten Welt nach ihrer religisen und rechtlichen Natur (1861; Maternal law: A
study of gynaecocracy in the ancient world with reference to its religious and juridical nature), was based on a ridiculously small foundation of evidence from
ancient sources (Wesel 1980)Herodotus report on the Lycians from Asia Minor
and Aeschylus Oresteia. His main argument, entirely lacking evidence, was that
ancient mother goddesses represented a matriarchal juridical system.
Herodotus (1.173) tells us that the Lycians transmitted the right of citizenship
and property through the line from mother to daughter (matrilinearity), rather
than from father to son (patrilinearity). Anthropologists conceded that Bachofen
was right that this was a unique order of social structure; however, such an order
only very rarely led to the formation of local female communities, and never to
the formation of a matriarchal system (gynaecocracy in Greek). In most cases,
these women lived in the social communities of their husbands and were governed by male rule (Kippenberg 1984, xxvxxxvi).
Aeschylus Oresteia, Bachofens second witness, tells the story of Clytemnestra who, together with her lover Aegisthus, kills her husband Agamemnon after
his return from Troy. Their son Orestes, sent abroad by Clytemnestra, returns as
an adult to take revenge for the murder of his father. Together with his sister Electra, he kills his mother and her lover. Subsequently, the Erinyes haunt and torture him in his flight until he is taken to Athens to stand trial for killing his mother. The issue in court was whether the son was more closely linked to the father
or to the mother. Only because Athena, who chaired the sitting, voted for Orestes,
he was finally released. For Bachofen, this result demonstrated the victory of paternal law over maternal law in ancient Attica, which brought the previous age of
matriarchy to an end (Wesel 1980, 58 59).
Although Bachofens work was immediately criticized for its methodological
shortcomings and eccentric claims, it exerted an enormous influence. This impact was often more indirect than direct, especially because Bachofen was regularly used without being explicitly quoted. The major reason for Bachofens success may be that his culture-critical interpretation struck a right chord in the
nineteenth century, such as in the following sentences:
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Into the life of these [gynaecocratic] peoples the conflict between the positive setting of
rules and the natural order of things, in which all great revolutions have their origins,
did not intrude. The human being was not yet put outside of this harmony, which rules
all material life on earth. The law that these humans follow is not exclusively human,
but a general law of the entire creation. Law presents itself as an expression of physical
life (Bachofen 1975, 252).
In his interpretation, Bachofen is in line with the British evolutionists. They, too,
were convinced that the early stages of human evolution were not simply assimilated into higher stages, but that they re-asserted themselves. Another similarity
is Bachofens implicit evaluation of progress; natural symbols and maternal law
express human relations with nature that rational, male, nature-controlling
progress can suppress but not eliminate. Ancient myth had become the mirror
of the repressed features of Bachofens own time.
Bachofen coded the matriarchal culture of antiquity in the discourse of the
day. In the assumed freedom from despotism he saw the ideal of a future juridical order (Bachofen 1984, 228 229). Just as symbol and concept are dependent
on each other, matriarchal and patriarchal systems need each other as a correcting force. Freedom from despotismthis characteristic of maternal lawwill and
should be re-established at the end of juridical progress. Bachofens thinking follows the same logic as in the case of the natural symbols: just as the natural
symbol remains present, even if it is interpreted differently, the maternal law
claims its influence. History does not obey dialectics. The defeated retains its
honor (Bumler 1965, 337). This is reminiscent of the talk of the third in cultural
studies, but Bachofen did not make that step 150 years ago. For him, it was selfevident that the female had to be defeated by the male. By projecting his own
generations battle of the sexes onto the early stages of human evolution, he
codified the antagonism between male and female (Wagner-Hasel 1992, 295
373; Lanwerd 1993, 72 109; Borgeaud 1999).
Bachofens historical imagination exerted unexpected influence. Even Marxist theoreticians were taken with it, although of course Bachofen was not at all
interested in political work for womens rights. But Friedrich Engels celebrated
him in his 1884 essay Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des
Staats (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State) as the discoverer of pre-bourgeois family structures. The history of the family dates to 1861,
the publication of Bachofens Mutterrecht, Engels wrote (Engels 1970 [1884],
12); but he was critical about Bachofen deducing the family orders from religion
rather than from real-life conditions (ibid., 40; see Davies 2010, 64 66). The assumption of Friedrich Engels and other Marxists that we can speak of a universal
matriarchy was still influential in the thinking of Walter Benjamin and the Frank-
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furt School (Drr 2007, 142; see his entire chapter on Myth and the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, 104 184; Davies 2010, 49 106 and 397 414).
The link to the Frankfurt School already indicates that Bachofens full impact became visible in the first decades of the twentieth century among German
intellectuals. The circle of the Munich Kosmiker played a significant role in this
(Drr 2007, passim; Davies 2010, 163 216). For one of them, Ludwig Klages,
Bachofen was the discoverer of a primordial state of consciousness (Klages
1930, 238). The rationally thinking bearer of world history was preceded by
a humankind that was thinking in symbols [] whose entire worldviews, including all manners and concepts of law, were totally different from those of
the historical human being (Klages 1937, 177 178). With this interpretation Klages served an anti-Intellectualism that surrendered Bachofen to national-socialist ideology (Davies 2010, 351 388).
Bachofen was of particular importance for the newly established discipline of
psychology (Davies 2010, 217 242). The influences of Bachofens ideas reached
psychiatric circles through various channels, and his influence on dynamic psychiatry has been immense (Ellenberger 1970, 222). There are many striking parallels between Freud and Bachofen, while Alfred Adler was influenced by Bachofen
indirectly (Ellenberger 1970, 222 223). Carl Gustav Jung used Bachofens work directly, for instance in his perhaps most important early work Wandlungen und
Symbole der Libido (1912, translated as Symbols of Transformation), which also
marked his break with Sigmund Freud; but he did not make his dependence on
Bachofen explicit in this book (Davies 2010, 240 242). Jungs teaching is filled
with concepts that may at least partly be ascribed to Bachofens influence, such
as those of the Anima and Animus, the old wise man, and the magna mater
(Ellenberger 1970, 223). We can assume that Jung knew Bachofens theory through
his acquaintance with the Munich Kosmiker and his connection to Basle (Noll
1994, 169 176; on Jungs Basle connection see Gossman 2000, 53). Jung was
part of what Georg Drr calls a Basle mythology; this consisted of Bachofen,
Nietzsche, some members of the Kosmiker group, and also the classical philologist
Karl Kernyi. In 1945, Kernyi published the essay Bachofen und die Zukunft des
Humanismusmit einem Intermezzo ber Nietzsche und Ariadne (Bachofen
and the future of humanismwith an intermezzo on Nietzsche and Ariadne),
in which he not only constructed a male Nietzsche and a female Bachofen,
but also the ideal of a new Bachofen who would integrate the female and the
male. This ideal future scholar, Kernyi proclaimed, was Carl Gustav Jung (see
Drr 2007, 46 48). The future humanist will give his reverence not only to Apollo
[i.e. Nietzsche] and Dionysus [i.e. Bachofen], but also to Asclepius [i.e. Jung] (Kernyi 1945, 39, quoted from Drr 2007, 47).
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conceptually a mother goddess of the Olympian world order, who works together with Zeus,
juxtaposed to the concept of Urania as a Gaia Olympia. [] In all these goddesses we can see
the concept of a world order that precedes the Olympian powers, a concept of a goddess of
fate to whom, as Homer tells us, even Zeus had to pay respect (Gerhard 1851, 463).
Gerhards idea of a matriarchal monotheism was later picked up by other scholars, including the classicist Jane E. Harrison (1850 1928), who acknowledged
that [t]he fundamental unity of all the Greek goddesses was, I think, first observed by Gerhard (Harrison 1991 [1903], 263 note 1; see Brunotte 2013, 132
133).
In her new study of the life and work of Harrison, Ulrike Brunotte points out
that Harrisons discovery of a pre-Greek religion of the goddesswhich was
connected to Asia Minor, Africa, the Orient, and primitive religionwas part
of a larger discourse around 1900 (Brunotte 2013, 127; see also Schlesier 1994,
177 183). It is particularly in the chapter The Making of a Goddess in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) that Harrison developed the thesis
of a primordial veneration of the goddess that was destroyed by gender wars and
the subjugation of autochthonous religions by patriarchal tribes that intruded on
the Peloponnese from the North (Brunotte 2013, 128 134). Harrisons contribution to this discourse was distinctive:
It is Harrisons unique accomplishment that she was the first scholar to analyze in detail the
often violent process of the making of a goddess, reported in myths and visual evidence,
from the local mother cults to the patriarchal Olympus. This critical and feminist approach
had deep impact on the artistic and literary avant-garde of her time. With some delay, it
also gained significance for a study of religion that took gender seriously as an epistemological category. However, an essentialization of female origins in archetypes, as well as the neopagan conjuration of the female sexs assumed healing quality and its close links to nature,
are only rarely found in the work of Jane E. Harrison (Brunotte 2013, 132).
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Charles G. Leland and Robert Graves: Popularizing the Idea of the Goddess
147
It was this interest that also determined his contribution to the discourse on
the Great Goddess. In 1899, four years before he died, Leland published Aradia,
or the Gospel of the Witches, which has remained a classic in its own right until
today. Although most scholars and practitioners agree that it is doubtful whether
Leland ever met the persons he introduces in Aradia (see Hutton 1999, 148), the
narrative of the coven of witches performing the rituals and liturgies of the ancient goddess Diana in nineteenth-century Northern Italy was persuasive and
fascinating for many readers. The information provided in Aradia was based
on a manuscript that Leland received from a woman called Maddalena (Leland
1899, 101). In his preface, Leland pictured the implications of modernization in
a humoristic way: [] both priest and wizard are vanishing now with incredible
rapidityit has even struck a French writer that a Franciscan in a railway carriage is a strange anomalyand a few more years of newspapers and bicycles
(Heaven knows what it will be when flying-machines appear!) will probably
cause an evanishment of all (Leland 1899, vivii). He then presents his main argument about the persistence of the old in the new:
However, they die slowly, and even yet there are old people in the Romagna of the North
who know the Etruscan names of the Twelve Gods, and invocations to Bacchus, Jupiter,
and Venus, Mercury, and the Lares or ancestral spirits, and in the cities are women who
prepare strange amulets, over which they mutter spells, all known in the old Roman
time, and who can astonish even the learned by their legends of Latin gods, mingled
with lore which may be found in Cato or Theocritus. With one of these I became intimately acquainted in 1886, and have ever since employed her specially to collect among her sisters of the hidden spell in many places all the traditions of the olden time known to them. It
is true that I have drawn from other sources, but this woman by long practice has perfectly
learned what few understand, or just what I want, and how to extract it from those of her
kind (Leland 1899, vii).
