Georgina Rose GR: Hello this is Georgina Rose part-time esoteric content creator and part-time centre of pestilence and welcome back to the Da’at Darling YouTube channel. On this channel, we discuss Magick, Mysticism and religion and everything on the fringe of Esoterica and this week I am back with another interview. I haven’t done one of these in a while, it’s nice to get back on the horse with them and this is going to be really different. I normally interview Occultists who are very into the practitioner aspect mostly about, you know, just occult, esoteric topics but I wanted to mix it up a little bit and I decided to invite an academic on who studies Occultism in an academic sense. I am very alien from the world of academia so I thought it’d be really cool to have that diverse perspective.

So here is my lovely guest. Can you introduce yourself?

Dr Angela Puca AP: Yes. Yeah, first of all, thank you for inviting me over, Georgina. I’m Dr Angela Puca and I’m a Religious Studies scholar and I specialise in Esotericism, the Occult and Magick, basically. My core research interest is Magick and all the religious traditions that involve some kind of Magick, can include some kind of Magick but I specialize in non-Abrahamic traditions, so and on Paganism and I also have a YouTube channel called Angela’s Symposium where I deliver academic scholarship on the matter and I’m also a University Lecturer. So I also work at the university and I do research and I go to conferences as academics usually do. So that’s what I do.

GR: That’s really cool I think it’s incredible that like, Occultism is being discussed in academia because I always, when I think of Occultism, we very much get thrown to like the fringes and are seen as like, I don’t know where I find that in my personal experience it’s not always taken as seriously other religions so that’s the first thing I wanted to really ask you about. How does academia treat Occultism and these pagan, more fringe traditions compared to like normal mainstream religion, because I can imagine it’s a little bit different but I’m honestly not sure?

AP: So that’s a good question. So how academia treats these kinds of matters? Luckily in Religious Studies every kind of religious practice or spiritual practice that has some kind of influence, or impact on people is deemed to be important, we could say, you know, deserving of being studied. However, it is still quite a fact that there are you know the Abrahamic, monotheistic religions tend to get more… it’s easier perhaps to get research funding for those kinds of areas for those kinds of research areas but I have found that in the years of my PhD and then after I finished my PhD and now I’m an early career academic, I can see that there is a growing interest in academia as well when it comes to Esotericism. In fact the last European conference or rather the Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religion that, among academics, we just call it E-A-S-R. The panel on Esotericism was really well attended and it seems like every year there are more papers in the realm of Esotericism. So from the inside, I see that there is a growing interest in Esotericism and that means that Esotericism and the Occult are becoming perhaps more impactful on society.

So it’s not just the case for academia is not only interest, you know, it’s not only the dominant religious systems that are interesting because academics realize that even, so-called, outliers or religions that are not the norm still have an impact on people and they can have an impact on many different levels. For those who practice it, for those that are in contact with the people that practice it and also they highlight how somebody can endorse a worldview and a belief system that is different from the dominant one. So you can have different layers of understanding that you can gather from studying Esotericism or Occultists or an occult worldview because you get all these nuances and even the understanding of how somebody that was born with a certain religion or in a certain cultural environment then moves away from it and endorses a worldview that is quite different. So that is also something that tells you something informative about how people work and how belief-making and meaning-making work.

So I would say that the study of Esotericism and Occult and Paganism is extremely important, not only to understand those practices but also to understand other aspects of human behaviour and belief making and meaning-making that are present even outside of the occult realm.

GR: I think that makes a lot of sense because I’ve noticed from the practitioner in the being in an occult sense there is a rising interest in Esotericism in the general populace. Even a while ago I looked at google trends which basically you can track Google search patterns and occult like, Google searching has even gone up and I’ve noticed like, in the community, ever since I got into it. Now there’s a way higher incidence of people practising and I’ve noticed even in book stores there’s like more occult books. So it’s really interesting that academia sort of followed that trend I’m hoping the trend continues to keep going up and Occultism keeps becoming more and more relevant. But I guess time we’ll see. My second question is do magickal practices, you mentioned the funding thing and that’s sort of what got me thinking about this. If a magickal practice or mystical practice is from a like mainstream religion, particularly the Abrahamic religions, as you said those tend to get more funding versus say Thelema or Hermeticism or Wicca or something smaller, are they treated differently in academia whether it’s a mystical practice, something big or from something small?

