Angela Puca AP: Has academic knowledge had any specific impact on magic-practising communities? That’s the topic we are going to tackle today.
Hello everyone. I’m Dr Angela Puca and welcome to my Symposium. I’m a PhD and a university lecturer and this is your online resource for the academic study of magick, Shamanism, Esotericism and all things occult.
Today I have a fantastic guest here on my YouTube channel Professor Kocku von Stuckrad from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He has published extensively on topics related to the Cultural History of Religion, Science, and Philosophy in Europe and North America served as President of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture and as President for the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion. He is also one of the founding members of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism. He is the author of several books that have been very influential for my research such as “The Scientification of Religion,” “Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge,” History of Western Astrology,” “A Cultural History of the Soul,” and many, many others. Do check out the infobox for the links to these books as well as his website. So hope you are looking forward to this interview just as much as I am.
Hello, Kocku thank you so much for being here on Angela’s Symposium. So happy and excited to have you on the channel.
Kocku von Stuckrad KvS: Thank you for the invitation, Angela. I look forward to our conversation.
AP: Likewise and I know that we have a friend in common Dr Justin Sledge who I believe you supervised at one point in the past.
KvS: Yeah, yeah. Nice.
AP: I’m sure he will look forward to this interview as well. So, as I mentioned in the intro your work has been quite influential in my research and, you know, both your work on Western Esotericism and History of Astrology in western Esotericism but I guess the one that I found particularly impactful, at least in my research so far, was your book “The Scientification of Religion” because I find quite fascinating the intersection and how academia tends to be quite impactful in how magic practitioners develop and conceptualize their practices. So can you tell us a bit about that? So about the interplay between science, academia, and magic practices of different sorts?
KvS: Yes, yeah. Thank you. It’s a very interesting mix of influences that we are talking about when it comes to the situation that we have today. In the 20th and 21st centuries where certain understandings about magic and about science and about religion, spirituality and so on seem to be quite normal or mainstream or very, very common. And it’s interesting to look at where they come from when they started to enter the public discussion and also the academic discussion. And when you look into the trajectories of what we today think about these all, what you can call orders of knowledge about magic, religion, science, and so on then you see that the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century were extremely influential or formative for what we, today, think about these topics. And interestingly enough that goes along with the institutionalization of certain academic disciplines at the end of the 19th century. So we have Psychology as a new academic discipline, we have the Study of Religion, independently from Theology, which is, of course, a very old discipline at the universities. But now you have all these specialized disciplines like Tibetology and Indology and Anthropology and Religious Studies and these are… and even also sociology, these are all new disciplines that study human behaviour and the history of culture in a different way. And then you see also the development of new theories about what is ritual, what is magic and is there an evolution of religion from Animism to magic to religion to monotheism as, of course, the best religion you can have and Christianity, maybe even the best one in this kind of evolutionary paradigm in the 19th century. So there are all kinds of different new ideas coming up in the academy, basically, and then there are also new natural sciences like Theoretical Physics, there’s also a new discipline.
And you can see how at the beginning of the 20th century many people started a conversation among these different disciplines but also with artists, for instance, with literature with other cultural producers and that, and with philosophers and that all created new forms of knowledge, if you want, or orders of knowledge, theories, and so on. And that then, in turn, was turned into direct kind of identities, religious practices as well and magic or Witchcraft or Shamanism or also Astrology. These are examples of how academic theories about nature, for instance, about occult realities or about theories of magic and so on. And also the History of Witchcraft, for instance, turned into new or established, kind of, new religious and spiritual movements. So these were basically informed by academic understandings and interpretations and then turned into practice. And we can look at examples but that’s basically what I call the ‘sanctification of religion’ which is also happening besides the more traditional, institutionalized religions like Christianity or Islam or Judaism, that they also change in terms, in the context of this development.