The text presents the main theological ideas of the worship of Diana as it is practiced by these women in Italy. Leland made links to ancient sources and provided additional information as to how these rituals and magic spells can be used
by uninitiated readers of his time (see, e. g., Leland 1899, 43). In the appendix, he
presented the historical construction that served as a template for subsequent
witches. The Christian repression of alternatives resulted in
a vast development of rebels, outcasts, and all the discontented, who adopted witchcraft or sorcery for a religion, and wizards as their priests. They had secret meetings in desert places,
among old ruins accursed by priests as the haunt of evil spirits or ancient heathen gods, or
in the mountains. To this day the dweller in Italy may often find secluded spots environed
by ancient chestnut forests, rocks, and walls, which suggest fit places for the Sabbat, and
are sometimes still believed by tradition to be such (Leland 1899, 106, emphasis original).
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Leland announced in the appendix to Aradia that this publication would only be a
small part of a larger collection of ancient religious practices that are still part of
northern Italian culture. This larger collection would also contain his 1892 publication Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition (Leland 1899, 109). For the
discourse on gender, the goddess, witchcraft, and the history of religion, it is fruitful to have a look at this voluminous book as well. Representative of many other
lines in Lelands narrative, let me quote what the author takes from the report of
the Bavarian collector of folklore, Friedrich Panzer (1794 1854):
Witches on earth sometimes pay visits to this Magonia, or Cloud City land, but they run a
risk of being caught or killed in the storms of their own raising. Thus Friedrich Panzer tells
us in his Bavarian Tales, that during the first half of the last century there was such a tremendous tempest, with hail, in Forchheim in Upper Franconia, that the people feared lest
the whole town should be destroyed. Then the Franciscan brothers met in their cloister garden, when, just as the first blessing was pronounced, lo! a beautiful woman, stark-naked,
was thrown headlong from a passing thunderstorm on the grass in their midst; and the
holy brothers, greatly amazed at this, doubtless to them, utterly novel sight [sic], drew
near, when they recognized in her who had indeed dropped in on them so suddenly, the
wife of the town miller, a woman long suspected of witchcraft (Leland 2002 [1892], 216).
Apparently, Leland tells us, the Franciscan monks were so impressed by the
beauty of this proie inattendue (unexpected prey) that they saved her from
being burned at the stake (ibid.). The male gaze at the naked witch is a metaphor
of control and domination. It resonates with the discursive mechanisms that we
have encountered earlier, from the unveiling of the truth of the feminine to the
fascination with ecstatic forms of religion. Leland, for his part, was inspired by
the manifestation of old forms of religion in contemporary society.
So from old days these hardened stories live as if trenched in ice, like mammoths in Siberia,
to the world unknown till some discoverer reveals them, and then there is marveling here
and there that such things could have been so long frozen up. So into time old time returns
again, and the ancient medals, thus disinterred, are all the more beautiful for their rust.
And it went deeply to my heart that after I had read the story of Magonia, and thought it
was a tale utterly dead on earth and embalmed in a chronicle, to find a sorceress in
whose faith it lives. It was as if an Egyptian mummy, revived, had suddenly spoken to
me, and told me a tale of Thebes, or declared that Cloud-Cuckoo land was a reality
which he had known [] (Leland 2002 [1892], 217, emphasis original).
When Kegan Paul, a respected academic press, reprinted Lelands work in 2002
in The Kegan Paul Library of Arcana, no mention was made of the fact that the
book was first published in 1892. Rather than contextualizing the publication,
the cover text presents Lelands findings as a document of historical evidence
and accurate information about contemporary religious practice. The Etruscans
Charles G. Leland and Robert Graves: Popularizing the Idea of the Goddess
149
are one of historys great mysteries, we are told, and they were more concerned
with religious matters than any other nation. They were adept at magic and it is
known that Etruscan books of spells were common among the Romans, but they
have not survived. It says a lot about the discursive impact of academic publications on religious practice when the cover text continues: Recorded over
many years at a time when many of these secret beliefs and practices were beginning to pass away, this remarkable volume deals with ancient gods, spirits,
witches, incantations, prophecy, medicine, spells and amulets, giving full descriptions, illustrations and instructions for practice.
Theoretical academic and practical approaches to religion constitute a common field of discourse on which the borders between inside and outside are
constantly negotiated. This impression is confirmed by the discursive knot that
Google generates on the basis of its algorithm. A search for Charles Leland
on 9 May 2013 resulted in the additional information by Google that People
also searched for Gerald Gardner, Margaret Murray, Doreen Valiente, Raven Grimassi, and Ronald Hutton.
Robert Graves
Born in Wimbledon seventy-one years after Leland was born in Philadelphia,
Robert Graves is another example of the creative blending of academic and poetic work in the construction of twentieth-century goddess veneration. His mother was a great-niece of the German historian Leopold von Ranke, and Robert
Graves was enrolled in school under the name Robert von Ranke Graves,
which he also used in German editions of his work. Several times in his early
life Graves went through severe illnesses, one of them being the result of a
war wound during World War I, in which he served as soldier of the Royal
Welch Fusiliers. He became known as a war poet. However, while these existential crises certainly had influence on his oeuvre, it is his later career that is of
special interest to our concerns here. Graves established himself as a writer of
poetry and historical novelsI, Claudius (1934) and the sequel Claudius the
God and his Wife Messalina (1934) became his economically most successful
publicationsand after 1945 he focused on what he would subsequently describe as the historical grammar of poetic myth, which is the apt subtitle of
his influential The White Goddess, first published in 1948. Graves was then living
with his second wife Beryl Hodge in a small village in the Majorca mountains, a
detail that he explicitly mentioned as part of his creative work (on how he came
to write The White Goddess, see the authors Postscript 1960 in Graves 1981
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[1948], 488 492; on Graves biography see Seymour 1995 and King 2008; on his
work see Quinn 1999 and Mounic 2012).
The White Goddess is a discursive knot in itself (Vickery 1972; Lanwerd 1993,
18 70; Seymour 1995, 306 318; Firla 2003; King 2008, 139 149; Mounic 2012,
53 78). In this book, Graves creatively wove together the discourse strands of religion, myth, nature, goddess veneration, matriarchy, poetry, philosophy, history, sexuality, rationality, magic, mysticism, science, europe,
and the west. This intricate knot is described from ever-changing perspectives
in all 26 chapters of the book, culminating in The Return of the Goddess (chapter 26). In his foreword, the author leaves no doubt about his program and the
main argument:
My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and
Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in
honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age,
and that this remains the language of true poetrytrue in the nostalgic modern sense
of the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute. The language was tampered
with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilinear
for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes.
Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry
as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour or their patron Apollo and imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a view that has prevailed
practically ever since in European schools and universities, where myths are now studied
only as quaint relics of the nursery age of mankind (1981 [1948], 9 10).
Despite the devastating influence of Greek rational philosophy, Graves tells us,
the ancient language survived purely enough in the secret Mystery-cults of Eleusis, Corinth,
Samothrace and elsewhere; and when these were suppressed by the early Christian Emperors it was still taught in the poetic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and in the witch-covens of
Western Europe. As a popular religious tradition it all but flickered out at the close of the
seventeenth century: and though poetry of a magical quality is still occasionally written,
even in industrialized Europe, this always results from an inspired, almost pathological, reversion to the original languagea wild Pentecostal speaking with tonguesrather than
from a conscientious study of its grammar and vocabulary (ibid., 12).
Charles G. Leland and Robert Graves: Popularizing the Idea of the Goddess
151
ing of life and poetry. For Graveswho had read James G. Frazer, Jane E. Harrison,
and the Cambridge anthropologists probably before 1917 (Vickery 1972, 10; on Frazers link to this discourse see also Lanwerd 1993, 112 146)the most severe damage
to the true original forms of poetic life was caused by Socrates. It was Socrates who
turned his back on the Moon-goddess and betrayed her poetic inspiration and sexual powerwhat is called Platonic love, the philosophers escape from the power
of the Goddess into intellectual homosexuality, was really Socratic love (ibid., 11).
Graves blending of mythology, sexuality, and goddess veneration is clearly related
to Jungs archetypal theory, even if Graves did not use Jung directly (Seymour 1995,
303; Mounic 2012, 49). This link is also what interested Ted Hughes in Graves writing; read Graves through Jung, Hughes wrote to Nick Gammage in 1995 (Gammage
1999, 150). Both authors shared what Gammage summarizes as follows:
The biology of the White Goddess can be located in Gravess exploration of the vigorous,
irrational but supremely pure raw energy of both the external and internal world, which
primitive man [sic] used mythic systems and their rituals to dramatize and control. What
Graves dramatizes in the image of the White Goddess is the tension between two principal
aspects of that life impulseboth the creative and destructive potential. These are the two
key possibilities of human behavior and are functions of the organisms most fundamental
drives: to survive and to reproduce (Gammage 1999, 150).
When it comes to Graves scholarly networks, his long friendship with Raphael
Patai (1910 1996) is also noteworthy. Patai devoted the third volume of his autobiography entirely to his friendship with Graves (Patai 1992, 10). In terms of the
formation and development of the discourse of the Great Goddess, this collection
of letters and Patais biographical statements are important documents. It proves
the close relationship between Graves historical imagination and its application
to issues of ancient Jewish history. Despite Graves focus on what he considered
to be Old European tradition, both scholars agreed that the deepest strata of
the Bible still provide hints regarding a veneration of the goddess in Jewish tradition as well (Patai 1992, 48). Patai put forward this argument in his The Hebrew
Goddess (1967), which appeared in an enlarged third edition in 1990. Strongly
criticized by many scholars, Patais historical construction of a matriarchal heritage of the biblical tradition nevertheless became an influential book for a broad
audience and among practitioners of goddess devotion. For our analysis here it
provides a significant link between the discourse strands that construct an ancient Greek and pan-European Great Goddess on the one hand, and the scholarly
fascination with mystical Judaism on the other (on their communication on Kabbalah see, for example, Patai 1992, 355 366; as a collection of Hebrew myths
that Patai and Graves co-published, see Graves and Patai 1983).
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153
During the second half of the twentieth century, European and North American
intellectuals became increasingly skeptical of the master narratives that seemed to
legitimize the superiority of modern Europe and to link European values to a Christian cultural heritage (see Perkins 2004). They insisted on the ambivalence, multiplicity, and the social and religious plurality of European culture. This critique of
a superior unity of the West can only be understood if we take into account the
discursive changes that I address in this book. People were looking for alternative
models of interpreting European history, models that seemed more fit to explain
the plurality and ambiguity of European values and identities. They turned to the
seemingly marginalized parts of European culture and paid special attention to aspects of European identity that seemed to represent its shadow.
These scholars were looking for a new vocabulary with which to analyze European cultural history. One of the terms that has gained currency since the
1990s is the concept of Western esotericism (see von Stuckrad 2010a, 43 64;
Hanegraaff 2012, 334 362). Although closely linked to older concepts that had
been part of scholarly debate for a long time (mysticism, Gnosis, occultism, Hermeticism, etc.), the term esotericism seemed to provide a basis for interpreting
Western culture that was more neutralor even positivewith reference to the
ambivalences, undercurrents, and margins of the West. The attraction of this
new vocabulary is part of a change of epistemea changing agreement regarding what can be true about Europe and North America.
