Dr Angela Puca AP: Hello everyone, I’m Dr Angela now and welcome to my PhD live celebration and here with me I have a super mega special guest and it’s Dr Justin Sledge from the YouTube channel Esoterica.

So help me in welcoming Justin.

Dr Justin Sledge JS: Thank you, Angela and congratulations on the successful defence of your dissertation. I think I said it before and I’ll say it again, that the field is incredibly lucky to have you and it’s really wonderful to have you as Dr Puca and so congratulations – mazel tov – you certainly deserve it. So congratulations.

AP: Thank you so much Justin that’s very nice of you to say. I think that the field is also very, very lucky to have you and YouTube is lucky to have you because if you guys don’t know the YouTube channel esoterica, I don’t know where you have been, but yeah, go and subscribe because he posts amazing content over there.

JS: Yeah, thank you, yeah folks want to check, it out. I think the link’s in the description and I pretty neat episode on Alchemy so if you’re interested in things like Alchemy and Kabbalah feel free to check out the channel.

AP: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s also nice how we balance out our contents because it’s like I’m more on the contemporary side and you tend to be more historical. So that is nice too I think.

JS: Yeah, it’s great that we can like we have this interesting relationship between its different approaches and different techniques but working in the same field. It just shows that the field is so fresh and that it’s so… Western esotericism is such a dynamic field that we can get so many different people working in it doing so many things and so, yeah, I really appreciate your content and how you approach these topics especially from the anthropological, sociological, contemporary side of things which I don’t have a background in. So it’s just really great how the two projects balance themselves out.

AP: Yeah, I think that we live in such a fascinating time where scholars can share their knowledge on the internet freely and yeah, I get some comments at times which really move me because they say they couldn’t afford a university degree or university level education but they still get that kind of content from us, from YouTube so those kinds of comments really mean a lot to me.

JS: Yeah, same. I think a lot about this especially for the fact that we can reach so many people with YouTube. I think people are really interested in learning but they’re not really interested in going into student debt or travelling halfway across the world to get a degree. So I’m really happy to be able to produce content that folks find engaging and I’m very humbled by how people are just so kind and so engaged with it so I’m really appreciative of the audience that we have and the ability to talk about this kind of material and the fact that people are interested in it just makes me really happy and humbled.

AP: Yeah. let me see who’s there in the chat. And also I’d like to tell you guys, first of all, thank you for coming. Oh, Nick, I can see you thank you for the congratulations. Thank you Alessio and Lea and hi Sebastian, nice to see you here. And nice to also see Dave, Eddie and Andrew. So please do bear in mind to put QUESTION in capital letters so that we can easily spot the questions because, of course, I know that you are going to chat amongst yourself as well which is totally fine it’s just that it makes it easier for us to respond to your questions. So let’s start with one of the questions, with the questions from my Patrons, from the members of the Inner Symposium.

So Andrew says, both of you are pioneers in an experiment in mass education. Like the first European universities, students are coming to you to learn what you have to teach and some of us are paying you directly, like my Patrons and your Patrons, as well as the YouTube videos you offer special lectures and access to your Patrons. You both are experimenting with new ways of teaching and others are coming up in the field of Religious Studies. How do you envisage the future for your own channels and the field our channels and the field? Do you want to start first?

JS: Sure, it’s a huge question. I get this sense that at least especially with the field of Western Esotericism there are just so few places in the world where you can go and get, basically, an academic degree or have a sustained academic engagement with the material and I think that one of the great things about YouTube is that it opens up the possibility of folks getting access to scholars working in this field in a way that basically means that they don’t have to travel halfway across the world or dump a whole bunch of money into getting a degree as I did. And so I think that what’s great about that is that it opens up the possibility of folks to be able to engage to what degree that they want.

I mean one of my favourite YouTube channels for years has been Jackson Crawford’s channel on Old Norse and I think in a lot of ways he pioneered the idea of just getting online and standing in front of a mountain and talking about the structure of Norse poetry or whatever. And it’s amazing, if you look at his channel, you have basically almost an undergraduate degree worth of knowledge available for free on his channel and I think that, at least for me, that’s basically what I want to create with Esoterica is a kind of library of topics in what’s in Esotericism that is reliable from an academic point of view and that folks can have access to that without having to to to go to Amsterdam or whatever to get it. And you know the basic idea of course also is that only that’s only going to work if we have support from the public and from folks like our Patrons and other kinds of things and the ability to do that is really incredible because it basically means people are willing to pledge some amount of money to make this information available for free to a wider audience and so it’s just a really neat experiment.

I don’t know about you but I think of it as a giant experiment where no one really knows what they’re doing and no one really knows what the future of this is going to look like and we’re all experimenting and what sticks, sticks and hopefully, it’ll work and so yeah I find this to be a really fun experiment and I don’t know about you but I’m still figuring out all kinds of things about this work. And I have no idea what I’m doing most of the time you know I’m not I don’t have any experience editing stuff like film and things I have no idea what… I mean I’m learning all the stuff on the fly. So, insofar as it’s working I’m really happy but I don’t know what do you think. What are you thinking about the long-term trajectory of your channel or of how your career and your channel intersect because you’re really in some sense at the beginning of both and religious studies online right there’s such great content with Let’s Talk Religion and Religion For Breakfast and there’s so much good content that’s developing and being in at the ground floor is going to be it’s something interesting that we have perhaps something of a unique access to. But what do you think about the long-term trajectory of this whole business?