But what’s particularly interesting and particularly interesting for Witchcraft and magic and these nature animist, occultist kind of movements, that these new spiritual or religious identities were formed outside of the traditional institutionalized religions. But they are very influential, they are very mainstream, even today, like the nature-based spiritualities that you have all over the place. It’s one of the largest growing, on also on the global scale, of the largest growing religious identity and practice and that that’s all informed by scientific understandings.
AP: And why do you think that that is the case? Why do you think that science and academia appear to be so impactful for these traditions?
KvS: When you look at the beginning of the, when you look at the early 20th century then you see that many of these academics were also writing popular books. So it was very common that, Ernst Haeckel for instance, one of the leading Biologists and Darwinists in Europe, he established a new religion that he called Monism and he founded the Monistic Alliance which is the blending of humanities and the natural sciences into one monistic understanding. That is not like a theistic religion, like Christianity or Islam, which has God but only has nature as a kind of divinity. But basically, even that it would be too much but it was science that is the main creator of these religions and they wrote very popular books. And one of the very influential books, that he wrote, even thought about, that crystals have souls, I like this understanding is even the title of the book “Kristallseelen” he wrote that in 1917, “The Souls of Crystals” where he theorized all kinds of different levels of animated stones and crystals, but also from the scientific point of view.
So that’s just one example of a very, very broad movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, that that was quite influential. Also, in more popular audiences – not only in academic audiences. And then there are artists who popularized this further. A very strong influence from the Theosophical Society that influenced artists like Piet Mondrian, Ernst Klee(?) and all these. So there are huge movements that were responding to these theories on a broader cultural scale. So that’s why I think it’s not so surprising that it had quite some impact. And one other reason why it was successful was, I think also, that these new spiritualities go easily together with science, which is for more kind of fundamentalist Christianity is more of a problem with the coming to terms with evolutional theory and with other scientific methods that have come up in the 20th century. So they had a hard time with this, what is called, secularization then, basically, but these movements, I mean occultists, would easily regard this as a scientific interpretation of reality and that’s not something that has a problem with science, rather it is a result of scientific interpretations that still, at the same time also, can be spiritual.
AP: Usually when I address this matter one of the hypotheses, that I have with regards to trying to understand why that is that academia and scientific knowledge is so impactful on these magic practising communities. I wonder whether there might also be a seek for validation since magic is not really endorsed by the dominant, neither the dominant religious system nor the dominant theoretical framework. Our culture does not encompass magic as something that is ontologically existent. So, I also, theorize that, perhaps, that might play a role in that science is recognized as something that is a valid means of acquiring knowledge whereas magic is considered at the fringes. Something that is not existent, that is outside of the realm of the possibilities and so you are not being rational or you’re not acknowledging reality by practising magic. Do you think that that might play a role, they seek for validation and the idea of, in a way, being more acceptable both to themselves than to society. Since we don’t we live in a disenchanted world to use Max Weber… yeah what do you think?
KvS: I think that that’s certainly a good interpretation of what’s happening. Also, your reference to Max Weber is a very, very apt reference and I think we can still use some of his ideas in interpreting what’s going on. And also Max Weber is interesting because he was not a theorist of secularization, he doesn’t even know the term secularization. So when he talks about disenchantment he means that the traditional producers of meaning, so the churches, in particular, have lost their authority. And there is with it, with a coming up of science, scientific interpretations, we can basically get to know everything that’s hidden. That everything that is hidden in the cosmos or about the world is basically accessible to our knowledge and there’s no enchantment any more. But he was also very clear in saying that this does not mean that people don’t look for this kind of meaning and this value validation any more, it’s only that they find it elsewhere. They don’t find it in the traditional religious context but they find it among new, what Weber then called like providers of meaning, and, for Weber, the main providers of meaning are science and art. And I think it’s very true and also particularly in his own biography, in his own life, he followed seances, he had his hand read by an expert and he was interested in all these kinds of occult phenomena. He was not a religious person but he was interested in seeing how these others, like science and other art and music were producing this or providing the meaning that science seemed to have taken away from the world. So it’s the process of disenchanting and re-enchantment and much of what we are seeing here is also some kind of re-enchantment that still goes together with scientific interpretations.