If we want to understand the origins of such a discursive change, it seems
that the influences of the American counter-culture of the 1960s and the New
Age movement are significant (see also Kaiser 2011). This remains true, even if
it can be argued that the major elements of New Age discourse originate in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious and philosophical thought. The
1960s and 1970s can be seen as a cultural turntable that disseminated these
ideas in a wider context. Many religious beliefs and practices that we witness
in North America and western Europe today can be interpreted as popularized
forms of new age. It is not surprising that scholarly instruments of analysis likewise reveal the influence of re-entanglement of discourse strands. The popularity
of concepts such as esotericism, paganism, or occultism are both the result
and further stabilization of the new discursive knot. Ronald Hutton pointed
out a similar dynamic when it comes to the inclusion and exclusion of Druids
in contemporary pagan milieus; the history of the construction of Druidism
since the sixteenth century is at the same time a history of cultural developments
in Europe, with the imagination of the Victorian period determining the discourse even today (Hutton 2013, 36).
The discursive changes that we see operative in culture and scholarship are visible in an application of analytical terms that are taken from the object level of anal-
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ysis. Emic termseven those that used to have very strong evaluative connotationscan be turned into etic categories. In fact, this process deconstructs the
very distinction between emic and etic. What makes these terms etic is the simple
fact that scholars use them; thus, calling something etic is perhaps not more than a
rhetorical device to give an emic term scholarly power and blessing. This dynamic
can also work the other way round, with so-called etic concepts being turned into
emic ones; examples include paganism, pantheism, animism, and even heathendom. The concept of the Great Goddess is another case in point: is it an
etic or an emic term? When did it change from being an etic term (i.e., used by
scholars) to becoming an emic one as well (i.e., used by practitioners)? Or consider
the term synchronicity, discussed in Chapter 2 above. Is Jungs use of it an etic or
an emic one? And if astrologers take over the concept from Jung and Pauli, does it
automatically change into an emic concept then? And does it make a difference if
those astrologers are themselves versed in quantum physics or depth psychology?
With these questions, I do not deny the analytical difference between object language and analytical language; but I doubt that the polarity of emic and etic clarifies this differentiation, as it tends to underestimate the fact that the very difference
between emic and etic is constantly renegotiated and dependent on power relations
and discursive constellations.
Let me exemplify this process of adaptation with the concept of altered states
of consciousness (ASC), which is taken directly from new age and the psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, a renowned scholar of Western esotericism, recently introduced the concept of altered states of consciousness
in order to analyze the Hermetic tractates of late antiquity. The concept seems so
well known that the author does not even see the need to define it; he simply
states that [i]t is quite common for trance-like altered states to be loosely referred
to as sleep (2008, 142). Hanegraaff criticizes scholars of an earlier generation
(particularly Andr-Jean Festugire) who rejected the possibility of having revelatory experiences during altered states of consciousness. In an all-inclusive comparison that resembles an Eliadean understanding of shamanic ecstasy (which I will
discuss in the next chapter), he notes that the idea that people cannot possibly
have had such experiences, and must therefore have invented them, reflects a peculiar blindness on Festugires partquite on the contrary, people have such experiences so frequently that they have been reported through all periods of history
and all over the world (Hanegraaff 2008, 160; no proof is provided for this general claim). Another example of a popularized new age vocabulary is the following statement about the experiential dimensions of the Hermetic text: Admittedly
the difference is a very ambiguous one, and perhaps deliberately so, because the
text keeps suggesting that the external cosmos paradoxically (or, if one wishes,
holographically) exists inside the visionarys own mind. In a footnote Hane-
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graaff explains that the association [of holography] with New Age should not
keep us from perceiving the applicability of this concept in a context such as
the present one (2008, 149, note 76).
With statements like these Hanegraaff lends scholarly authority to the discursive knot of trance, mind, cosmos, new age, philosophy, hermeticism,
gnosis, and experience; this knot overlaps in many ways with the entangled
discourse strands that have been at work since the nineteenth century. What
we see here is the academic stabilization of the attribution of meaning to certain
experiences, or, more generally, the legitimization of knowledge claims in the
dispositive of academic writing. Recently, Hanegraaff also introduced the term
entheogenic esotericism (2013), which is another example of the same dynamic;
similar to Michael Harner (whom I will introduce in the next chapter), the positive attribution of religious meaning to the use of ayahuasca and other psychoactive plants is discursively stabilized in the genre of academic publication. In a
discourse community that comprises practitioners and academic observers, as
well as intertextual links to discourses that have been formed earlier, the strict
differentiation between emic and etic turns out to be analytically useless.
In a recent review article, Markus Altena Davidsen (2012) asked, What is
Wrong with Pagan Studies? He argued that pagan studies (which is the self-description of many scholars, programmatically contrasting the academic study of
paganism) are dominated by the methodological principles of essentialism, exclusivism, loyalism, and supernaturalism, and he demonstrates that these principles promote normative constructions of pure paganism, insider interpretations of the data, and theological speculations about gods, powers, and a
special magical consciousness. Much of what Davidsen argues also holds
true when we look at publications in the field of Western esotericism. There
can be no doubt that essentialism, exclusivism, loyalism, and supernaturalism
are methodological principles that we also encounter in esotericism research.
Two examples by leading scholars in the field may suffice.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in his introductory book on The Western Esoteric
Traditions (2008), wrote:
My own perspective on this debate is that definitions of the esoteric in terms of discourse,
social constructions, and legitimacy lack a hermeneutic interpretation of spirit and spirituality as an independent ontological reality. By seeking to define the esoteric in terms of
human behavior and culture, it becomes a reflective cultural category rather than a philosophical or spiritual insight, which remains the essential component of any claims to real
or absolute knowledge (2008, 12 13).
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This self-description of the academic field is a direct materialization of countercultural discourses. While Christian theology has gone through hundreds of
years of pluralistic criticism and refinement, many pagans and esotericists (including those who are academics) construct their identity through narratives of exclusion and persecution. This can lead to unexpected revelations. When asked what
were the worst things about having this [Western esotericism] as your specialty,
Godwin responded: Having to listen to papers or read articles and dissertations
that accommodate it to current and fashionable academic trends. But this is my
problem. If I was academically trained in philosophy, history, or the study of religions, or if I had bothered to read the authors sanctified by those trends, I might
feel less bored and excluded (ibid.). The result of this lack of theoretical reflection
is what I call methodological solipsism, which is a characteristic of many publications in the academic study of paganism and esotericism.
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Hanegraaff does not refer to the huge intellectual debate that is raging in historiography since the challenges of Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Reinhart Koselleck, and others, or to the new responses that scholars have formulated to cope
with these challenges. A more serious engagement with this critical debate
would lead to the realization that it is impossible to apply an anti-eclectical his-
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toriography; the questions, rather, are: What interests and circumstances drive
the selection of historical data (including our own)? How is historical knowledge
constructed in social communication? It is these questions that need to be included in serious historical research. Hanegraaffs argument would be much
stronger if he incorporated the methodological considerations of scholars who
are reflecting on the social construction of knowledge. Poststructuralist approaches actually provide ammunition for a critical analysis of the complexities
of European culture and its historiography (see also Otto 2013).
Even if Hanegraaff, Godwin, and Goodrick-Clarke simply state that poststructuralist and discursive approaches cannot solve the problems of academic
research after the fact (to use Clifford Geertz expression), then the challenges
of older paradigms still hold and must be answered, instead of returning to an
understanding of historiography and scientific truth that predates the important
turns of the twentieth century. There are examples of scholars who are also critical of so-called postmodern approaches but who actually take the challenges
seriously and respond to them on a high level of reflection. One example is
Geertzs book After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist
(1995), to which I will return in the next chapter. Another prominent example
is the historian Carlo Ginzburg. In his recent book Threads and Traces: True,
False, Fictive, Ginzburg notes:
Against the tendency of postmodern skepticism to blur the borders between fictional and
historical narrations, in the name of the constructive element they share, I proposed a
view of the relation between the two as a competition for the representation of reality.
But rather than trench warfare, I hypothesized a conflict made up of challenges and reciprocal, hybrid borrowings. If this was how things stood, one could not combat neoskepticism
by going back to old certitudes. We have to learn from the enemy in order to oppose it more
efficaciously (2012, 2).
If scholars of paganism and esotericism want to leave the niche into which the
discursive entanglements of their study have brought them, they will have to join
the theoretical discussion that is going on in historiography, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and the academic study of religion.
In sum, and closing my brief methodological excursus, this chapter has
shown the direct discursive impact of academic theorizing on religious practice;
it has also shown the mutual dependence and ultimately the inseparability of
academic and non-academic as well as emic and etic perspectives. Again, it
makes sense to talk of discourse communities if we want to grasp the underlying
processes. The next chapter will address another example of such a community,
this time linked to shamanism.
8 Normatizing Shamanism:
Academic Teachers as Religious Experts
Shamanism has fascinated European and North American societies for the past
four hundred years. Missionaries, traders, and travelers were the first who
brought news from the large steppes of northern Eurasia to the west, along
with stories describing exotic rituals. During the eighteenth century, there had
already developed a more or less fixed image of shamanism as a specific
type of religion. For most enlighteners the shaman was a model for irrational behavior, and Catherine the Great even wrote a comedy entitled Der sibirische Schaman, ein Lustspiel (1786), in which she tried to ridicule shamanism and lead her
subjects to a new age of enlightenment. But this was only one side of the coin,
and the counter-reaction was soon to emerge. For quite a few European enlightenersamong them J.G. Herder, J.W. von Goethe, or V. Hugothe shaman was a
religious virtuoso, a reminder of those ancient ecstatics and artists who were
able to transgress ordinary reality by means of music and poetry. The most prominent figure in this European imagination was Orpheus (on the formation of this
shamanic discourse in Europe see von Stuckrad 2012; see also the more detailed
treatment in von Stuckrad 2003c, 35 83; Znamenski 2007, 3 38).
Roberte N. Hamayon labeled the three-step history of approaches to the shamans behavior during the past three hundred years devilization, medicalization, and idealization (Hamayon 1998, 179 181). However, the discursive entanglements and re-entanglements that have led to the present situation are much
more complex than this model suggests. It also neglects the fact that European attitudes toward shamanism have been ambivalent from the beginning. To reflect
this ambivalence, Karl-Heinz Kohls notion of refutation and desire is much
more suitable for understanding the characteristics of European intellectual appropriation of shamanism. In several publications, Kohl defined this dialectic as
the major pattern in the engagement of European culture with everything foreign
and unknown, and subsequently also as the constituting dimension of the discipline of ethnology or cultural anthropology (Kohl 1987; see also Kohl 1981). Each
era, writes Kohl, has what we can call its own mark of obsession [Besessenheitsmerkmal] (Kohl 1987, 3, emphasis original) that reveals the main topics in the encounter with the Other in a given period. But while the marks of obsession may
differ from one period to another, the dynamics of observation and interpretation
of the Other have remained the same. What European observers perceived in the
foreign civilization was essentially determined by the limited horizon of experience of their own civilization (ibid., 4).