AP: Whether they’re treated differently? I wouldn’t say they are, I don’t think that they are treated differently. It’s just more the case that they are less studied and you could make a case that they are less studied because they are less practised compared to those other religions but no, I wouldn’t say that academics, you know, those who actually research the practice, treat it differently, these kinds of practices. Sometimes you can have methodological struggles meaning that, for instance, something like Paganism is very difficult to define because when you don’t have a central dogma or you don’t have a central institution or you don’t have guidelines that every Practitioner follows, it is more difficult for an academic to define the practice, for instance, in my case to define what Paganism is or what Shamanism is. Which was something important for my PhD, for instance. And in that case, you need to develop methodologies that perhaps somebody, who is studying a different religion, that has a different framework, wouldn’t necessarily need. So you need to find a way to gather accurate knowledge on a movement that is very fluid and in a way, eludes a solid definition. But you still want to gather knowledge on that movement because you know that it is something, it’s not nothing.

So you need to be quite clever in developing and trying methodologies that will allow you to keep a degree of that kind of fluidity but still gather accurate knowledge. And so I think that perhaps it presents unique methodological challenges but I wouldn’t say that it is treated differently in academia. It’s more about, okay this is the phenomenon I don’t want to make it into something that it isn’t just because just for the sake of having a clear definition. So how do I understand this phenomenon that is this religious phenomenon that is quite unique in how it presents. So you have methodological challenges but I’d say that academics tend to treat with respect every kind of tradition.

GR: That makes me really happy that in academia there’s still that level of respect towards other traditions. I’ve noticed sometimes in the general public that’s not always there. You mentioned that it’s a little more difficult to define things, which I can imagine it’s a nightmare for you guys considering the community of Practitioners can’t always define things. Are there any sort of unique challenges that studying, like, occult and pagan traditions present compared to more dominant mainstream religions? How does that experience vary?

AP: So, I think that one of the main issues is that kind of fluidity, that I was talking about. Whereas perhaps in other… well you could argue that there would be scholars that might argue that even with dominant religions, that are more dogmatic and have a central dogma, you still have a mismatch between the institutionalized religion and the so-called dogma and what people actually do. And so you could also argue that perhaps you have that kind of fluidity even in those religious circles. But I would still see that as a bit more uniform, a bit more unitarian. Whereas with something like the practice of the Occult and occult practices, esoteric practices, Paganism, these tend to be much more individually-based rather than institutional-based or dogma-based. They are very individual but you can still tell that that is Esotericism and it’s not a glass or you know, something completely different. So if there is still the perception that, you know, that you can have a name attached to that phenomenon and people will understand what you’re talking about then you, as an academic, as a researcher, need to find a way to understand it better. So I would say that the unique challenge is to find the methodology that allows you to get accurate knowledge. And a methodology that is quite popular among scholars nowadays, especially those who do Anthropology. Because another thing that I didn’t say is that you can study Esotericism from very different disciplines, from different disciplinary perspectives. So you can have History of Religion and in History of Religion, you will have a historical development. So you might have somebody who studies Aleister Crowley and what happened to the Golden Dawn based on the documents and the texts and the historical evidence and that would be working in the realm of History of Religion. Then you could have Sociology of Religion, Sociology of Religion tends to study the impact on society. So, for instance, you may have statistics on the number of Thelemites or the number of Occultists and how many of them, you know, how their beliefs engage and affect the how they present and they are in a society.

And then you have Anthropology of Religion, which is what I do. Anthropology of Religion studies contemporary practices. So you do fieldwork with people, you do participant observations, so you participate in rituals, you interview people you try and understand how they define their practices. So when you study, I find, of course, as an Anthropologist of Religion, for me, the challenge is, okay, so I have 11 pagans who define Paganism in 20 different ways. So how do I pin down a definition that is based, you know, on the data that I collected during my fieldwork and a solution to that is a Foucaultian methodology called Discourse Analysis. So you basically identify patterns of meaning that emerge from the community and from those patterns of meaning you are able to identify in the most accurate way you can do it. But of course, every knowledge produced by academia is always subject to change because science is not meant to provide the truth, science is meant to provide the most accurate knowledge at a given moment. And then it will change over time because things change and methodologies change and everything changes. So yeah, thanks to Discourse Analysis you are able to identify these patterns of meaning and then you can give a definition that is not making Paganism or Thelema or whatever it is that you’re studying into something that it is not. But at the same time, you are able to identify what it is, in a way that resonates with at least the majority of practitioners. It’s not meant to fit every single individual’s experience because as I said these are very individual practices but it is meant to identify patterns of meaning that you find across the board, across the community that you study.

GR: Yeah, so I was kind of curious how did you get into studying Occultism? What was that process? Like how did you sort of, find this path, for you?