AP: Yeah, but the terms disenchantment and re-enchantment are buzzwords in our field. So do you think that, apart from perhaps being a means of validating their practices and also trying and fit in their worldview with the dominant worldview, do you think that acquiring knowledge from the academic world and the scientific world also has a positive effect, a positive contribution for practitioners? I don’t know if my question is clear.
KvS: Yeah I think so. I mean when you look at this historical development then I would distinguish two different dynamics. One dynamic is a very polemical kind of disjunction that you see, particularly when it comes to the so-called occult sciences, so Astrology and Alchemy and Magic, where you see that, basically, since the 19th century, not much earlier, you see a polemical separation of Astrology and Astronomy. They went together for like 3,000 years as two parts of one system of knowledge which we call the knowledge of the stars. And so there’s a calculating part and there’s an interpreting part and they were known all the way. But that the one excludes the other is something new. That you say you can do either Astronomy or Astrology and they will never go together. Which is for Astrology is not true but for Astronomers, it’s true that Astrology is a nemesis of what they think science is. So there’s a disjunct, a really excluding discourse there and the same is true with Alchemy and Chemistry.
I mean that that was also part of one overall philosophy of nature since antiquity till the 19th century, basically. There were all kinds of rifts but this polemical disjunction that chemistry has nothing to do with alchemy any more, is something that is quite recent, actually. And the same happened then with magic and science where if you look at Goethe, for instance, the Faust. Or this kind of philosophy of nature at the beginning of the 19th century, in the Early Romantic, thinking this still went together somehow and were what was part of a philosophy of nature that was more holistic. And you see, even in English, the first use of the English term ‘scientist’ is in the 1860s. Before that there was no scientist in the English language, these were all scholars, philosophers or whatever. So you see this kind of disjunction of the radicalisation of opposites that you see there. So that’s the one directory if you want and the other one is that you still see even in that period that these philosophies of nature went together in a very formative way, particularly when you look at Occultism in the 19th century.
If you look at the formation of Psychology, for instance, the first chairs for Psychology at the end of the 19th century all their labs were basically working with spiritual theories, with psychic and medium, mystic theories and they did experiments with Psychics and then that whole fascination with what your soul can do and how your consciousness, if you project your consciousness then it materialises somehow. So exactly what magic still is today but in those days that was the main interest of many Psychologists in the first generation. And that went then a different way in some more experimental more positivistic and others more holistic. So I’m not saying that this is a one-way street but it is much more complex and much less divided at the beginning of the 20th century than we like to think and because we all think there was a kind of secularization, maybe there wasn’t really a secularization. Maybe there was just a reordering of these fields of knowledge in a different way and some scientists like to present history in a way that science won over religion but that’s actually not, maybe, not the case.
AP: That’s perhaps, applying that evolutionary model that you were mentioning earlier. You know, the idea then history goes from worse to better and so now that we have a specialized science it must mean that it is better from what we had before. And the idea of secularism, that secularism never actually occurred reminds me of Peter Berger’s work and the idea that he says, you know, we don’t live in a secularized age, we live in a pluralistic age. So it’s not really about secular, we didn’t really become religion-less, it’s just that we have multi-layered religious beliefs and worldviews and belief systems. So it’s much more nuanced and so it may appear as though you don’t have one big religion but it’s because you have lots of micro-religious beliefs and practices that are embedded in the lives of people.