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Descriptions of shamanism always carried with them an element of fascination that became apparent when Eliade in 1951 put forth his new construction of
the shaman as a trance specialist. Now shamanism appeared as a kind of anthropological constant, an ensemble of religious practices and doctrines that enabled certain socially discernible persons to interrelate with spiritual entities on
behalf of their community. Eliade must be addressed as the major turntable between nineteenth-century intellectual discourse and the popular appropriation
of shamanism in the second half of the twentieth century (Noel 1997, 26 41;
von Stuckrad 2003c, 123 135).
The problems connected to definitions of shamanism are enormous, but they
are not my primary concern here. What is important for my analysis is the reentanglement of discourse strands of shamanism, nature, psychology, and
religion that went along with a new appreciation of shamanism. It was in
the 1960s that the shamanic discourse in North America made a decisive step
in a new direction when the New Age movement discovered shamanism and
made it a major reference tool for its worldview. Inspired by Eliade, Jung, and
Joseph Campbell, the shaman became an indication of a new understanding
of humanitys relation to nature, of the human ability to access spiritual levels
of reality, and of leading a respectful life toward the sacred web of creation.
Henceforth, shamanism was no longer regarded as a spiritual path limited
only to classical shamanic cultures. Instead, by substituting the European positivistic and mechanistic attitude toward reality and nature for a holistic or vitalist one, shamanism was considered available to everyoneeven to those in
urban contexts that are estranged from nature (von Stuckrad 2003c, 137 174).
The phenomenon was soon to become known in academic parlance as neoshamanism or modern Western shamanism, in more negative depictions also
as urban shamanism, New Age shamanism, or even plastic shamanism. Because of their biased tone, practitioners usually do not feel comfortable with
these labels. As Annette Hst from the Scandinavian Center for Shamanic Studies argues, modern Western shamanism (or, for her part, even modern European shamanism) would be much more appropriate (Hst 2001). From a discourse-historical perspective we can go a step further and simply talk of a
shamanic discourse that has a long genealogy in European and North American
intellectual history. This discourse includes the scholarly biases and polemical
refutation of plastic shamanism, as well as the idealization of shamanism as
A good survey of previous work is presented by Siikala and Hoppl 1992. For a critical
evaluation see Taussig 1991 and Hutton 2001. See also the collection of important contributions
in Znamenski 2004.
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162
Of the multitudinous publications on Eliade, I only mention Dudley III 1977; Ellwood 1999,
79 126; Rennie 2001 and 2007; Allen 2002. On Eliades Romanian roots see Ricketts 1988; on the
discussion about his fascist inclinations and involvements see Junginger 2008, particularly Part
II.
This position is part of a larger development during the first decades of the twentieth century,
usually discussed under the slogan of the crisis of historicism. In addition to the links already
established in previous chapters, particularly for the German context, mention should be made
of Oexle 2007 (with Oexles long introductory chapter, pp. 11 116) and Laube 2004; see also
Raulff 1999.
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vides the information that Eliade postponed the writing of that book on 21 June
1949 to start working on a novel. The novels Romanian title Noaptea de Snziene
(The Night of St. John) alludes to this date (Ricketts 1982; see also Noel 1997,
30 38). The summer solstice was a turning point not only for the author but
also for the protagonist of this long novel that was published in English as
The Forbidden Forest. The plot that focuses on the main character Stefan begins
on this date of the year 1936 and ends exactly twelve years later with Stefans
escape from history, when he and his lover Ileana are killed in a car accident.
Between these dates the novel tells the story of a group of Romanian intellectuals trying to keep up the realm of truth and beauty within the chaos of World
War II and its ugly destructive face. The narrative is not without Romanian nationalistic overtones that experienced fresh impetus between the World Wars.
Stefanwriter, philosopher, and painterhas a characteristic gift to perceive
the hidden dimensions of the ultimate truth behind the deceptive superficial
world of history.
The entire novel circulates around the themes of history and time, of imaginative spaces and mysterious synchronicities, and of predestination and fate.
From the outset it is clear what is at stake for Stefan: To escape from Time,
to go out of Time. Look well around you. Signs come to you from all sides.
Trust the signs. Follow them. (Eliade 1978b, 25). This time is plagued by persecution, war, and destruction; but beyond the outer history there is a cosmic
time without limits. And for some people, like Anisiesaint, magician, and emperorit is only the time of the planetary cycles and the phases of the sun and
the moon that is important.
He accepts no time other than cosmic time, and he especially rejects historic time; for example, the time during which parliamentary elections take place, or Hitlers arming of Germany, or the Spanish Civil War. He has decided to take account only of the time in which
cosmic events occur []. Hes content to exhaust the significance of each of these phenomena, living thereby an uninterrupted revelation. [] For him Nature begins to become not
only transparent but also a bearer of values. Its not a case of a regression, lets say, to the
animal-like state of primitive man. Hes discovered in Nature not that absence of the Spirit
that some of us seek, but the key to fundamental metaphysical revelationsthe mystery of
death and resurrection, of the passage from non-being to being (ibid., 69).
Eliade here constructs the same discursive knot as in his analysis of alchemy,
discussed above. He again reassembles nature, religion, spirit, cosmos,
and metaphysics, now combined with politics, historiography, the spiritual evolution of humanity, andin the next quotemyth. In The Forbidden
Forest, Anisie is the protagonists metaphysical teacher, giving him lectures
about the essence of time and of history that will have an apocalyptic end for
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humanity in the near future. Another war will follow this one, and then another, until nothing of all that has been will remain, not even the ruins! (ibid., 313).
But this, Anisie says, is only part of the truth.
[F]or historic man, for that man who wants to be and declares himself to be exclusively a
creator of history, the prospect of an almost total annihilation of his historic creations is
undoubtedly catastrophic. But there exists another kind of humanity besides the humanity
that creates history. There exists, for instance, the humanity that has inhabited the ahistoric
paradises: the primitive world, if you wish, or the world of prehistoric times. This is the
world that we encounter at the beginning of any cycle, the world which creates myths. It
is a world for whom our human existence represents a specific mode of being in the universe, and as such it poses other problems and pursues a perfection different from that of
modern man, who is obsessed by history (ibid., 313, emphasis original).
At this point it becomes clear that Anisie represents Eliades conviction that humanity has to transform into a new epoch and that such a transformation can
happen only after a return to the mythical illud tempus. But maybe he also felt
like Stefan, who held a somewhat softer position: I too dream of escaping
from time, from history, someday, Stefan had replied. But not at the price of
the catastrophe you forecast [] (ibid., 314).
In The Forbidden Forest, Eliade introduced a concrete way to escape from
historical time into mythical non-time. Even as a child, the clairvoyant Stefan
knew of a secret chamber that initiates called Sambo. This room was above
us, somewhere overhead on the second floor (ibid., 74). When Stefan dared to
open the room he was struck by an experience of enlightenment.
And just then, at that moment I understood what Sambo was. I understood that here on
earth, near at hand and yet invisible, inaccessible to the uninitiated, a privileged space exists, a place like a paradise, one you could never forget in your whole life if you once had
the good fortune to know it. Because in Sambo I felt I was no longer living as I had lived
before. I lived differently in a continuous inexpressible happiness. I dont know the source
of this nameless bliss (ibid., 75).
In this timeless mythical room of sacred cheerfulness Stefan was no longer able
to move his tongue; he did not feel any hunger or thirst, and he lived, purely
and simply, in paradise (ibid.). As an adult Stefan reserved an additional secret
room in his hotel where he could work as a painter. He created mystical pictures,
drawn on the canvas but invisible to others, and it is by means of art that he
again entered that ecstatic mystical state. Painting, I had no past (ibid., 58).
In this secret place, time had a different quality. When I returned home, sometimes very late at night, I seemed to be returning from a journey to a distant
place. I seemed to have come from another city where the customs were different
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and where I met other kinds of people (ibid.). This mode of time, Stefan added,
felt more real to him than the time at home or at the Ministry.
Clearly, Sambo is a literary adaptation of the topics of ascent of the soul, the
contact with the other world, the motif of the journey, and the function of art
and ecstasy that Eliade engaged in his academic book on shamanism, which
he was working on at the same time. What is more, the primacy of ascent, making the issue of descent to the underworld a secondary one in his understanding
of shamanism, has a clear parallel in his shamanism study. As Daniel Noel puts
it: The escape from history sought by Stefan is an escape upward, reversing the
fall into history (1997, 32, emphasis original). Noel continues: [I]t is only the
elevated spaces of the novels world that offer any hope of a way out of the history that so tormented Stefan, Ileana, Biris, Anisie, and the other charactersas
it tormented their creator and his fellow Romanians in the period between 1936
and 1948 (1997, 34).
The novel culminates dramatically with the death of the lovers Stefan and
Ileana. The car accident was predetermined long before, but their love triumphs
over death. Eliade let the novel end with the sentence: He had known that this
last moment, this moment without end, would suffice (1978b, 596). Hence, the
Orphic dimension of the triad of love, art, and death is a prominent element of
The Forbidden Forest, as it was part and parcel of Eliades interpretation of shamanism.
It is noteworthy that in his academic book on shamanism Eliade called Orpheus a Great Shaman: his healing art, his love for music and animals, his
charms, his power of divination. Even his character of culture hero is not in
contradiction to the best shamanic tradition. After having reviewed a number
of parallels in the ancient worldfrom Hermes Psychopompos to Er the PamphylianEliade argued that
[the] situation of man remains constant. [] The enormous gap that separates a shamans
ecstasy from Platos contemplation, all the difference deepened by history and culture,
changes nothing in this gaining consciousness of ultimate reality; it is through ecstasy
that man fully realizes his situation in the world and his final destiny. We could almost
speak of an archetype of gaining existential consciousness, present both in the ecstasy
of a shaman or a primitive mystic and in the experience of Er the Pamphylian and of all
the other visionaries of the ancient world, who, even here below, learned the fate of
man beyond the grave (1972a, 394).
Eliade 1972a, 391; see also Eliade 1972b, 34, where he addresses the ecstatic experiences of
Orpheus that were shamanic in type.
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Anisie in The Forbidden Forest could not have summarized Eliades position
more precisely. These sentences by far transgress the limits of historical or scholarly argument. They reflect Eliades existential questioning of the human condition after World War II. The Orphic myth was a blueprint for his presentation of
shamanism as a technique that is most suitable even for modern humankind to
renew its bond with the ultimate reality in illo tempore.