AP: Yeah, that was quite a journey because my Bachelor’s and Master’s are in Philosophy. I’ve always been interested in Magick as I said that’s kind of my core interests. That’s why I also asked you for an interview for my channel about Magick in Thelema. So even when I was studying philosophy, for instance, I research a lot of Renaissance Philosophy because there are a lot of magical texts there’s Giordano Bruno, Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Marsilio Ficino especially, of course, I’m Italian if you couldn’t tell by my accent. So my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees happened in Italy. And in Italy, unfortunately, these kinds of subjects are not really studied, this is still an undeveloped field. So when I was still in Italy I had honestly no idea that you could actually study, academically, Esotericism. Then thanks to YouTube technology, thank you, I found them in a video, a conference of a scholar who is now a friend of mine, pleased to have her as a friend of mine. She’s Dr Jenny Butler from University College, Cork. And I found her… she was talking about her PhD research and he was on contemporary Irish Paganism and Witchcraft. And for me was like what? You can study these kinds of things from an academic point of view? That’s what I want to do but it wasn’t possible to do that in Italy. So I tried to do it in England and yeah, I applied for a PhD program, I got into it and then I also got a teaching position at the University of Leeds Trinity, which I’m still working at the moment, and so yeah, that’s how I got into it. I guess that I’ve always been interested in Magick, even when I was studying Philosophy and Religious Studies in a different way, I was still focusing on Magick. For instance, I’ve studied Buddhism for a long time. I learned Sanskrit and Tibetan and I was studying Tantric Buddhism and texts on Magick so that’s always been kind of my core interest. And then when I found out that it was indeed possible to study it from an academic point of view I was like, okay, I’m all in, I want to do that because it just fascinated me, endlessly. So that’s why I did it and yeah, here I am now.

GR: Yeah, why do you think it’s important for academia to look into Esotericism? Why should this field be further developed and explored?

AP: Because I think that Esotericism gives a lot of explanations about, as I said though, the belief making and meaning-making. So you can see it from the importance of it is multi-layered. Of course you have that there is a growing interest in Esotericism and Magick as you mentioned earlier and in fact I was talking about that with Dr Bernd Christian Otto, a German scholar whom I met last at the European conference that I mentioned earlier and he and I were having a discussion about Magick and how the perception of Magick evolved over time and he was saying and I was agreeing with him that we are living in the first time in history where the most prevalent view of Magick is positive as opposed to negative because and that is because of some cultural developments that you see even in TV shows and movies in the past like 50 years ago the only depictions of Magick and Witchcraft were negative in every possible way. Whereas now, thanks to TV shows and movies but also Social Media and the emergence of certain aesthetics that you have on Instagram and Tiktok and on social media in general you have that Magick and Witchcraft are now seen, not anymore, as something that is wholly negative but a perception of Magick that is more enchanting and fascinating is emerging. So perhaps now we live in the first time in history, probably – it’s a hypothesis where Magick is perceived more positively rather than negatively. So this of course means that there is a growing interest in Magick and Witchcraft so one of the reasons why it’s important to study Esotericism is to understand this religious phenomenon and all religious phenomena are important to study and understand because we want to understand all religions and they are all important.

So you have the level of understanding of these religious phenomena then you have the level of understanding of the historical developments in culture, in the wider culture, especially if you have a sociological approach and you look at the impact on society, the cultural developments when it comes to Witchcraft and because sometimes you can also have that a very narrow study can prove important for a completely different kind of study. So for instance, there’s a political scientist from the University of Barcelona that I had a conversation with because she’s studying the use of the term Witch, in politics and how that relates to how the community of those who actually practice Witchcraft see the term Witch and the depiction and the conceptualisation of the term and that concept. So you can have that information and knowledge that you gather in a narrow area and in another research area can still prove important and impactful in a completely different area to understand something, apparently, is very different but everything is really connected. And that’s another point that knowledge is, in its entirety, important and just leaving blind spots doesn’t really allow us to have the best knowledge and the best body of knowledge that we can get. If you want to get a good body of knowledge as a society and as humankind, you want to include all the aspects of it and since now Witchcraft and Esotericism are becoming more impactful for practitioners, of course, they become more relevant even for society. And also I think it’s important to study Esotericism to understand non-dominant worldviews and that allows us to better understand how human beings work, perhaps. Because then you can have a sort of cross-analysis of how come certain people tend to endorse a dominant worldview as opposed to those who endorse a non-dominant worldview. And it can give you a better understanding of how human beings develop ideas and worldviews and perceptions of reality. So there are many reasons as to why it is important to study, academically, Esotericism. I could go on for hours.

GR: What has been one of the most interesting things you sort of learned or come across in your years of research in the field of the Occult?

AP: The most important or interesting thing?

GR: Yeah, either or…

AP: Oh that’s a good question. The first thing that comes to mind, now, is that when I was doing the fieldwork for my PhD I was undergoing training in Shamanism because I was studying Shamanism and what I found particularly interesting is the community that people created. I found that to be more interesting than the teachings in and of themselves from the teacher because I was undergoing a series of training from the Foundation for Shamanic Studies because part of my research was on Transcultural Shamanism and there were, at the time, two appointed teachers by the Foundation for Shamanic Studies in Italy and I was undertaking these training. I and I just found that… I think the most interesting thing for me is why people engage with these practices and you always find that there is such a deep meaning that changes from person to person. And I just find it extremely fascinating because I have met, during my research, people that had gone through hell on earth, metaphorically, and they had found themselves, thanks to Magick practices, shamanic practices, pagan practices. And I think that is the most interesting thing to me, seeing how these practices and the specific belief making and meaning-making, that people practising all sorts of Magick, magickal practices do. How that really affects their lives and it seemed to me to be a very positive impact for those who clearly keep practice up.