AP: Oh it’s very difficult to predict, to be honest. I can say what I hope will happen rather than what is going to happen. I hope, as you said, that this is going to become much bigger and yeah, as you can tell by in on my channel of my Symposium. I called it Angela’s Symposium for a reason I didn’t call it Angela Puca because I wanted it to be not only a place for me to share knowledge but also to bring in other academics and I guess I just wanted the community even the community of people who practice Magick, to know that there are people who study these things from an academic point of view, that they are not neglected, so to speak, by the academic world. But then actually, what they do bears a lot of value from all different points, from different points of view and so I hope that, in the future, my Symposium will grow larger. Of course, it depends on the help, as you said, that we get from our Patrons and from the community and how much even the YouTube channel grows. But yeah I do hope to involve more scholars in the future and I don’t think that I want to give up Academia.

Maybe I’m I might be I think but you can tell me whether I’m wrong I might be more fond of the academic world than you are, from what I gather. but I guess that I would like to do them both at the same time and still be an academic while releasing information on YouTube. I guess that I’d like to do that. Of course, if I was able to do to have financial support from my community I could do like part-time academia and part-time YouTube or other sorts of things. Maybe I might, in the future, create a website to share knowledge on Western Esotericism, esoteric topics, Pagan Studies, Shamanism, Magick practices and so on. So it really depends on what happens because, as you said, we are just learning as we go it’s not something that we were trained for. I mean we were trained for the content but we were not trained for the delivery. And all these things that we have to engage with, including the viewers and yeah, it’s just something that we are trying to figure out as we go I guess.

Then we have another question from Andrew which is, are YouTube and Tiktok videos that lack your academic rigour the new oral tradition. I think that Andrew here is referring to YouTube channels who share practical Witchcraft information. Not like our channels who deliver scholarly knowledge. So do you think that they might be or become a new oral tradition because we talk so much about oral traditions in even in contemporary Witchcraft and contemporary Paganism? But what is an oral tradition today? Can a tradition conveyed via YouTube or TikTok be considered a new form of oral tradition?

JS: I can’t imagine what the argument against that would be. I mean whether it’s people sitting around a fire, around, a hearth a thousand years ago or sitting by the warming glow of a laptop. Insofar as traditions are being formed and knowledge is being transmitted orally, from an academic point of view, I can’t imagine why wouldn’t consider YouTube or TikTok or Twitter or whatever the mechanisms, whatever the platform is, it seems to me that the obvious answer is yeah, of course. Like the people are getting their religious content and maybe even moreover minority new religions like Wicca and various forms of Witchcraft they’re just they’re small enough that having localized communities, it’s just very difficult for many people and so it makes a great deal of sense that these communities are going to largely gather online and forge community online and that the medium, the medium itself, that these various mediums like YouTube or TikTok are going to be the mechanisms by which that knowledge is transmitted. So yeah, and it seems, that seems very compelling to me.

AP: I totally agree with you. I think that what counts as oral knowledge or oral tradition changes as life changes, as communities change and I mean, we cannot really just think that things will stay still because everything is in a continuous metamorphosis and in a continuous change. So obviously, as the means change so will the traditions I guess.

JS: I think what’s also somewhat odd to me is, also, what part our channels could play into that, for instance, and I’m sure this is true for you, it’s where I think people come to academic practitioners, sometimes will come to academic sources to learn better how to inform their practice and so in many ways, while I produce content, that’s it’s almost exclusively academic, it’s interesting that that academic resource can also be incorporated as part of an oral tradition into people’s practices with Hermeticism or Witchcraft or what have you. And so I think it’s also interesting that even if you’re not intending to be part of that ecosystem one becomes involved in an ecosystem and I think that’s all the more reason for me to think very carefully about being respectful. Being respectful that, not only am I creating academic content but that that content also needs to be respectful of the fact that many of the things I talk about are living people’s lived spiritualities and so I try to have that, of course, in the back of my mind. I think many academics can be very dismissive of that kind of thing. I think that’s changing though but trying to think about, I’m part of that ecosystem too and to be responded to know that and be responsible for it’s also a very interesting kind of task I think.

AP: Yeah, I think that in my field, I mean in the study of contemporary religions people, scholars tend to be very mindful of that. At least in my experience, I’ve always met Anthropologists or Ethnographers or other such scholars who always pointed out how important it is to bear in mind that your research will have an impact on the community you’re studying. And in some cases you are even unintentionally legitimating traditions, not because you are saying anything positive about them but just by the very fact that you are studying them. And I did have the experience in my research as well, where I had people, who labelled themselves as Shamans, who wanted to be part of my research because they kind of wanted to get notoriety from my research. So this is something that is often debated among Anthropologists. We have like these long debates over wine or beers to kind of say, oh so how do you deal with that and what’s your solution? It’s very difficult because when you deal, when you do fieldwork, with people it’s very complicated and it’s complex on so many different levels. And I think that we try so hard to be always mindful and respectful and even so there’s always going to be somebody who gets offended even if you really tried your hardest not to be disrespectful in any sort of way but sometimes people, informants convey certain information to you in the hope that you will interpret that information or put them in a wider context the way they want you to.