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or maneuvers take place over specific resources and the access to them (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 97; Wacquant 1989, 39; Bourdieu 1990, 52 65). The
field, hence, is a structured system of social positions, occupied either by individuals or institutions, the nature of which defines the situation for their occupants. Put differently: the field is a space of action or struggle; the struggle is
over forms of capital in the field. What is important is the fact that any individual
or institutiona player in the fieldoccupies a certain position in the various
fields of their society, a position that is determined by the agents access to
forms of capital. Each field, by virtue of its defining content, has a different
logic and an axiomatic structure of necessity and relevance that is both the product and producer of the habitus that is specific and appropriate to the field.
With these analytical tools, which can easily be combined with an analysis
of discourse, let us now have a closer look at the authorities that strove for recognition in shamanic fields of discourse in late twentieth-century Europe and
North America.
Carlos Castaneda
Much has been written about Carlos Castaneda, also known as Carlos Arana (or
Aranha). Questions regarding his biography are as difficult to answer as questions pertaining to the authenticity of his writings. During his study of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, between 1959 and 1973, Castaneda undertook several research trips to Mexico, where he said he met a Yaqui
brucho, that is a sorcerer, who would soon gain worldwide fame under the
name of Don Juan Matus. Don Juanaccording to unverified sources born in
1891 in Sonora, Mexicobecame Castanedas teacher and introduced his apprentice during the following years (intermittently) to the secret wisdom of the Yaqui.
Normally, the knowledge of these secrets was reserved for a nagual, a spiritual
leader of a generation of sorcerers.
In four books, Castaneda made his experiences with Don Juan known to a
wide audience: The Teachings of Don Juan; A Separate Reality; Journey to Ixtlan;
and Tales of Power. The Teachings of Don Juan was published by the University of
California Press. Even more astonishing was that Journey to Ixtlan was accepted
by the University of California, Los Angeles, as a doctoral thesis for anthropology, which soon led to some irritation in the academic world. Nobody except Castanedanot even the members of the PhD committeehad ever seen Don
Juan, and there were no photographs of him. Hence, many people concluded
that Castanedas books were entirely fictitious or even fraudulent. Such suspicion was further fed by certain discrepancies in Castanedas narrative, which in-
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cluded elements that were difficult to trace in the Yaqui spiritual tradition. One
scholar in particular, Richard de Mille, spent years on his attempt to prove the
fictitious character of the Don Juan books (de Mille 1976 and 1980).
This is not the place to engage in a discussion of the Castaneda controversy.
More than thirty years after this debate, it is more interesting to see how Castanedas presentation of his methodology became more and more linked to relativistic positions in anthropology and to questions of scholarly objectivity in the
writing culture debate. Time and again, Castaneda insisted that there is no substantial difference between his virtual informant Don Juan and the just-as-invisible informants of other ethnographers; or between his problem of translating
sentences that originate from a different interpretation of reality into languages
of the Western world (cf. Silverman 1975). Compare, for instance, Clifford
Geertzs remarks about narrating the past after the fact:
What we can construct, if we keep notes and survive, are hindsight accounts of the connectedness of things that seem to have happened: pieced-together patternings, after the fact. To
state this mere observation about what actually takes place when someone tries to make
sense out of something known about from assorted materials encountered while poking
about in the accidental dramas of the common world is to bring on a train of worrying
questions. What has become of objectivity? What assures us we have things right? Where
has all the science gone? It may just be, however, that all understanding (and indeed, if
distributive, bottom-up models of the brain are right, consciousness as such) trails life in
just this way. Floundering through mere happenings and then concocting accounts of
how they hang together is what knowledge and illusion alike consist in (1995, 2 3).
Shortly before his death in 1998, Castaneda published The Active Side of Infinity
as a final reflection on his life, teachings, and experiences. The title refers to the
realm of the dead to which the Yaqui shamans gain access after having collected
the memorabilia of their life journey. According to Castaneda, this land is called
The Active Side of Infinity. Many statements in this book are reminiscent of
Geertzian anthropological relativism, even though Castaneda did not bother to
respect the methodological difference between imagination and invention (a difference that is essential for Clifford Geertz). The Active Side of Infinity was published by Harper Collins, which presented it on the cover as the ultimate Castaneda: In this book written immediately before his death, anthropologist and
shaman Carlos Castaneda gives us his most autobiographical and intimately revealing work ever, the fruit of a lifetime of experience and perhaps the most moving volume in his oeuvre. It is generally noteworthy that later works of Castaneda, such as the 1984 publication The Fire From Within, have been presented in
some editions as novels (see also Drury 1989, 87).
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Joan Halifax
For studying the close link between anthropological research, personal experiences, and an attempt to describe shamanic worlds of knowledge in a way that
transgresses cultural borders, the work of Joan Halifax (b. 1942) is particularly
interesting. Halifax started her career with a study of anthropology and a research project under Alan Lomax at New Yorks Columbia University in the
1960s. Subsequently, she spent some time at the Muse de lHomme in Paris,
where she prepared for a research trip to the Dogon in Mali. Her experiences
with the Dogona deep questioning of her life, new insights, illness, and healingchanged her life forever. The world I had come fromNew York, Miami,
North Carolinalooked quite disordered as I sat in the quiet shadow of the cliffs
above Banani, but I eventually realized that most of us have to return to the
world from which we started (Halifax 1994, xxiii).
It is reports like these that significantly add to her symbolic capital and her
authority in the field. Back in the United States, she worked at the University of
Miami School of Medicine and moved on to the Maryland Psychiatric Research
Center to work with Stanislav Grof on his LSD projects. About this phase she
says: My world had shifted radically when I left New York and Paris for Africa.
From cross-cultural studies in archives to fieldwork in Africa and the Dogons
great rite of passage, the Sigui, I switched from mind to body. My world was
again to shift, this time from body to psyche, when I married the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof (ibid., xxiv).
But working on anthropology, shamanism, and transpersonal psychology
was only the prelude for yet another shift in Halifaxs spiritual and academic
journey. This happened when she met the Korean Zen master Dae Soen sa
Mim, who introduced her to Buddhism. Subsequently, she intensified her
study of Buddhism and worked for years with the Vietnamese teacher Thich
Nhat Hanh. All these experiences she tried to combine in the spiritual center
she founded in the late 1970s in Ojai, California.
170
At Ojai, I tried to replicate the experience of intimacy with place that I had known with Ogobara, Don Jos, and other tribal peoples. I wanted to live as close to the Earth as possible. I also
wanted to create a place where people from various cultures and traditions could meet together
and exchange with one another in an environment that was sacred, friendly, and wild. Ojai was
a refuge where shamanism and Buddhism interacted in an earthy way (ibid., xxvii).
The Ojai Foundation is still an important hub for shamanic activities in North Americaa good example of the routinization of Halifaxs charismatic authority.
Halifaxs work on the interface of shamanism, nature-based spirituality, and
Buddhism influenced the development of the shamanic milieus. Her volume on
Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives (1991 [1979]) was one of the
first scholarly volumes that intended to present the voice of shamans themselves.
The fact that her career combines scholarship and personal spiritual experiences
has enhanced Halifaxs reputation considerably.
Michael Harner
Michael (James) Harner (b. 1929) is arguably among the most prominent authorities in the modern shamanic field. He became involved in the debate about the
authenticity of the works of his friend, Carlos Castaneda. He was convinced that
Castanedas work was 110 per cent valid since it conveys a deep truth, though
his specific details [could] often be justifiably questioned (quoted from de Mille
1980, 22). It is also said that Harner personally offered assistance in helping
Castaneda place his manuscript in the 1960s, after a notable New York publisher
declined it (Dury 1989, 86).
In 1963, Harner earned his PhD in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked as a professor at Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, and at the
New School for Social Research in New York. Between 1959 and 1961, he had led
a research project on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History to study
the Conibo Indians of the Peruvian Amazon basin. During thisand laterfieldwork, Harner was introduced to shamanic rituals involving the entheogenic
vine ayahuasca.
The website reports that Over the past year, The Ojai Foundation has played host to Joanna
Macy, Malidoma Som, Starhawk, Hector Aristizabal, Paul Cummins, the annual Gathering of
Council Leaders, Gigi Coyle and the Beyond Boundaries pilgrimage and 80 other programs for
individuals, schools, nonprofits, social service agencies, corporations and the community
(www.ojaifoundation.org/About-Us, accessed on 8 May 2011).
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Since his first ritual use of ayahuasca, Harner already had extraordinary visionary experiences that both confused and fascinated him; these experiences
included visions of the Book of Revelation (see Harner 1980, 2 7). He was
eager to learn more about the world that he had entered, and so he asked
the most supernaturally knowledgeable of the Indians, a blind shaman who
had made many excursions in the spirit world with the aid of the ayahuasca
drink (ibid., 7). When he told this blind shaman of the dragon-like creatures
he had encounteredanimals similar to great bats who said that they were
the true masters of the worldthe response was astonishing:
He stared up toward me with his sightless eyes, and said with a grin, Oh, theyre always
saying that. But they are only the Masters of Outer Darkness. He waved his hand casually
toward the sky. I felt a chill along the lower part of my spine, for I had not yet told him that
I had seen them, in my trance, coming from outer space. I was stunned. What I had experienced was already familiar to this barefoot, blind shaman. Known to him from his own
explorations of the same hidden world into which I had ventured. From that moment on
I decided to learn everything I could about shamanism. And there was something more
that encouraged me in my new quest. After I recounted my entire experience, he told me
that he did not know of anyone who had encountered and learned so much on their
first ayahuasca journey. You can surely be a master shaman, he said (ibid., 7 8).
These passages are indicative of the rhetoric of Harners books. With such a narrative, Harner not only proves that he was an anthropologist who really was
therecontrary to Castaneda, who was not able to provide evidence for his encounter with real shamansthe author is also introduced as an authority for
various shamanic traditions of the Americas, which he as an initiateeven as
a potential master shamanknows from within. This knowledge he can
bring to a Western audience, thus serving as a bridge between native tradition
and non-native modernity. With respect to authorization and legitimization of
knowledge, this initiation in two cultures is highly important.
After extensive research both in the field and through literature, Harner elaborated what he felt to be the cross-cultural common denominators of shamanism. These he referred to as core shamanism, which he describes as a spiritual
technique instead of a religious concept. Employing rhythmic instruments
mostly a large frame drum or rattlea slightly altered state of consciousness
is induced (not necessarily a trance), which allows the practitioner to focus
his or her attention on non-ordinary realities. In this state the shamanic practitioner journeys into the lower or upper worlds in order to meet spiritual entities
See Geertz 1988, 1 24 (chapter 1 entitled Being There: Anthropology and the Scene of
Writing).
172
such as power animals and spirit helpers. Submitting as an apprentice to the spirits, the shaman can then ask for help or advice in order to heal her-/himself,
other people, animals, plants, or places. The relationship between shaman
and spirits is further strengthened by ritual activities like dancing and singing,
or through power objects that bring immaterial power into visible form.