KvS: Yeah, no, absolutely and I think that is certainly true that this is a much more pluralistic understanding and diversified in European and American societies and also in other societies, of course, and it’s also interesting to see that if you look into surveys about what people actually believe that so much of this. If you ask, for instance, churchgoers, Christians, so active Christians, if they believe in reincarnation, which is not a really traditionally Christian understanding of how it’s going after death but then you find like 20 to 30 percent and sometimes even more people believe in that. So where does that come from? So what we actually see is with some people, and I think rightly so-called kind of mainstreamed New-Age understanding about cosmology and about ontologies and about what’s possible and so on and it’s not even kind of fringe any more. It’s what people take for granted and the same is true for Astrology. In the UK every survey that you have about Astrology, I mean you never know exactly what it means do you, attribute plausibility to Astrology, what that actually means. So you have to be a little bit more concrete in what you find but even in the most kind of careful interpretation, like in the UK, 20 to 30 percent attribute a lot of plausibility to Astrology and more plausibility than to economic prognostication, for instance, or to other sciences. So it really has very strong roots in 21st-century societies and that’s interesting to acknowledge and then to try to find explanations for that.
AP: Yeah and do you think that there is still this disjunction between science and religion or has it now come to a point where there is a new relation, you know, the two have established a new relation different from what they had before. Because in the past you didn’t have this very stark demarcation between the two. Then once you had it there was or at least it appeared that there was a separation between the two and now that we live in this multi-layered, as we mentioned, age in this very pluralistic age. I was wondering and I guess I’m asking, do you think that now there is a new relationship that has been established between religious practices and science and more specifically esoteric practices?
KvS: I think it depends a little bit on which discipline you’re looking at and also that that changes like in the first half of the 20th century here was a very interesting discussion between Theoretical Physics and Philosophy or Spirituality, however you want to call it, the quantum mysticism and all these things. So Physics and Philosophy and Religion were very in close conversation even with Heisenberg and Bohm and Einstein who called himself, that his religion is nature, That’s Einstein. So there was a certain conversation that got less in the second half of or after the second world war. But now since a couple of years or many years, the Biology has taken a lot of spiritual questions as well and the idea that the planet has consciousness and that there is, not a religious plan, not a creator who has an intelligent design, that’s not the idea but that there is some intelligence in ecological systems or even in the planet. The whole Gaia understanding of the planet, the divinisation of that. That the planet is a being which with its own agency and all this thing. It’s very common and it’s fed by a new ecological understandings about the intelligence of trees, also the idea that there is a… because of the evolutionary closeness that we have to other animals, this whole kinship ethics that we are basically. That the difference between the human-animal and other animals is, basically you can almost neglect it, and that that creates certain ethical understandings about how we should treat animals and so on.
All these all these things provide meanings that go way beyond the purely scientific questions, and today, maybe even stronger because of the climate crisis that we have. Ecology is a really strong player in the conversation about meaning. What does it mean to be human? And what is our impact on the planet? And what does that mean in ethical terms but also in terms of how we have to live together and should live together in a more fruitful relationship with a more-than-human world? And these more holistic understandings of ecology that also include ideas of consciousness of agency of non-human personhood and all these things are much stronger than they were like 50 years ago. And maybe even in Theoretical Physics, there’s a new move when it comes to Quantum Physics but also to String Theory, to all these very weird theories that are mathematically correct but nobody really can imagine what it means. We still try to wrap our head about what does it actually mean. If there is no time and there are no causality and no determinism and all these things and that that again feeds into the understandings of magic, basically, that that maybe. I mean, I don’t think that many scientists would make that step but many practitioners go that step and say, oh yeah exactly that’s what the non-causality, the non-determinism that you describe this page, basically, what we also experience when we do magic or this is also part of our cosmology. That things happen at the same time and not. It’s more in a correlation of things rather than a causation of things and these understandings can be quite can go fruitfully together I think. But the scientists certainly have still have to go a step further to acknowledge those relationships.
AP: Yeah I think the matter of quantum physics and how it’s been employed by major practitioners it’s very, very interesting. In fact, I’d like to ask you what do you think about how practitioners include an employee quantum physics in their practice and what’s the difference between how scientists deal with these kinds of discoveries the ones that you were mentioning and how practitioners interpret these kinds of discoveries?