So yeah, it’s very unpredictable what happens on the field but I find it to be funny and I come from your same background in philosophy. So for my PhD, I sort of transferred to Anthropology and fieldwork with contemporary practices, practitioners and traditions. So, it was quite a change but I find it really fun. I think that research in Anthropology is extremely fun. It can be harsh and dangerous and extremely tiring but it’s definitely fun.

Let me see if we have other questions.

Alessio Di Gino asks, do you believe that Western Esotericism is living now a renaissance?

And then we have another question, how have your academic work impacted your personal practices, spiritualities?

So, do you think that that Western Esotericism is living a renaissance or that is just becoming more talked about?

JS: Yeah, I don’t yeah I don’t know renaissance because renaissance has the idea of rebirth and I think that, whatever it is that we’re doing now, is I think, very different than whatever existed, you know, during the days of Ficino and Ludovico Lazzarelli or Paracelsus or whatever. We’re doing something very different, different now. I will say that we’re living in many ways and maybe one of the most exciting periods of time for this kind of study, both for reasons that access to the texts and access to the information is really accessible. I mean I did an episode just last week on Alchemy and getting access to some of these alchemical texts from the early modern period on Google books is just so easy, just look up three-volume alchemical texts from 1577 and there it is. I mean, obviously, you need to read Latin or whatever but as long as you have the languages the information is right there in a lot of ways. So I think we’re living in a really exciting time for the study of Western Esotericism because one there’s not the threat of, I don’t know, being burned at the stake or something for studying necromancy or whatever, at least not here. And two the information is so accessible in a way that I think even 20 years ago, 10 years ago that wasn’t true. So I think that we’re living at the beginning of a huge explosion in interest in this material and so I’m pretty excited to be at this level of that. Both at the YouTube level but also at the academic level. As for the spirituality side of it, you would know much more about that than I would. From the folks who are modern practitioners and incorporating these ideas in their spirituality so you would know more about that than me for sure.

AP: Yeah, I, as somebody who studies contemporary religious practices, yes definitely. The interest in Paganism, Magick and well, it’s always been there but now it’s becoming more public and it’s taking many different forms, even like with TikTok and Instagram. You have people who engage with Witchcraft on so many levels. It can be on an aesthetic level, it can be on a sensorial level, it can be… it doesn’t necessarily have to be, you know, using a cauldron or summoning a demon. There are many different shapes and forms and means whereby Witchcraft and Magick practices are now practised and engaged with so yeah, definitely. I’m actually doing research with a researcher from the University of Barcelona on the Witches of TikTok.

So I guess that the paper will come on the channel eventually because quite often when I have to deliver a paper or write an article, some of the material that I use for the article or the paper or the research I then use to make a YouTube video. So because I just think that it’s a pity that these things will just sit in an academic journal without people knowing them. So I like for the wider public to be aware of the research that is taking place because there’s lots of research taking place now and at the moment there is the conference of the American Academy of Religion where I will be delivering a paper tomorrow. But yeah, for example, the field of Pagan Studies is becoming bigger and bigger and even the field of Indigenous Religions and the study of the concept of indigeneity. So yes absolutely, I think that magical practices are, I wouldn’t say as you said Justin that they are living the renaissance, but I would say that they are living an opening to the public. They are kind of massive, they are leaving the closet, the broom closet and yeah and people tend to be more open about them and of course, it also takes many different forms.

I also have a question from another one of my Patrons which is Sebastian. Sebastian if you are here in the chat, which I think you are, please correct me if I’m wrong because I’m not completely sure whether I understood your question because he now asks me to ask you the relationship between bureaucracy and knowledge. But I’m not completely sure what he means by bureaucracy but I guess he means the academic standards. He says, how much do academic standards count in relation to knowledge production as bureaucratic? Is there a neat separating line? Does less bureaucracy come with less rigour? Are there different ways of holding people accountable in regards to knowledge other than their fear of losing their job at an institution? How, in your experience, does the digital bureaucracy differ from the academic one?

JS: Yeah, this is an interesting question, right? And it sort of cuts two ways. One thing that I think, one thing I think is true is that that one of the things we know for instance about peer review is that peer review is not perfect and there have been papers that have gotten into journals that have been basically hoaxes and things. So peer view is not a foolproof method for vetting things. On the other hand, I think when things are just basically like what they call ‘unverified personal analysis’ or something then you definitely get into a position where you can’t really vet ideas and you can’t have an argument or debate about the verticality of a belief or something like that. What I see, actually, more than bureaucracy is something I worry about, in terms of academia, is more the push toward obscurantism in academia which is the desire to move to… because there are so few academic jobs and there are so many people getting PhDs that people have to become more and more and more siloed and more and more esoteric, ironically, in order to basically produce publications and these publications become buried in these really obscure journals and they’re not making an impact in terms of public education and for me as a person very interested in education and public education. I see that that drive is a not totally healthy drive in academia where you have basically five people having conversations that no one else in the world can have besides those five people. I don’t find that to be an incredibly healthy kind of academic… if that’s all academia that’s unhealthy I think.