In 1979 a step toward institutionalization and routinization of core shamanism took place when Harner and others founded the Center for Shamanic Studies. Having resigned his professorship, Harner renamed this non-profit organization in 1987 as the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (FSS). Subsequently, a
global network was established in order to secure the quality of the core shamanism techniques, to facilitate grassroots networking, and to distribute literature, music, and shamanic paraphernalia. The constitutional aims of the FSS are
threefold: preservation of shamanic cultures and wisdom around the world;
study of the original shamanic peoples and their traditions; and teaching shamanic knowledge for the benefit of our planet. This last objective has been especially controversial because the foundation offers scholarships to natives to regain their own shamanic heritage (Urgent Tribal Assistance). Critics regard
this as a sincere act of colonial suppression, whereas natives who work as certified counselors for the Harner methodlike the Lakota Carol Proudfoot Edgarembrace the FSSs techniques as a cross-cultural shamanic tradition.
With branches on most continents, the FSS has established the Harner method as a standard way of teaching shamanic practice. Several other groups have
adopted it as a model. The foundation organizes workshops, and it also encourages participants to gather into drumming-groups, where the skills learned
through the workshops are practiced and shared.
It is time to sum up the discussion so far: I have presented Carlos Castaneda,
Joan Halifax, and Michael Harner as examples of charismatic leadership in the
first generation of shamanic practitioners in North America and Europe. Despite
differences in their work, all three have been instrumental in processes of institutionalization of this spiritual practice; all three have succeeded in having their
charisma routinized in foundations and group networks; and all three based
their authority on claims of knowledge that combine academic teaching and personal initiation in native contexts. In all three cases the charismatic authority
Authority Contested
173
Authority Contested
The modern shamanic field is no exception to the rule that struggles for recognition and social capital lead to contestation and competition with regard to authority and charisma. Processes of inclusion and exclusion, of normatization and
the challenging thereof, of legitimization and delegitimization, or what Max
Weber called social closure (soziale Schlieung), are easily recognizable
when we take a closer look at the shamanic scene. That the last decades have
seen an increasing competition in the field certainly enhanced such processes.
The Foundation for Shamanic Studies is a good example of the dynamics
that are at stake here. As we have seen, since its inception in 1979 the FSS
has established itself as a focal point for the shamanic scene, and the Harner
method has become a well-known label. The term Shamanic Counseling is
protected by copyrights in the United States, as is the diploma Certified Shamanic Counselor. The FSSs distinction between a basic course to learn the shamanic techniques and several advanced courses has been taken over by many
shamanic groups in the United States and Europe, which illustrates the process
of normatization that Harner initiated. In discursive terms, what we see here is
the legitimization of knowledge and the attribution of meaning through publications and through dispositives such as the FSS.
West, examples of which are Sun Bear, Harley Swift Deer, or Hyemeyohsts Storm; see von
Stuckrad 2003c, 149 152. On Lynn Andrews see also Drury 1989, 87 92.
174
At the same time, leading figures in the field contest Harners authority, as
can be gathered from the interviews that Loren Cruden conducted in preparation
for her book Coyotes Council Fire. Many respondents could not really relate to
Crudens question, Do you think that core shamanism can replace or be a useful adjunct to cultural shamanism? Grey Wolf, for instance, replied: I am not
sure what is meant by core shamanism. For that matter, I am not sure what
shamanism is. I think of it as being in contact with the Oneness of All (Cruden
1995, 32). And Brooke Medicine Eagle responded: By core shamanism I assume
you mean a generic shamanism, such has been practiced throughout the world
and is viable and useful in all cultures today (ibid., 50; finally, she answered in
the affirmative). Only Sandra Ingerman, a leading representative of the FSS,
frankly and self-consciously remarked that [t]here is no cultural shamanism.
Core shamanism is the only game in town (ibid., 60).
Harners authority has also been contested by some of his followers. With the
growth of Harners workshops, fierce debates came up concerning the commercial aspect of his work. Critics from outside charge Harner with having appropriated native traditions for personal profit, while participants frequently express
their disappointment about the workshops sterile or impersonal atmosphere.
One reason for this may be that Harner conceptualizes shamanism as a mere
technique; others (particularly Harners former colleague Jonathan Horwitz
from the Scandinavian Center for Shamanic Studies in Copenhagen) stress the
animistic aspect and talk of shamanism as sacred work. All aspects of this debate can be followed in the journal Spirit Talk. In the rubric Workshop Reviews, authors repeatedly criticize Michael Harners workshops, despite their
appreciation of his overall efforts for the revival of shamanism. A participant
in a course in London wrote:
I went to this workshop excited to meet the man who both began the shamanic renaissance
and who was my teachers teacher. I left feeling that I never met the man. I was disappointed by the impersonal nature of this workshop, which for many may have been a first experience of shamanism. The site and food were super and Michael Harner is undoubtedly an
excellent teacher. But somehow I felt like a customer of a big business rather than someone
learning a spiritual practice. Im glad I went, but wouldnt repeat the experience (Spirit Talk
3 [Spring/Summer 1997], 14 [page number after print-out of document www.users.dircon.co.uk/~snail/ST/ST3.htm; accessed on 17 June 2002]).
The mixture of great respect for the legendary founder of the shamanic revival
movement and his missing presence in an impersonal workshop context is typical of these course reports. Karen Kelly, editor of Spirit Talk and herself experienced in a number of spiritual workshops, presented a similar picture:
Authority Contested
175
Michael Harner is the man who is largely responsible for the re-birth of shamanism in the
West. In summer 1997 he taught a Foundation for Shamanic Studies basic course to some
seventy people in London. Michael is a larger than life figurehe has a[n] Indiana Jones
feeling to himand the depth of his experience of shamanism clearly shows. His anecdotes
drawn from both his own practise and his anthropological field study were both funny and
effective and his utter [sic] certainty was re-assuring. However it was also clear that Michael
had taught he [sic] course many, many times and occasionally he seemed almost blas in
the way he held the circle. This particularly struck me when he was rattling the circle togethersomething I had previously experienced as a deeply sacred moment. With seventy
people present, there was also almost no personal contact between the [sic] Michael and
the course participantssomething I really missed. However almost everyone seemed to
be having a good time and there were some really miraculous journeys happening. For
me though I felt something of the sacredness of this practise was missing. Its clear for
Harner that shamanism is a useful and interesting series of techniques, it is not clear to
me whether it is more than that to him.
In addition to a critique of the increased commercialization of Harners workshops, parts of his doctrines have been submitted to critical reflection as
well. One example is the debate about the status of the Middle World, i. e., the
normal world we are living in. While Harner and the FSS used to argue that shamanic journeys into the Middle Worldfor instance, by walking through a wood
in a shamanic state of consciousness, or by communicating with rivers, plants, or
stonescan enrich shamanic practice, representatives of the FSS later warned
against such journeys. The reason they gave was that the entities populating
these spaces were less wise and compassionate.
Such reasoning aroused much irritation among other practitioners. Annette
Hst, who was asked about this many times during her own workshops, felt the
need to clearly distance herself from Harner and the FSS. After acknowledging
that I consider Michael Harner my first ordinary reality, Middle World teacher
in shamanism, and I will always be grateful for what I received from him
(Hst 2000, 19), Hst expressed her concern that Michael Harners personal opinion can become a firm dogma that subsequently prevents people from having
Spirit Talk 8 (Winter/Spring 1999), 17 (page number after print-out of document www.users.dircon.co.uk/~snail/ST/ST8.htm, accessed on 17 June 2002). Kelly reported three other basic
courses she went to, concluding that working with Harner was interesting, if impersonal. For
myself Ive been working with Jonathan [Horwitz] for the last seven years which I guess reflects
my own choice (p. 18). See also Kellys interview with Horwitz, published under the title
Shamanism, Death and Life online at www.shamanism.dk/Article-on-death-and-life.htm
(accessed 22 May 2011).
For a similar critique, this time regarding Lone Wolf, a shaman of Nordic descent, see
Taylor 1997, 193 195; see also Jocks 2000.
176
important experiences. Such a dogma is the same doctrine the Church has
preached to my ancestors for the last thousand years. It taught people to fear
the spirits of Nature, to fear the night, to fear the unploughed land. It preached
that all those nature spirits were actually bad, the devils companions, and best
avoided. Hst concluded: I cant use the foundations Middle World doctrine. It
would stand between me and Life. I prefer to trust my own experience.
Trusting ones own experience is a major doctrinal feature of contemporary
European and North American shamanismperhaps of contemporary paganism
in generalthat renders a simple master-pupil relation difficult or contested.
Even Harner himself argues this way:
[] I practice shamanism myself; not because I understand in OSC [Ordinary State of Consciousness] terms why it works, but simply because it does work. But dont take my word for
it: truly significant shamanic knowledge is experienced, and cannot be obtained from me or
any other shaman. Shamanism is, after all, basically a strategy for personal learning and
acting on that learning. I offer you a portion of that strategy and welcome you to the ancient shamanic adventure.
Another aspect of contemporary shamanism that makes a simple relation between master and pupil complicated is the fact that, according to shamanic doctrine, people should only trust their power animals and spirit helpersentities
they encounter in a shamanic state of consciousness and who are described
as real powers rather than projections of the psyche. The Middle World teachers
only provide the intellectual and technical means for shamanic practitioners to
journey into the other world and become the spirits apprentice (Horwitz 1999).
With reference to our initial question, what can we conclude from these dynamics of legitimization and contestation of authority? First of all, the shamanic
field of discourse that I have described in this chapter is dominated by doctrinal
assumptions of individual self-realization and non-hierarchical social structures
that are also prevalent in contemporary paganism, Wicca, and nature-based spiritualities. Whether such a doctrine represents social reality is of course debatable
Ibid., 20. On Annette Hsts contribution to this discourse see also the articles published on
the website www.shamanism.dk (accessed 1 August 2013).
Space does not allow me to address this topic in detail, but it seems that the focus on
personal experience is the result of a Protestant cultural discourse, which explains why paganism, New Age doctrines, and shamanism are attractive to people raised in cultures dominated by such a mindset.
Harner 1980, xviii. Note that, despite this disclaimer, Harner here implicitly calls himself a
shaman; other authorities in the field tend to be more modest, calling themselves shamanic
practitioners.
Authority Contested
177
(see, for instance, Hammer 2010 for a critical reading of New Age individualism).
But the doctrine makes it more difficult for masters and authorities to establish
themselves as charismatic leaders. In shamanism, charisma is particularly achieved by the symbolic capital of both academic and spiritual knowledge, legitimized in biographical narratives that are read widely among followers and pupils.
We can also conclude that the most successful way of responding to the
many refutations of and challenges to authority in a diverse field such as contemporary shamanism is the institutionalization of charisma and, in Webers
terms, its Veralltglichung. It is because Harners authority had been routinized
that Sandra Ingerman can self-consciously call core shamanism the only
game in town (Cruden 1995, 60; see above). This does not explain the attractiveness of this form of shamanism in toto, but it throws some light on the extraordinary success of institutions such as the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and
the Ojai Foundation. In the end, and despite some peculiarities, the dynamics
that structure and organize the religious scene do not differ much from what
we know from other processes of contemporary group formation.