KvS: Yeah I think many practitioners, as far as I know, don’t really bother too much about that. They just do things and it’s more a kind of knowledge that comes with experience that you experience something and then it works and then I mean that what more possibility do you need and then you can, okay apparently the scientists haven’t figured it out yet but I mean I know it works or we have these certain experiences that just happen when we think of something or something happens and then like grandma dies and then, at the same moment, her photo falls off the wall. Most people have something like this and then there are all kinds of theories about that we make up these synchronicities that are fine. But for the people themselves, it’s quite plausible and they don’t really theorize that in a philosophical sense because they don’t need to. And then there are some who do that actually and then they start this conversation about, for instance, synchronicity which explains why if you do something it has direct correspondence or a correlation with something else without saying that that you produced it causally but you kind of swing in to, tune into a certain web of energies and if you use it correctly then you can use it for your own benefit, for a certain goal and that’s also what most Astrologers would say. That this is not a question of causality but of correlation and reading and using the knowledge of correlations, that if you do a ritual with a certain purpose with a certain concentration on something that you have the matching tarot card, you have the matching flower to put on your altar all these things are more questions of correlation and then you say, okay I forced nature to do this. No, I acknowledge the powers of nature and don’t work against them. That’s a different attitude even though they also of course magical traditions also like if you think of Aleister Crowley or something that really, I force nature with my will and it’s a conscious change of reality according to my will. I mean that’s even his definition of magic. So there are different ways of doing that and that would be but that would be a kind of way where I see overlap or a fruitful conversation between this kind of physics, quantum physics that works with synchronicities and magical practice.
AP: So, do you think that then, when practitioners try and use quantum physics to explain why magic is real, do you think that there is a kind of mistaking correlation for causation or do you think that there is some scientific ground to uphold the kind of view, that kind of interpretation, of those experiments and those findings?
KvS: I think that interpretation is actually an interpretation that basically quantum physicists would also acknowledge. Because in quantum physics there is no causation. I mean there’s causation, of course in the world, but not in this theory what we look at – this is correlation and is that there is a kind of synchronicity between two objects and it always depends on the observer, so there is no neutral observer, we are always, as an observer, we are part of the whole setting. And if we observe something, as soon as we observe something, we change the whole setting. So the whole idea of neutrality and independent observer is not existent any more in that kind of physics and that’s mainstream physics and it’s still hard to really understand what it really means. But that there is no causality, in this context, and no determinism. You cannot predict anything, you can only predict a certain spectrum of results. But you cannot really, as soon as you predict something then you change the setting already. That is something that is acknowledged and that’s certainly something where these magic practitioners or Astrologers or others would have a very similar worldview.
AP: You also mentioned earlier, before we started the recording, that you have recently challenged, in your research, the concept of Esotericism and the fact that there is only a minority of people engaging with these kinds of practices. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
KvS: Yeah, I think it’s a very complicated, complicated discussion and there are many, many different aspects of it but in my experience and I’ve abused the term Esotericism, of course, myself for a long time and found it found quite useful. But I also realized that there’s an academic discussion about what Esotericism is and I’m, don’t get me started off on Western Esotericism, which is a very different colonial problem. But even if we just limit it to Esotericism there’s an academic discourse about that. And they have different definitions and all kinds of they have their own kind of discussion forum about that. But as soon as you leave this very niche of academic discussion then everyone knows, seems to know what Esotericism is and have certain ideas about it and these don’t match the academic definitions. And that’s what made it, for me, very difficult to talk to normal people, humans or to people who do Shamanism, for instance, or Astrologers, or Vicars, or whatever.