But on the other hand, I think that having no checks and balances in terms of knowledge can lead to all kinds of disastrous situations. I mean, I think again I look at some of the stuff, I think Alchemy is in an especially bad place here where, if you just take a look at Alchemy books on Amazon, the amount of information that gets spewed out about Alchemy and what it was is so bad and so misrepresentative of anything that Alchemists were historically doing and that’s just unfair to the Alchemists for one. I’d like to be fair to them, I think they were smart people and I want to be fair to them. And two, it basically opens up the situation where if there’s nothing checking that knowledge you can just end up with things that are wildly off the mark – interesting – but just so wildly off the mark and that’s not to count all the things that are just actually like really, really terrifyingly pernicious that arise.

I mean I think, for instance, in you know the realm of Norse Studies and things like that how straightforward Nazism, Nazi mysticism has really infiltrated into that world and that’s a pity for many people who are not racists, who want to practice their religion and the Runes now being associated with things like the far right or with Hitlerism or something. That’s a pity so with no mechanism to check this stuff I do find that it is worrying and it does go off the rails. And I think with my YouTube channel and I think this is true of Angela as well, we’re willing to engage in public debate, like if I say something that, if folks want to correct me, I’m happy to be fact-checked and if people will really disagree with me I’m totally happy to be disagreed with. And I think the idea is that if I were to say something about Shamanism on my channel and Angela would have come over and say I think he really misunderstood this and I hope she would. And if you come over and say I really think this is wrong, I would work hard to correct it I would take that video down I would work hard to correct it because I don’t want to put anything out there, with my name on it, is bad information or information is unreliable.

AP: So yeah, I totally agree with you.

JS: How to strike the balance I don’t know how to strike the balance between academic rigour and advancing the academic world where you’re you are writing relatively obscure things and making that information publicly available in a way that is reliable. It’s a hard balance to strike and I think that I’m trying to strike it. I know Angela’s trying to strike it too and I think, I hope we’re doing a good enough job and I think that we’ll get better and better at it.

I see, I saw Dan Attrell in the chat looking for a talisman to get rich. Dan if you give me a lot of money I’ll send you a nice kabbalistic talisman that will make you all kinds of money. You have to send me like $36,000 thousand dollars and I’ll work that out for you. But Dan Attrell also is a person who’s working in this field and is a great scholar and I think we’re all trying to figure out how to strike this balance and I don’t know about you Angela but I’m doing the best I can and it’s not always easy.

AP: Yeah, it’s not easy and as you said, I guess, especially in our field where there is such a dissonance compared to the dominant cultural framework. We need to be particularly meticulous about how our methodology and how rigorous the information we deliver are both because of the topic. I wouldn’t say it’s controversial but it’s kind of at the fringe of our culture somehow and as a consequence, since it’s not that widely accepted, in our cultural framework, people don’t believe that Magick exists. So if there are, and there definitely are, people who practice Magick they find themselves in the situation, in the condition of opposing this cultural framework and even be considered lunatics or silly people who believe in fantasies. So since we are addressing these topics which have such a big dissonance with the cultural framework we live in, especially in this case, we need to be rigorous in how we address these things. First to show that these topics can be addressed from an academic point of view and we’ve just as a rigorous methodology as you could address any other cultural phenomena.

And two because, of course, there are people who just share information which are, as you said, all over the place and so both because there is a lot of knowledge out there which is not you know the best and the most rigorous and because this topic is so at the fringes of our cultural framework and the collective understanding of the world and how the world works so for both of these reasons we need to be quite rigorous. So I’d say, even though I think Sebastian was more interested in your answer than mine, I guess that it is important to find a balance but at the same time I do believe in the rigour that the academic, yeah that academia has helped me build when it comes to researching something and trying to understand a specific phenomenon.

JS: No I totally agree, yeah I totally agree that. And again also I think that I’m not, the task of producing academic knowledge of Western Esotericism that’s what I’m doing and when I look at content creators who are creating content specifically from the practitioner side of it I don’t have the least bit of judgement or idea about what they’re doing that’s again for me, I think, that if they’re talking about history or something they should have the facts, right as best as they can. We all should but I have no interest in saying well, that’s not really what Paracelsus said and you can’t do that. I have no interest in stepping on anyone’s spiritual toes. Sometimes I have people ask me things like, well do you think that the, I don’t know, the Kabbalah of Madonna is real Kabbalah and I’m like, it’s real to Madonna…

AP: It’s Madonna’s Kabbalah.

JS: Rabbi Madonna, God bless her. She should have whatever Kabbalah she likes. So yeah, I think it’s also the other side of it, from an academic point of view, is that I want to learn from the folks who are practitioners as much as I want to learn from other folks. So I don’t have any interest in judgement of how they land on, what they land on, you know. But if they tell me that Paracelsus was from the 8th century CE then I’ll be like, no I don’t think he was from the 8th century CE, something like that.