When it comes to the analysis of shamanism in general, this chapter again
has demonstrated the difficulty in distinguishing between emic and etic, because
the academic and the practitioner form a discourse community in which all actors mutually inform and stimulate one another. What is more, contemporary
shamanism in Europe and North America is a clear example of scientification
of religion because shamanism as a religious practice would be impossible without the meaning that academics have attributed to this religious phenomenon.
It is time to drive my argument home.
179
Rethinking the relation between the religious and the secular is an important
starting point. Such a critique of dominant secularization theories, however,
has not yet led to alternative models of interpretation with full currency in todays academic debate. We have to conclude that it is still unclear what model
of interpretation would come after secularization.
If we want to move beyond the secularization paradigm, it is useful to start
with the observation that the very idea of secularization is more explanandum
than explanans: the theory of secularization is itself an integral part of the formation of contemporary European identities. As the material studied in this
book makes clear, secular discourses have not brought the end of religion; rather, they have established the religious in a new framework of meaning. The new
faces of religion in contemporary European societies are co-produced by secular
dynamics. Consequently, it is important to problematize and supersede the clearcut distinction between religion and the secular (see also Krech 2013 and Bangstad forthcoming 2014). Framed in an analysis of discursive changes, this approach helps to develop a more suitable theoretical grid for understanding the
dynamics that have shaped the religious in secular environments.
If we change our object of study and look at the entanglements of religious
and secular discourses that have produced new meanings and new realities in
European societies, we will find a way out of the impasse of secularization theories. When it comes to cultural and political changes during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, we now can describe these simply as reconfigurations of the
religious and secular fields of discourse. It is in discursive re-entanglements and
cultural negotiations of meaning that European societies generate the conceptu-
180
al borders between the religious and the non-religious and between religion and
science. Academics have played a significant role in this dynamic, a role that this
book tries to understand.
The discursive organization of knowledge about religion in secular environments is what I call the scientification of religion. Theoretically, one could also
talk of a religionization of science, but the discursive entanglements of religion
and science are historically inseperable from changes in dispositives and the
emergence of science in its new understanding. That is why I prefer to speak
of scientification of religion to describe this process. My analysis has shown
that the institutional establishment of new disciplines in the nineteenth century,
such as anthropology, classics, Indology, Jewish studies, psychology, and the academic study of religion, led to a professionalization of knowledge about religion
that in turn attributed new meanings to religion (as related approaches see Kippenberg 2002; Krech 2002; von Stuckrad 2003c, 279 284). This attribution of
meaning resulted in the emergence of new religious identities and practices,
such as paganism, new forms of shamanism, astrological practices, environmental
activism, or new variants of Jewish mysticism. In a closely related dynamicand
often in direct correspondence with academics from the humanitiesnatural scientists adopted religious and metaphysical claims and integrated these in their
work, resulting in a new discursive knot of religion and scienceoften combined with a reverence for naturethat gained much influence in the twentieth
century.
Thus, the discursive generation of new meanings and practices of religion in
European societies before and after 1900 was closely tied to intellectual debates
and the emergence of new institutionalized ways of organizing knowledge about
religion. The transformation of discourses and dispositives that went along with
these changes had its core in academic culture, but was by no means limited to
these milieus. Indeed, we should abandon the analytical distinction between
academic and non-academic knowledge, between science and pseudo-science, and between professional and amateur when we study the most important
contributions to discourses of religion and science (Alissa Jones Nelson makes a
similar case for the distinction between academic and vernacular as two rhetorically separated forms of knowledge; see Jones Nelson 2012, 1 3). These distinctions are themselves the results of discursive re-entanglements, of borderwork that determines what it means to be modern and European. Abandoning
the distinctions as analytical categories does of course not mean neglecting their
existence; quite the contrary: it means taking their existence and discursive
power seriously, but without subscribing to the power of persuasion that is discursively attributed to them. In other words, we should not place ourselves in-
181
side these dubious unities in order to study their internal configuration or their
secret contradictions (Foucault 2010 [1972], 26).
This argument is linked to a more fundamental observation. Throughout this
book I have argued that binary constructions such as religion and sciencebut
also others such as emic and etic, East and West, and science and pseudoscienceshould be abandoned if we want to understand the dynamic structures
in which these concepts have gained their meaning. Again, this does not mean
that binary concepts are worthless in general terms; it only means that we
should not trust their power of explanation and that we should critically investigate the realities that these binaries create rather than describe.
If we leave behind binary constructions as analytical categories and look at
them in their function of creating identities through the attribution of meaning,
we will have to find a new vocabulary that seems to be more suitable to serve as
an analytical instrument in our interpretation of historical processes. The vocabulary that comes with discursive analyses provides such an instrument. Talking of discourse strands, which can be entangled in manifold ways, enables us to
see how binary constructions emerge in concrete historical settings, how they are
supplemented with other discourse strands, and how they change their meaning
and constellation over time. Similar to what Bruno Latour calls networks (Latour 1993, 3), these discourses do not have a fixed center around which they
are organized; they are a moving target of scholarly analysis, creating new centers in shifting alliances, dispositives, and discursive configurations.
The discursive constellations that I have followed through the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries clearly demonstrate the strong impact of religious discourses on contemporary societies in Europe. Breaking down religion and science into groups of discursive knots that ascribe new meanings to religion and
science is a useful analytical step. Based on the historical sources presented in
this study, we can identify the major discursive knots that have determined the
place of religion in European culture in the last two hundred years.
My analysis has a deconstructive and a constructive dimension. The deconstruction lies in the critical evaluation and contextualization of what is regarded
as historical and academic knowledge. The constructive element is the re-evaluation of discourse strands that together form the cultural place of religion and
science in contemporary Europe. This re-evaluation does not claim to present
the only valid history of religion and science in Europe; not being an adherent
of the representation model of truth, I do not follow an understanding of historiography as a discipline that strives to represent reality. However, as scholars of
religion we are fully accountable for our constructions of historical developments. It is a grossthough very commonmisunderstanding when critics of
discursive approaches argue that the analysis of discourse opens the door to ar-
182
bitrary and ultimately meaningless scholarship. I hope this book has demonstrated that discourse analysis must be based on a screening of representative
historical material and not on an arbitrary selection of a few sources that fit
the preconceived theory, and also that the power of discursive structures clearly
limits the ways in which scholars can construct meaningful narratives that convince their discourse community. This is the opposite of anything goes.
Focusing on discourses rather than the realities they pretend to represent
means being careful with the application of analytical categories such as modernity, Western esotericism, secularization, or any other concept that is used
in academic parlance to make sense of the world around us. These concepts gain
their meaning only in discursive contexts, and it is in these contexts that we can
see their ideological agenda.
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Index
academic study of religion 1, 2, 102, 108,
131, 158, 180
academics / academy 1, 9, 21, 26, 30, 49,
67, 77, 85, 94, 102, 103, 106, 112, 116,
117, 119, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 138,
139, 140, 145, 146, 149, 152, 155, 156,
158, 161, 162, 165, 166, 167, 169, 172,
177, 180, 181
Academy of Science 100, 144
actors 4, 137, 166, 177
Adelung, Johann Christoph 34
Adler, Alfred 143
Adyar 102, 107, 109, 110
Aegisthus 141
aesthetics / aestheticization 38, 48, 61, 68,
79, 80, 84, 102, 118, 127, 128, 129, 130,
137
Agamemnon 141
Age of Aquarius 55
Agrippa of Nettesheim 100
Aguli, Ivan 132
Albanese, Catherine 133
Alchemy 20, 39, 53, 55, 56 75, 80, 84, 87,
100, 101, 104, 115, 135, 162, 163
spiritual alchemy 73
Algonquin 144
Allah 126
Allan, Maud 131
almanacs 27, 30, 31, 32, 33
altered states of consciousness 154, 171
alterity 157
amateur 19, 68, 80, 83, 88, 139, 180
American metaphysical religion 133
American Museum of Natural History 170
amulets 147, 149
anatomy 105
Andrews, Lynn 172, 173
angels 37, 59
Angelus Silesius 47, 48