Oh, this is as an Esotericist. What? Yeah, well, I’m not so sure but as soon as I then started just using other terms. This is a certain understanding of nature and of powers of nature and I tune in with powers of nature or whatever, or I use my consciousness, or there is a world soul, or whatever. And then you can say, okay, all these ideas also have certain histories in European and American culture, and by the way, these have very old traditions and they have not been marginalized all the time and they were ups and downs and all these you can reconstruct certain ideas, certain discourses, as I call it, and then I don’t need the term Esotericism. To put together in all these very diverse traditions from Platonism to Astrology to, I don’t know, Witchcraft, and everything, and Masonry and Mesmerism and I mean what was all in there, in that box, to artificially put that together. So that I don’t actually need the term and since I don’t use it any more I find that people understand me better. So that’s one reason for me. The other reason is that influential understandings of Esotericism are that this is kind of rejected knowledge or this is kind of marginalized knowledge and saying that is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in my view. Because then you therefore for the study that I… for instance, if you look at Berlin around 1900, 120 years ago there were and Corinna Treitel wrote a whole book about that, “Occultism and the German Modern”(A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern ) about the situation there. It’s a kind of self-marginalization. If you call the Esotericism something that is rejected from the mainstream you don’t see it in the mainstream any more.
That’s one of the implications and then you don’t expect, for instance, like 120 years ago, if you look at Berlin there were already a couple of millions of inhabitants, it was a huge metropolis, and there were hundreds of professionally working Astrologers in town. You could go to them, they were known and many of them even gave their readings with big sketches in the street. They stood there and talked about Astrology. And I mean that that’s something that is not rejected knowledge that was very mainstream. And, of course, there were many haters of Astrology but there are also many haters of evolutionary theory. So that’s not a reason to kind of define something and the same is true for many other traditions that we, I think wrongly, say these are marginalized. Another example would be Kabbalah, Jewish Kabbalah in the 17th century thirty percent of the Jewish, the European Jews, were Kabbalists. this is not a kind of rejected, no this is maybe one of the largest group and traditional identity of European Jews in the 17th century.
So that yeah I don’t think that really is helpful and it has the implication that somehow okay, there’s Esotericism studies, institutes or people who just study these weird sex-magicians or whatever and then okay, but that’s actually not what the potential of Esotericism research is in my view. The potential is to describe the diversity of these knowledge systems that we do that we were talking about in their historical settings and then you see that some of these are marginalized only in the 19th, 20th century but before they were not. And others come up as new settings in the 20th century, as a result of evolutionary thinking, for instance, or science and biology, or whatever, or cultural history theories as well that created new forms of spiritual practice. And again, these are not rejected so that that’s not a helpful characterisation, in my view.
AP: And what would be a better way of defining esotericism if not with this term?
KvS: I don’t.
AP: Do you avoid definition?
KvS: I avoid, yeah, I avoid definitions of Esotericism in that sense. What I do look into certain orders of knowledge about magic, for instance, or about the soul or about Occultism and I looked into how these were presented or come across as philosophies of nature. So, or an interpretation of Platonism or like a philosophy or a cultural theory. Like I found in my new book on the “Cultural History of the Soul,” I again found also in the “Scientification of Religion” book, already, I found the very influential root of many of this thinking is Frederick Nietzsche and the philosophy of the Dionysian, right, and that there is a kind of Dionysian access to knowledge and to the real essence of the world of the cosmos and sounds through ecstasy, through rage, through altered states – now we call them extraordinary states of consciousness or whatever.
But all of these people, like Carl Gustav Jung and also Jane Harrison, so influential theoreticians of religion they all read Nietzsche and they all thought, okay this is what religion can do and this is what magic can do and art can do and the whole Dionysian fascination was also leading to, okay when we merge with the spirits of nature we get all the kind of healing that Shamanism provides, for instance. So there’s a lot of influence of this understanding and that, for me, it’s I don’t need a concept of Esotericism that that puts that all together. So I would more look into these concrete kinds of contexts and talk about occultism because these people use the term occultism all the time and then I can define occultism in that context without saying, okay I have a generic definition of occultism or magic.