AP: Yeah I agree with you, it really depends on whether you’re addressing and tackling a contemporary living tradition and whether they are talking about their practices or whether, like, for example, there are certain claims which might be historically untrue and in that case, a scholar would point them out. That it’s not based on facts nor history but at the same time if a person says this is my Kabbalah, this is my way of practising, okay.

JS: Yeah, and this is the same way I approach my own private religious beliefs, right. When people say things like you know historically speaking there’s no evidence that there are Israelites enslaved in Egypt. I’m like, yeah, I don’t think that that was the case either and it’s a cultural mythology and cultural mythologies are very important whether they’re historically true or not. And far be it for me to sit in judgement of anyone else’s cultural mythologies.

AP: Yeah, we have also another question from another one of my Patrons which is Jenny and it is kind of a follow-up to Sebastian’s question. So she asks, how in both of your opinions the peer critique and research would work for reliable academic work that keeps these channels relevant outside the ivory tower or bureaucracy?

JS: I think it would just be if I said something that you thought was incorrect or you know I think that we would… I think we respect each other enough to know, I think we respect each other’s work enough to say like to go over someone’s channel and say, hey look, I think that’s not quite true. I mean I can give one example where I may have done this on Let’s Talk Religion’s channel where he made a claim about when the Israelites came into existence and he said that they must have come into existence in the 9th century BCE and I’m like, no there’s a Stele of Merneptah that dates you know the 13th century BC. I think the 13th century BC. And I’m like and the is the Israelites were mentioned in that stele and so they must have existed at some level at that point.

And he was very gracious. He said yeah, I forgot about that stele and, you know, blah, blah, blah. So I think that part of how we would do peer review is just by watching each other’s content. We like each other’s content, we’re interested in this field and so we watch each other stuff, I think, and if we make a mistake we try to correct for it. I’m not perfect, I don’t know everything and I make mistakes and I’m gonna change my mind and so I might make an episode about X and then five years later I might come back and say yeah that was really off the mark there. I don’t believe that anymore and come back and change it. So I think it just means that folks have to be patient with us as we make this content and try to make it the best we can and when we make mistakes we that will hopefully get corrected by folks who know better and will be gracious and thoughtful enough to correct for it.

Now, of course, I also get people coming to my channel telling me that I know I’m wrong, that the Zohar was written in the 13th century and they’ll say, no the Zohar was definitely written by Shimon bar Yochal in the second century, whatever. I’m like, that’s a traditional point of view, it’s very interesting that’s just not where the history lands, that’s not where the academic position is. You can disagree with it but my responsibility is to give the best academic, scholarly answer that I can. Of course, name the other answer and say this is also a position that’s held, for instance, in the more traditional world but I’m not going to change my channel, you can’t suit everybody, right.

AP: Yeah, I guess I’m totally on board with what you said. I always welcome criticism. I welcome criticism when it’s based you know on evidence literature and proper research but there are of course times when I get criticism which is based on purely misunderstanding what I said in a video or just on their personal views. So in that case. it’s just, okay, I acknowledge that my video was not for you and thanks for letting me know. But that’s it. But yeah I think that since we come from an Academy, we’ve had an academic training. Part of the academic training is also to engage and accept the peer review and also engage and accept with the fact that you are always going to, you know, not be perfect. We are perfectible but never perfect and so it is always a journey rather than a fixed point. ‘Okay, this is the video this is the ultimate answer to all of your questions on this topic.’ No, that is never going to be the case but we are trying to do the best we can and yeah, I guess that that’s the only thing we can do.

JS: Yeah, I think there was a relatively easy question to answer back in the chat about learning languages and I think this is a thing that I’ve gotten, I think, several people have asked about this and I think you and I are going to agree largely about this and I’m sure again other folks like Dan in the chat, yeah, if you want to do Western Hermeticism, I would definitely do Latin. You need to learn Latin pretty well especially if you’re gonna do historical stuff. Picking up some Greek is not gonna hurt and again Latin, Greek and Hebrew. I would really encourage folks if you really want to do a dive deep into Western Esotericism and then you would probably use a speciality language as you specialize in a field. So if you’re going to be working in, you know, something like, I don’t know, Alchemy, German is going to be a really important thing for you, especially if you’re going to work in Paracelsus or that kind of world. So, yeah, at least Latin and then I would say probably some degree of Greek. If you want to do Kabbalah obviously you’re going to pick up Hebrew and Aramaic and then a speciality language and one of the real gaps in western esoteric scholarship in my opinion, at least, is the connection of Zoroastrianism and Persia to a lot of stuff going on especially in the ancient world and the amount of scholars that we need that do Arabic but also Persian is like really… the fact that there aren’t really great translations of Zoroastrian scriptures that are accessible, it’s just like a glaring thing over the side where like we don’t have really good translations of these texts. So, but I know we’re both partial to learning ancient languages and so I think you spent your fair share of time, Angela, working on especially Latin and Greek.