GR: Yeah, so what advice would you have for people who are interested in occult academia? Who are considering sort of approaching this or have just heard about this and are like wow, that’s really cool? What advice do you have for like, I guess, younger you in a sense?

AP: So you mean somebody who wants to become an academic?

GR: Yeah. Or like approach Occultism in this academic sense, what advice would you give?

AP: Oh okay, so if somebody is a practitioner and they want to understand Esotericism from an academic point of view alongside understanding it from a practitioner’s point of view. Of course, there are peer-reviewed papers and books on the matter and that’s why I have my YouTube channel Angela’s Symposium because I wanted to bridge the gap between academia and practitioners and I know that a peer-reviewed scholarship is not always accessible to those who don’t have a university affiliation or are not university students or affiliated with a university because they are working there. So but although some of them are accessible through libraries, I think but it depends on the country. So of course my YouTube channel is hopefully a good resource for academic knowledge on the matter. But otherwise, you can use Google Scholar and you can use other databases to find peer-reviewed materials. There are some scholars that upload their preprints on academia.edu. So you may find quite a few academic papers there for free but you have to pay attention because sometimes there are people that are not academics that upload their things, but yeah, that is a good source. Otherwise, there is JSTOR which is another website that has a lot of material in the humanities and read books by academics that are published by academic publishers because, you know, even if you have a PhD it doesn’t mean that everything you publish is academic. So you need to publish with an academic publisher because that means that it goes for peer review. Because if I, as a PhD, publish a novel it will still have Angela Puca PhD but it’s not going to be an academic text. So yeah, I’d say and also there are academics that have Twitter profiles and Instagram and they share their research. So there could be another interesting way of being updated with what’s going on within academic circles. If you want to become an academic then I would say that it would be a good idea to get, well, your Bachelor’s and your Master’s and then a PhD and depending on the interest that you have, you may want to do it in Anthropology of Religion or History of religion or Sociology of Religion or other forms of religious studies that engage with this kind of topic so it really depends on the interest of the person. I’m not sure if that was exhaustive as an answer.

GR: No, I think it was really helpful. I feel like if you’ve watched this we’ll really appreciate that. My sort of final question is, what do you think the future of occult academia is going to look like? Where do you think this is going to go. So you mentioned that there was a pattern of it getting more popular and more studied. So where do you think that’s headed?

AP: Well maybe this is wishful thinking but I hope that, as I said, I have seen a positive trend in terms of the growth of interest in Esotericism and there is going to be next month and I’m going to give a paper there at the Conference of the European Association for the Study of Western Esotericism which is the European Academic Association for the Study of Esotericism and I’m interested to see how many scholars will be there and sometimes you don’t only have European scholars but from all over the world. So maybe it’s wishful thinking but I hope that the academic study of Esotericism will get more funding and as a consequence, we will be able to get more research because there are still many, many aspects of Esotericism that are massively understudied, for instance even contemporary Thelema, I mean, is heavily understudied in academia and I don’t think that it is because there is a lack of interest but rather because there is a lack of funding. So, hopefully, over time, the relevance of this field of study will be made plain on many levels within and outside academia and we will have more funding so that we can conduct research on the topic. So I guess that my hope is that the field will grow and we will get more funding to do this kind of research.

GR: Perfect, so that’s pretty much what I wanted to ask you. Where can people find you and see your work and engage with what you have to say?

AP: Yeah, people can find me on my YouTube channel Angela’s Symposium which is I guess my main platform followed by TikTok and Instagram and Facebook and I’m also on Twitter. So you can kind of find me anywhere if you’re interested.

GR: Okay, thank you so much for coming on. If you are watching this video like, comment, subscribe and if you’re subscribed for 93 days you’ll meet your Holy Garden Angel and you will never have to know what academia is. I promise it works like that, do not report me to the Better Business Bureau – it will go bad, do not do it. But I’m Georgina Rose, I’m Da’at Darling. I am on many places. I’m here on YouTube, I do podcasts, I’m on Twitter, TikTok and all the places that you could find me, also Instagram and Telegram – I forget about those two a lot. And if you want to support me to continue to allow me to do this and enable me to keep making content, check out my Patreon, you get extra videos every month, early access, virtual guides amongst other things. So thank you for watching, have a lovely day or night wherever you are and I will see you in the next one.

All right, bye.