I mean I would never define magic. How do you want to define magic? I mean you can say, okay Crowley and his friends defined it this way and there is another definition that that goes that way but I don’t decide which definition is correct but I can see how definitions, I can describe these definitions and see how they work in certain contexts without me having to decide, okay where is the distinction between magic and science. I know I don’t know and it’s like what Bruno Latour does – the ‘magicality’ of science. I mean these are playing with words that are, for me, more interesting than to say, okay I need a definition of either science or magic but talking about the magicality of modernity is saying that, okay magic is a very important identity marker, a negative identity marker for defining what modernity means and at the same time we are obsessed by magic. And these are figures of interpretation that work, for me, better than putting it all together into one container, under one container concept.
AP: That’s a fascinating take. I usually tend to be, in my research I tend to be fond of labels – just because they bring to the table a discussion that you wouldn’t have otherwise, so…
KvS: Yeah, the labels. The labels are good. I think that labels don’t need to be a definition and it’s also, I mean, what I like is what Michel Foucault called ‘grouping’. With that, you have certain ingredients of orders of knowledge like nature, knowledge, and consciousness, or whatever, Animism and magic and so on. So and then you have all these ingredients like in the 19th century, what we can do with our mind. We can alter reality with our mind. How does that work? So that creates a certain order of knowledge that is very strong in Occultism and still also in magic today and they didn’t call it magic.
And then people like Israel Regardie called it magic and they used this Dionysian and this knowledge about the powers of the psyche to explain magic, fine, and then you have certain ingredients. But what Foucault said that what you see are these ingredients and then you can always regroup them you can look into oh this author also wrote about religion or about politics or about something else and then then you can reconstruct a different historical constellation of knowledge that is, also still based on the concrete material, but it’s a different reading of that history and it brings up, like what you said, it flags with different labels, it flags things in a different way. And that brings new perspectives to the table that’s actually very interesting and I think that’s one of the big potentials you have in Esotericism studies. That you can do this creative kind of regrouping of things. Like, for instance, okay well Max Weber was very deep into theosis and all the magic stuff and he went to Monte Verità to visit the Pagan community there and I mean and all that stuff.
Or you see that Fraser, one of the big anthropologists, who came up with one of these big definitions of magic, that actually Alistair Crowley then took over, he took most of his theories from Fraser. And then you see that Fraser was also highly fascinated by sources, by magical rituals, by all that stuff. So then one author called him, Joseph Storm, calls him the ‘haunted Anthropologist.’ So we just kind of break down these labels somehow, play differently with the same labels. This is not a theory of secularization, he’s also haunted by magic, he believes in magic or in the reality of things and tries to kind of get a way to handle it and that’s a different take on the cultural work that was going on in that time and the same is true for our generations, of course. We’re also trying to find, reconcile certain understandings, experiences that we make ourselves with scientific theories.
There’s one reason why we have this whole new awareness of Animism in Religious Studies and Anthropology. Animism was completely out of the picture because it was kind of constructed and mis-constructed, all kinds of colonial things. But now there’s a whole new Animism field that is very interesting, also very interesting for understanding nature-based spiritualities like witchcraft, like Shamanism but also magic and other practices. And one reason is that there are all these scholars who are magicians themselves and they are practitioners, they are pagans and they are writing, basically, about their own spiritual, sometimes they do it openly sometimes not but I mean there’s certain kind of also main-streaming or more acceptance of being a Pagan and still studying religion
I mean that’s not a big thing any more, at least in many places. So that also then changes again in this kind of scientification setting or discourse community setting. It’s not so clear to say, oh this is only a scholar and this is a practitioner. No, it has never been so easy and many, many scholars were practitioners too, all the time. But it becomes a little bit more accepted, I think today than it was 50 years ago.
AP: And I usually argue that what really matters is the methodology. Because regardless of whether you are a practitioner of magic and study magic or you aren’t, you are still a person with a belief system. So if the argument is that your belief system is going to affect your research then it will do it either way, whether you are or aren’t a practitioner. So that’s why we have rigorous methodology to gather data and analyse data so that our personal views don’t matter all that much.