AP: Yeah, yeah, I grew up learning Latin and Greek way before I even knew that the English language existed. So yeah, sometimes I say that I grew up eating pasta and translating Latin and ancient Greek. Which is true because the kind of education that I went through was a classical education. So every single day I had to translate for two hours from Latin and two hours from ancient Greek and usually, there were different kinds of texts. Sometimes it was a Caesar, some other times was, yeah I didn’t quite enjoy the ones on war and war strategy but yeah there were others which were from philosophers like Plato and those ones were more interesting to me. But yeah, it was more about learning the language anyway. And I guess I have, at least when it comes to pronunciation, I certainly have an advantage in both languages because Italian is phonetically, well extremely similar to Latin and pretty similar to Greek too. So it’s easy for an Italian to pronounce ancient Greek correctly and Latin especially, especially the medieval ecclesiastical pronunciation.

Andrew… Oh and hi James Vitale, happy to see you in the chat. Oh, there’s the Modern Hermeticist. Hi, happy to see you in the chat.

JS: He was playing around in the chat. I called him, I don’t know, a second ago.

AP: Oh yeah, because I can’t remember his name. What’s his name again?

JS: Dan Attrell.

AP: Okay yeah, because we had an exchange in chat a few days ago but I have, I always had issues remembering the names unless I see them over and over.

So Andrew asks, how important are practitioner-scholars in the advancement of the field?

JS: Practitioner-scholars?

AP: I guess scholars who also practice Magick.

JS: If they’re good, if they’re good scholars they’re good scholars. I mean that’s my general attitude that yeah if they’re good scholars, they’re good scholars. It seems to me to be the long and the short of it, that if you want to be a scholar and be a person who practices as long as you’re a good scholar it doesn’t… I think that that’s basically a non-issue at least as far as I can tell. I mean most people who are good scholars of Christianity or Kabbalah are Jewish and I never blink. You know again it’s weird that we would when a person identifies as a Pagan becomes a Pagan Studies person that somehow that their private beliefs will shape their scholarship in a bad way. But no one blinks when you learn that Gershom Scholem was Jewish and pioneered Kabbalah or whatever. So I find that that it’s unfortunate, it’s unfair that folks that who are practitioners, specifically of the of stuff in Western Esotericism get looked at askew in a way that I think that a mainstream Catholic Jesuit who does church history, no one would blink an eye. They’d be like, yep it’s a Jesuit, that’s what they do. So, I think that would be unfair but aside from that, I think what is basically a bias on the part of some people. I think that good scholarship’s good scholarship. I don’t remember me working…

AP: Yeah I agree with you. I think that whether a scholar of Western Esotericism is a practitioner or not is completely irrelevant because if you are a good scholar you are a good scholar and everybody is, whether you practice Magick or believe in Magick or not, you are always going to have your own personal belief system. So whether you let it affect your research it really doesn’t depend on which belief system you endorse, it’s just a matter of acknowledging your biases and not let them play a role in your academic research.

So yeah, as you said Justin, it’s all about being a good scholar. If you are a good scholar it doesn’t matter whether you are Jewish or a Magick Practitioner or a Witch or a Christian, you would still tackle the topic with the rigour that that topic deserves. Yeah, I agree.

I see a question from Stefan Pavlovic, how much Sufism influences Kabbalah in the 12th century?

JS: In what century? The 12th century? Well so it’s, so the 12th century is a little early I mean there definitely is some degree of Kabbalah being practised. I mean Kabbalah is being developed primarily in Spain and in France at least in the 12th century. This would be the period of things maybe like the Iyyun circle or the circle of Special Cherub. So in some sense, the 12th century is really proto-Kabbalah in a lot of ways. It’s not until we get to the mid 13th century that we get the Zohar and the literature around that really becomes Kabbalah proper. But the truth matters. I’m not a scholar on Sufism. This would be a great question for “Let’s Talk Religion,” it’d be something maybe he and I could work on. But yeah, so for me, I don’t know that much about Sufism and so I hate to say that say, one way or the other.

It seems to me that insofar as Christians and Jews and Muslims are living in close proximity to one another that they’re not influencing each other. I will say that whereas I don’t know much about the Sufi influence on Kabbalah, I will say that Christian influence is, actually, all over Kabbalah and this is sort of a badly kept secret, I guess, in Jewish studies, where I think that it’s basically impossible to believe that with the rise of the Marian cult and Spain, specifically in the high Middle Ages that when you see the exact same kind of innovation happen with the idea of the Shekinah, the idea of the feminine divine in Kabbalah. There’s just no way that that’s just emerging out of nowhere I think that it’s certainly a response to the rise of, for instance, the Marian cult in Spain and the rise of the Shekinah in Kabbalah. So insofar as Jews and Christians and Muslims are all living close to one another the idea that they would not be influencing each other just seems preposterous. Now, I’m not a scholar of Sufism and so I can’t speak on exactly what those influences would be but it just seems incredibly likely that they must be. Religions are not closed things, as much as religious leaders would like to believe, that they’re closed off and hermetically sealed, so to speak. Religions are always also always open to the outside world and always being influenced by things other than themselves and often being influenced by the very others that they other. And so this is just I think a fact of history and the fact of human beings and…

AP: Yeah, I have a video on that. On the difference between institutionalized versus lived religions. Just, yeah, to point that out.

There is also a question from another one of my Patrons. Hi Nick. Nick asks do you think that practitioners are attracted to more academic sources as a way of validating their spirituality in a majority Judeo-Christian society?