Anima / Animus 50, 143, 144
animal magnetism 66, 97
animals 13, 66, 73, 77, 79, 92, 101, 163,
165, 171, 172, 176
anima mundi see world soul
212
Index
Index
chemistry 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 73,
80, 84, 100, 101, 157
Chew, Geoffrey 88
Christianity 12, 26, 27, 31, 40, 76, 78, 97,
109, 110, 112, 117, 119, 121, 128, 129,
130, 147, 150, 152, 153, 156, 178
chorology 77
Christ impulses 112
Chronos 144
chrysopoeia 58
chymiatry 60
chymistry 59, 60, 61
circumcision (male) 116
Clarke, Bruce 67, 83
classification 7, 14, 166
Clinton, Bill 135
cloning 66
Clytemnestra 141
code / coding / de-coding 44, 134, 135,
136, 137
cognition 9, 11, 80, 83, 84
cognitive science of religion 73, 83
Coley, Henry 32
collective unconscious 50, 134
Collge de France 29
Collins, Francis S. 135, 136, 137
colonialism 1, 4, 19, 102, 115, 116, 117, 139,
172
color theory 80
Commer, Ernst 76, 77
commercialization 96, 97, 174, 175
communication 4, 5, 6, , 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14,
15, 17, 59, 61, 87, 95, 96, 97, 98, 128,
132, 137, 146, 158, 166, 175
Conibo 170
consciousness 9, 14, 16, 37, 72, 74, 79, 93,
105, 143, 154, 155, 165, 168, 171, 175,
176
content analysis 10, 18
contingency 8, 90
Copernicus, Nicolas 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 40,
41, 46
Corbin, Henry 162
core shamanism 171, 172, 174, 177
corpuscular philosophy and science 60, 64
correspondence theory of truth 20
cosmology 36, 37, 111, 137
213
cosmopolitanism 131
cosmos 27, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 48, 55, 72,
76, 92, 133, 137, 154, 155, 156, 162, 163
counterculture 55, 156
Coyle, Gigi 170
creation 45, 76, 78, 79, 103, 136, 141, 142,
144, 160
Cree 172
Cromwell, Oliver 31
Crookes, William 65
Crosby, Robert 109
Cruden, Loren 174, 177
crystallography 78
crystals 78, 79, 80
cultural studies 19, 142, 158, 169
Cummins, Paul 170
cybernetics 91
Dacqu, Edgar 48, 85, 86
Dae Soen sa Mim 169
Dalai Lama 107
Dalton, John 61, 62, 64, 100, 101, 102
dance 92, 128, 129, 130, 131
Darwin, Charles 76, 77, 78, 144
Darwinism 66, 77, 80, 90
Davidsen, Markus Altena 155
Davison, William 29
Davy, Humphry 61
death 79, 91, 101, 163, 165, 175
Debus, Allen G. 73
Dee, John 59
deep ecology 87, 89, 92
depth psychology 50, 154
dervish 119
Descartes, Ren 30, 35
De Stijl 80
determinism 12, 39, 52, 53, 54, 93, 106, 165
Deutsch, David 55, 73, 74, 75
Deutscher Monistenbund (German Monist
League) 17, 80, 81, 83, 86
devil 102, 176
Diana 147
Diderot, Denis 34
dilettantism 68
Dinet, Etienne 132
Dionysian 120, 125, 131, 143
discourse 1 19 and passim
214
Index
Index
215
216
Index
Gauricus, Lucas 34
Geertz, Clifford 6, 158, 168
Geiger, Abraham 117, 122
Geisteswissenschaft 42, 80, 85, 111; see
also humanities
gender 4, 5, 50, 108, 115, 116, 117, 130, 131,
145, 148, 152
gender studies 4, 19
genealogy (discursive) 5, 7, 11, 17, 20, 25,
55, 116, 135, 160, 161
genes / genetics 92, 134, 135, 136, 144
geology 69, 76
Gerhard, Eduard 144, 145
Gieser, Suzanne 71, 72
Gimbutas, Marija 145, 146
Ginzburg, Carlo 158
Giuntini, Francesco see Junctinus
globalization 89, 121, 132
Gnosticism 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124, 153,
155
God / gods 29, 37, 40, 41, 43, 47, 61, 78,
82, 91, 120, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 132,
135, 136, 147, 149, 155
goddess 21, 139, 141, 144, 145, 146, 147,
148, 149, 150, 151, 154
goddess spirituality / goddess veneration
21, 139, 145, 149, 150, 151
Godwin, Joscelyn 156, 158
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 35, 36, 38,
39, 40, 41, 46, 47, 48, 68, 71, 78, 79,
80, 110, 111, 128, 144, 159
Gogh, Theo van 116
Goodman, Felicitas 161
Google 149
Gossman, Lionell 140
Gramsci, Antonio 9
Grand Unified Theory 90, 137
Graves, Robert 132, 146, 149 152,
great conjunctions 28, 46
Green Party 86
Greenwich Observatory 33
Grey Wolf 174
Grimassi, Raven 149
Grof, Stanislav 169
Grounded Theory 16
groupings (discursive) 12, 13, 16, 36, 138
Gurdjieff, Georges 132
guru
95
Index
217
218
Index
Index
magic 5, 14, 20, 30, 37, 44, 45, 56, 57, 58,
59, 60, 72, 73, 84, 85, 101, 102, 109,
115, 132, 146, 147, 149, 150, 155, 161,
163
magna mater 143
Mahatmas (in Theosophy) 95, 98, 103, 106
Maimonides 122
Maria Theresa, archduchess of Austria, queen
of Hungary and Bohemia 33
Marie Louise, queen of Poland 29
Mars 37, 38, 51
Maryland Psychiatric Research Center 169
Massey, Gerald 152
Mata Hari 130, 131
mathematics 8, 26, 27, 28, 29, 34, 43, 44,
57, 60, 106, 134, 135
matriarchy 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 150, 151
matrilinearity 141, 150
matter 8, 26, 37, 44, 45, 54, 55, 61, 62, 64,
65, 68, 71, 72,78, 80, 81, 90, 93, 100,
101, 105, 110, 144
Matthaei, Heinrich 134
Maturana, Humberto 89
Mayer, Julius Robert 81
Mazarin, cardinal 29
Mead, George R.S. 152
meaning / meaning structures 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25,
32, 38, 44, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 59, 61,
81, 83, 84, 86, 88, 112, 115, 119, 120,
125, 127, 131, 132, 137, 139, 146, 152,
155, 156, 161, 173, 177, 179, 180, 181,
182
mechanistic science / mechanistic models
26, 27, 29, 45, 48, 49, 65, 66, 68, 76,
81, 88, 160
media 3, 12, 14, 17, 18, 128, 178
medicine 12, 57, 58, 60, 149
mediumism 98, 103
Mercury 37, 38, 147
Mersenne, Marinus 30
Mesmer, Franz Anton 45, 66
Mesmerism 97
Messer, August 85
messianism 123
metals 44, 58, 62, 63, 71, 72, 74, 84
methodological solipsism 156, 157
219
Meuthen, Erich 35
microcosm and macrocosm 55
Middle World 175, 176
Mille, Richard de 168
Milton, John 76
mind 42, 44, 45, 49, 54, 55, 62, 67, 72, 76,
77, 78, 81, 89, 90, 91, 92, 110, 155, 156,
169; see also body/mind problem
minerals 58, 72, 101, 105
miracle / miraculous 43, 173, 175
Miracle Club 97
modern 19, 56, 63, 68, 108, 132, 150, 180
modernization 21, 25, 147
modernity 67, 115, 124, 128, 129, 131, 132,
139, 157, 162, 171, 178, 179, 182
Molitor, Franz 122
monadology 88
Mondrian, Piet 80
monism 16, 10, 67, 76 87, 93, 101, 120,
137
monotheism 40, 78, 93, 145
Montanari, Giovanni 28, 29
moon 37, 38, 51, 130, 163
moon goddess 150, 151
Moore, Francis 33
Moran, Bruce T. 58, 60
Moritz of Hesse-Kassel 60
morphogenetic fields 92
Morrisson, Mark S. 65, 70, 73, 102, 108
Moses 112, 120, 121
mosque 119
Mother Earth 73; see also Gaia
mother goddess 141, 144 m 145, 146
Mouffe, Chantal 3, 4
Mller, Friedrich Max 102, 103
multiverse 55, 75
mundane astrology 31, 37, 50
Murray, Margaret 146, 149
muse 150
music 13, 130, 159, 165, 172
Myers, Frederic W.H. 7, 69
Myers, Jody 133, 134
mysteries 36, 45, 60, 112, 149; see also
mysticism
mystery religions 125, 150
mysterium fascinans 126
mysterium tremendum 126
220
Index
mysticism 21, 27, 28, 30, 47, 55, 59, 62, 63,
78, 81, 82, 83, 86, 88, 90, 93, 95, 97,
104, 108, 109, 112, 115 132, 133, 138,
150, 151, 153, 164, 165, 180
myth 14, 35, 41, 46, 50, 95, 96, 119, 142,
143, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 152, 162,
163, 164
nagual 167
Napoleon III 45
National Institutes of Health 134
National Socialism 143
Native American traditions 161
natural magic 39, 56, 57, 161
natural philosophy 26, 40, 43, 45, 60, 61
natural sciences 20, 42, 52, 68, 78, 83, 110,
180
natura naturans 59, 66, 76, 120
natura naturata 59
nature 7, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 37, 38, 40, 44,
45, 48, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 64, 66,
68, 71, 72, 73, 76 80, 81, 82, 85, 86,
87 93, 98, 101, 105, 120, 135, 141, 142,
145, 150, 152, 160, 161, 163, 170, 176,
180
veneration of
20, 77, 87
nature-based spirituality 21, 87, 170, 176;
see also nature, veneration of
naturopathy 85
Naturphilosophie see natural philosophy
Naturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (Natural
Scientific Association) 42
Naumova, Gala 161
Naydler, Jeremy 68
Nederlands Genootschap voor Godsdienstgeschiedenis (Dutch Association for the History of Religion) 127
Needham, Joseph 73
neopaganism see paganism
Neoplatonism 36, 57
neo-shamanism 161
neo-Sufism 131, 132
neo-vitalism 66
New Age 73, 74, 89, 90, 91, 108, 109, 153,
154, 155, 159, 160, 176, 177
New Age science 88, 92
Newman, William R. 57, 58, 59, 60
Index
221
222
Index
Index
223
soul 16, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50,
52, 76, 78, 85, 86, 95, 97, 105, 106, 119,
120, 121, 134, 144, 165
socialism 3, 178
sociology 2, 3, 8, 15, 19, 91, 127, 158, 166
sociology of knowledge 3, 4, 10, 135
spells 44, 147, 149
Spinoza, Baruch 78
spirit helpers 172, 176
spirits 44, 96, 97, 147, 149, 172, 176
spiritualism 67, 68, 78, 80, 96, 97
spirituality 14, 21, 25, 65, 67, 69, 70, 76, 87,
89, 91, 102, 104, 108, 124, 133, 139, 152,
155, 170
Stheli, Urs 11
Starhawk 170
Stirner, Max 111
Stone Age 150
Storm, Hyemeyohsts 173
string theory 55
Strindberg, August 81
Struck, Hermann 118
Sufism 119, 131, 132, 133
sun 30, 37, 38, 39, 41, 47, 51, 104, 105, 163
Sun Bear 173
sun spots 105
supernaturalism 46, 87, 111, 155, 166, 171,
173
superstition 33, 34, 43, 47, 51, 56, 63, 82,
100, 105
Surette, Leon 152
Surya, G.W. see Weitzer, Demeter Georgievitz
sustainability 89
Suttner, Berta von 80
Swedenborg, Emanuel 81, 97
Swift, Jonathan 32, 33
synthetic biology 136, 137
systems theory 88, 89, 90, 91
synchronicity 52, 53, 54, 92, 154, 163
synergetics 90
Szab, Lsl E. 54
Tattoni, Antonio 28
Taussig-Rubbo, Mateo 179
Taylor, Bron 87
Taylor, Charles 178
technology 11, 13, 14, 17, 84, 129
224
Index
universe 38, 42, 45, 46, 54, 75, 77, 78, 79,
90, 92, 101, 103, 105, 134, 135, 137, 164;
see also cosmos
unveiling see veil / veiling
Uranus 144
Urban, Martina 120
Valiente, Doreen 149
values 1, 86, 89, 92, 103, 119, 135, 153, 163
Vaughan, Thomas 100
veil / veiling 99, 104, 116, 117, 129, 130,
131, 148
Venter, J. Craig 135 137
Venus 37, 38, 147
Vickers, Brian 57, 59
Victorian period 69, 96, 129, 139, 153
Villefranche, Jean-Baptiste Morin de 29
vitalism 16, 20, 64 70, 73, 76, 79, 80, 92,
93, 100, 101, 104, 120, 135, 160
Vitebsky, Piers 161
Vogt, J.K. 45
Voltaire 34, 105
Wade, Nicholas 136
Walkowitz, Judith R. 131
Wallace, Alfred Russel 69
Wallenstein, Albrecht von 41
Ward, James 69
Watts, Alan 73
Weber, Max 48, 76, 166, 173, 177
Weinberg, Steven 54
Weitzer, Demeter Georgievitz 86
Welling, Georg 37
Westcott, Wynn W. 65
Whewell, William 62
Whistling Elk, Agnes 172
White, Hayden 6, 157
Wicca 161, 176
Wilde, Oscar 130
Wille, Bruno 83
William III, king of England 32, 33
Wissenschaft des Judentums 117, 118, 122
witchcraft 21, 56, 139, 146, 147, 148, 149,
150
Wodak, Ruth 11
Wolf, Immanuel 117
wonder 76, 135
Index
225