KvS: Absolutely. I mean I agree, so the matter is not if you are a so-called believer or not. I mean that’s also the misnomer of what actually is going on. But if you are part of the community that all the phenomena that you’re studying then doesn’t make you more subjective than if you love your stuff it doesn’t make you more subjective than if you hate it. So I mean it’s more a question of including our positionality in our methodology somehow. And that’s basically what we should do but it does not mean that it’s better or worse if you find the study, the stuff that you’re studying plausible or not.
AP: And where do you think that the academic inquiry on these kind of topics is headed in the next decade?
KvS: I don’t know. I think what I don’t see, honestly, a huge field for Esotericism Studies because of the questions I mentioned earlier and it’s still perceived, by many, as a niche. So it’s very hard to leave that niche, I would think. But if you look into larger academic settings like Cultural Studies like, also Post-Humanity Studies and also new developments in Anthropology and also in Sociology and in Science and Technology Studies, for instance. If you look into Donna Haraway’s stuff, Bruno Latour’s stuff and so where you see that the social and the and the natural are growing together somehow they don’t buy this binary distinction between natural sciences and humanities any more. And I think there is, there will be a huge post-humanities movement, I hope at least, maybe it’s wishful thinking.
But I think there is a clear indication that these disciplines are merging more and more that we become undisciplined, in the sense that we go beyond these disciplinary distinctions and look into certain phenomena like climate change or the life of the planet is a good example. And we have to find answers to these challenges or we will go extinct. I mean there is a certain urgency also that you see in this field that it is not enough to only to measure certain things in nature, or in plants, or in animals, but it’s always linked to ethical questions, to consciousness questions, to our place in the cosmos and so on. And to raise these questions and then actually find a partner for conversation about this in other disciplines is something that you see also as a clear tendency I think. If you look at what the European research council is funding for instance, and so if that is an indication. So the emerging of disciplines around certain topics is something that I hope will happen even more and Religious Studies or Esotericism studies can be a very good kind of anchor for something like that because this has always been interdisciplinary and acknowledging that can also be a good way forward.
AP: I totally agree with you and I’m working with a head researcher from a University in Barcelona and she’s in political study and in media and we’re looking at how the concept of the witch has been employed in politics as the anti-female. So that’s a very small example but there are many, many more examples of how concepts that relate to esotericism both in practice and in the popular understanding and the popular conceptualization, they do play a role that goes way beyond the religious practices.
KvS: Yeah and that’s a great project and it’s also a good example to see that it’s very helpful to use labels because these are labelled witches. But there’s always someone who has an interest in labelling someone witch, be it a self-identification, that’s one thing, but also being a projection of something. So, the term has a discursive function in relations of power and that’s very, very good to flag that and label that but I doubt that you will come up with a definition of what a witch is. You know what I mean, so or you need to say, okay this is Esotericism, wow! I mean what does that label add? But it is certainly something that has its own vocabulary and its own kind of discursive field where you can identify certain meanings in different contexts without coming up with a generic understanding of okay, this is witchcraft. Or something is very hard to define in a kind of academic, in the general ways, It’s easier to see in this context, in this political context, a witch is defined blah blah blah and then but it provides a certain context. But it’s not the definition that you have to use yourself. It’s more a tool that you describe to analyse certain tensions in the field.
AP: Yeah I guess that in this case, I find it very useful to use discourse analysis when you are trying to understand how people use certain terms. Rather than defining the term in absolute terms. I would argue and I gather that you agree, you would agree with me on this, that defining things in absolute terms is quite impossible when it comes to living culture.
KvS: Yeah.
AP: It is possible when it comes to writing a vocabulary or a dictionary but when it comes to living concepts, that people engage with on a daily basis, I think they’re coming up with an absolute definition. It’s a bit challenging.
KvS: I agree, I agree.
AP: So this is it for today’s interview. Hope you enjoyed it and please do let me know in the comments section what you think of it and whether you have any questions?
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