I think yes and there is a book on this from… maybe Justin you know how to pronounce his name … I never know how to…

JS: Kocku von Stuckrad.

AP: Yeah, Stuckrad.

JS: Yeah, he was my advisor in Amsterdam, yeah.

AP: That’s why I thought you, you know how to pronounce his name. The book is called “The Scientification of Religion” and there are a few chapters especially dedicated to contemporary Magick practitioners such as those involved with Paganism, Shamanism and other forms of Magick practices. And he points out how important Academia was in the development of contemporary Magick practices both with Shamanism, which was popularized by an Anthropologist, by two Anthropologists first Carlos Castaneda and then Michael Harner, in the western world. And then you have Wicca which was created on the claims, which were then disproven, but these were academic claims made by an academic, Margaret Murray, saying that there was this unchanging lineage of worship of the Horned God and the Goddess and those were used by Gerald Gardner to back the inception of east tradition as something, that was not new at all but actually was based on this very old and ancient lineage of Witch practice. So yeah, I think that it is a way of practitioners to prove to themselves that they are not completely out of the cultural framework they live in, that there is a place for them somehow that if the academia, which is the pinnacle of science and rationality, spends time and effort to study these practices then it means that they exist and they are in fact part of our society. What do you think Justin?

JS: I mean I can’t speak for modern practitioners so much because that’s not my field. But yeah I think that it seems logical to me, that it’s sort of a weird impulse. I think it’s sort of this old Roman impulse that, ‘if your religion’s new it’s not true,’ which maybe people have a kind of self-consciousness worry about the fact that if their religion doesn’t reach back to some ancient source or whatever then it’s somehow less than, which just seems philosophically not sound to me. It doesn’t really, you know, it seems just as likely that a new religion is going to be right as an old religion is going to be right – as far as any of them are right. And yeah, it seems psychologically that if you have a bunch of super-smart people like Dr Angela Puca at the AAR talking about Shamanism and you’re a Shaman then you’re like, look well these smart people can’t be wrong so I must be verified. That seems like a very it seems like a very rational kind of impulse. Although again, I think that a bunch of academics talking about what people do doesn’t make them any more right or wrong and it being old or not old doesn’t make it any more or less right. You know I tell my students, when I teach critical thinking, that tradition, while tradition is very important, tradition is just peer pressure from dead people…

AP: That’s fantastic – peer pressure from dead people.

JS: Like tradition is peer pressure from dead people and you know we all had our… I’m sure all of our Moms told us about peer pressure and how we shouldn’t give in to peer pressure. So I’m not so convinced by tradition. Of course, obviously, I come from a religious background where tradition is a big deal but I don’t think that somehow, from a philosophical point of view, at least, doesn’t make anything any more correct. I think that insofar as when spiritual practices are edifying to that person then they’re a good fit for that person.

AP: Yeah I totally agree with you. It is kind of a bias, a form of archaism and romanticisation of what is in the past. I think that it kind of links to the idea of otherness. It looks like sometimes especially in certain traditions and for certain practitioners the idea of otherness and even exoticism makes the practice more appealing. So if something is, you know, comes from a distant past or it’s like the mundane things are not considered to be special, so they need to be distanced from us somehow. Whether it be in time, in place or in perception but yeah it’s like in order to engage with something which you deem to be special, it doesn’t have to be mundane, it doesn’t have to be something that you would just do on a day-to-day basis. And clearly, Magick has got a few of those elements. And by the way, I’m not talking about Shamanism tomorrow at the AAR, I’m talking about Magick and whether the philosophy underpinning Magick is particularly adherent to and in line with the queer point of view. Because I just realized, during my fieldwork, that the overwhelming majority of Pagans or Neopagans are part of the LGBTQ community. So I just got interested in trying to understand. Of course, there has been scholarship done already on the link between Pagan spirituality and the queer community at large. But I was particularly interested in exploring whether Magick, as practised and conceptualized by Pagans, had elements which would be in line with that.

JS: So, I think this is also strongly true for Astrology as well. I think that both Astrology and Magick, in the queer community, those are very popular spiritual modes. So yeah, it’s an interesting overlap but again, it’s not my field.

AP: Yeah, well it’s gonna be turned into a YouTube script at some point. So, usually, I change it a bit in order to make it more appealing to the public, less boring and less focused on my fieldwork. But yeah I tend to turn my papers into YouTube videos.

JS: I think that there’s an idea that Western Esotericism skews to the right. I think that’s a common idea that people like Julius Evola and things like this said that they’re more representative of Western Esotericism, Traditionalism and things like this.

AP: Which is funny because in Paganism it’s the exact opposite.

JS: Yeah, my experience is that I don’t know that they’re equal. I don’t know that they’re equal but the material is the raw material and I think that folks for the far right and the far left both access it for very different reasons in very different ways. And I find, at least in my experience, there to be far more left-wing people interested in Western Esotericism and its associated spiritualities rather than the people on the far-right. The thing is it’s just the people on the far right are a lot louder and that they’re much more likely to like come in your comments and say evil, you know, ‘heil Hitler’ or whatever.

AP: Does it happen to you?

JS: Oh yeah, I’ve had to delete my fair share of alt-right comments where people come and say all kinds of Nazi things. Usually, the YouTube algorithm grabs them and they don’t even make it to the front page and again, when I look at folks that, you know, people like Evola and things like that who are fascists or whatever crypto-fascists, quasi-fascists they write Esotericism. I’m interested in them from an academic point of view. I’m not going to not read them. I read Heidegger and Heidegger was a Nazi. I don’t subscribe to that philosophy, obviously, but I think they’re worthy of academic study. In fact, I think that if we don’t study them and if you’re interested in that kind of stuff not being harmful to the world then studying it is the ideal thing you need to be doing. You need to understand it, that seems to be the task of the day. But when I look at esoteric spiritualities I think that they split in both directions. I don’t see there being an inherently right-wing bent.

So yeah I guess that there is clearly a political involvement of these traditions but from what I can see and what I can tell, of course, I haven’t conducted proper research but anecdotally, from what I’ve seen on the field, there are certain traditions which tend to be more right-wing like Ceremonial Magic, certain western forms of Esotericism, certain reconstructionist movements. Whereas Paganism, new forms of Paganism, eclectic Wicca, they all tend to be extremely left-wing, very, very keen on the queer movements, feminism, inclusivity in any shape or form. So yeah I see that there is this kind of discrepancy. So you have like these two worlds. I don’t know if you agree with that?

JS: Yeah, I think that’ be my… again I don’t work in contemporary studies but I think of the people who strike me as far-right folks tend to come out of that world. Maybe, again I think it has to do with identity stuff as well, right. Reclaiming Norse identity or reclaiming Germanic identity and I think that once you get into that kind of Identitarianism it’s not far away from more racist kinds of beliefs and things like that. Although I’ll say, interestingly enough, one thing I’ve noticed about mystics through history, especially in the Middle Ages, is that they’re often very conservative. That, for instance, some of the most ardent supporters of the Crusades were Christian mystics, which I think people like Hildegard of Bingen, Hildegard of Bingen and other people, Bernard of Clairvaux. Some of these really famous mystics of the Middle Ages were some of the most enthusiastic people behind the Crusades. And Kabbalah, when it first emerged in Spain and then when it really emerged in Palestine, it was one of the most conservative forms of Judaism that existed at the time and so I think we sometimes link mysticism with more left-wing kind of ideas now but if you look, at least from the historical point of view, the mystics were often incredibly conservative, which I find to be interesting. They’re conservative from our point of view. Whatever that meant now, they were not open and accepting. I don’t think that Bernard of Clairvaux and a Kabbalist… nowadays, they would get together at a conference and all hangout and talk about how blah blah blah. I think in the Middle Ages they have been each other’s throats. So again, it’s just a different, just again, not imposing our modern ideas on these Medieval people. They’re very different, often, than we think that they should be.

AP: Yeah. Andrew points out that is not only the LGBTQ community but also disabled people and neurodivergent people and so on.

Andrew that is spot on and actually my paper addresses that as well. So we should definitely talk more about it in our Discord community, later on.

And also Thomas Dolcelli says, that in the US religion and politics tend to be strongly associated.

Sebastian thanks us for answering his question.

Yeah, I’m afraid that we will not be able to answer all of your questions because I’m really happy to see that there are lots and lots of them and I will invite you to please leave them in the comment section so that I can address them in the comments. Because otherwise, I guess, this live stream would be 10 hours long but yeah I’m definitely absolutely happy that lots of you have showed up and that you are coming here to celebrate, with the two of us, my PhD.

And yeah, how do we want to wrap up the live stream Justin? Do you have any final words apart from, of course, check out Justin’s channel but I’m pretty sure that all of you know his channel but if you don’t go and subscribe to Esoterica?

JS: Thank you. No, I’m just super, I’m just really excited that these kind of conversations are going on and that there’s so many people interested in the live stream and in the chat and you know, people like us able to have these conversations. For all of the stuff that obviously, you know, Covid has done so much harm in the world, it’s also provided an interesting situation where the technology that we could use to do these kinds of conversations are here. And it’s just amazing that we can reach across the ether and conjure up these kinds of conversations and that folks are so interested in it and people are just so amazingly thoughtful and considerate and kind as we both try to figure out what we’re doing. I’m just really thankful for it and really humbled and really thankful for you and really looking forward to seeing how your career develops and really, just really happy for your PhD. So well done.

AP: Oh, thank you. Likewise. Maybe one day we can write a book together.

JS: That’s fun.

AP: Yeah, I could focus more on the contemporary side than you and you could focus on the historical side.

JS: Yeah, it’s a good match, it’s a good match.

AP: Yes, definitely.

Yeah, so I guess we’re gonna wrap up the video now. Thank you again, Justin, for coming here on the channel it was definitely a pleasure to have you here and yeah I hope we are going to do lots of collaborations in the future.

JS: Absolutely. Thank you guys and thank you, Angela, for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.

AP: And for those of you both watching live and the recorded video on YouTube, if you like this video, SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, activate the notification bell so that you will never miss a new video from me and as always, stay tuned for all the academic fun.

Bye for now.

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First streamed 7 Dec 2020