Currents in Esoteric Studies

The current newsletter of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism is available for download. In it, some of the members discuss their current doctoral work. It is always interesting to see how new scholars are formulating just exactly what “esoteric studies” covers.

Like Pagan studies — there is some degree of overlap — esoteric studies (if I may personify it) struggles to find out who it is. Egil Asprem, doctoral candidate and blogger, writes,

On the one hand, you often hear that the field has now matured, but when you look for some of the signs that characterise a mature academic field it is hard to see them in practice. I am particularly thinking of the lack of agreement on fundamental issues, such as ”what is it”, ”how do we study it”, ”what’s its importance”, and ”how is it related to the broad spectrum of human activity”. If you pick up the three most popular introduction books to the field, you’ll find three very different ways of handling these fundamental questions.

Kocku von Stuckrad, an established scholar but still “younger” in academic terms, makes the comparison:

It is a kind of identity work that I perceive in the study of esotericism, but also in ”pagan studies” and related fields of research. This identity work often leads to a neglect of critical methodological reflection, which I find problematic. What we need is an active collaboration with as many colleagues as possible, no matter whether or not we like their definitions of esotericism, in order to build up networks that can make research into these historical and cultural dynamics sustainable for the future. If we study these phenomena as part of the cultural history of Europe and North America, in an increasingly globalized perspective, we will be able to integrate the field of Western esotericism” in larger research structures and critical scholarship. This will also help students who enroll in our programs to find a job after their studies.

More resources in the newsletter about courses and research opportunities, chiefly in Britain and the Netherlands.

Quick Review: The Aleppo Codex

If you liked The Da Vinci Code or The Historian or The Name of the Rose, you might enjoy The Aleppo Codex. The difference is that it is a factual story, and its context is modern Syria and Israel, not medieval Europe.

From the dust jacket: “It’s a tale that involves grizzled secret agents, pious clergymen, shrewd antiquities collectors, and highly placed national figures who, as it turns out would do anything to get their hands on an ancient decaying book.”

The codex in question was created in the tenth century by an expert scribe and a noted rabbi working together. The scribe could write Hebrew like it came out of a laser printer, as the author will later note, while the rabbi then added various marginal notes to the completed pages. Unlike the Torah scrolls used in synagogues, this parchment book was designed to be the most accurate and complete reference edition of the entire Hebrew Bible.

It was looted when the Crusaders captured Jerusalem 170 years later, ransomed by Egyptian Jews, studied by Maimonides, then somehow later transported to the chief synagogue of Aleppo in northern Syria.  The codex, now known as the “Crown of Aleppo,” was no longer read but functioned more as a talisman for the Jewish community.

There in November 1947, angered that the United Nations had approved creation of the state of Israel, a Muslim mob attacked Jewish homes and businesses and trashed the synagogue.  Most of the Crown’s pages were recovered after the synagogue was vandalized during the riot—but then the story grows murky, foggy, and complicated.

When author Matti Friedman, a Canadian-born reporter working in Jerusalem, becomes intrigued with the story of how (and how much of) the Crown came to be in an Israeli museum, one of his sources tells him, “You’re entering a minefield . . . . There are traps and pitfalls and mirages and cats guarding the cream. Say the wrong thing to the wrong person, and ten other doors will slam shut.”

Trying to write the modern story of the codex, Friedman enters a world where public records disappear, where histories have large gaps, and where passions run high. One murder possibly connected with the Crown causes him to write that it was a “story could have been written by Agatha Christie, if Agatha Christie were an ultra-Orthodox Jew.”

A typical interaction goes like this:

My conversation with Zer followed the usual pattern for exchanges with people in the Aleppo Codex Underground: they would float vague pieces of information to see if I knew more than they did, and I did the same.

It is not the information within the codex that makes it so important, but its enormous significance as tangible Judaica—like a lost emperor’s crown or the Holy Grail, it is important for its associations.

Not coincidentally, another of his collaborators, the grizzled retired Mossad agent referred to on the dust jacket, describes how as bullets were still flying in the Six-Day War of 1967, he and an Israeli colonel traveled to Bethlehem in search of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls believed held by an antiquities dealer there. Eventually the dealer sells it to the government for a high price—but it is an offer that he cannot refuse.

Not only was the new state of Israel seeking to bring back Jews from all over the world, it was determined by any means necessary to bring back texts connected with Jewish history, and in that determination lies the probable explanation of what happened to the Aleppo codex.

Europe’s Oldest Paganism

At Forging the Sampo, a link to a short documentary video on the revived Pagan religion of the Mari people of the former Soviet Union. (Wikipedia entry on Mari-El.)

Massive sacrificial feasts, accordions, sacred oaks and groves, priests in tall woolen hats, even a sort of Bigfoot reference — what’s not to like?

I have been reading chapters from a forthcoming book on revived Paganism in Central and Eastern Europe, which includes a chapter on the Mari by Boris Knorre, who writes,

Even during the Soviet times, within the isolated rural population of the Mari, certain elements remained well preserved: local and family prayers, reverence for the sacred grove, and similar “private” practices of the tradition. In the 1990s, some urban intellectuals among the Mari initiated an active process of restoration of the native faith. The conduct of these Pagan rituals extended the boundaries of family tradition into public space, and at this time public communal sacrifices and prayers reemerged. In the Republic of Mari El, there are six hundred holy groves (kusoto), of which the majority have been taken under the protection of the state.

I look forward to being able to promote the entire volume when it is published.

Business Opportunity for the Next Generation

Tattoo removal. It‘s starting to take off (pun intended).

The psychological motivations for tattoo removal (change of lifestyle and relationship status, changes in body and skin over the years, upward mobility in society and employment, etc.) are a constant, and will lead to an even larger market for tattoo removal than currently exists today.

And some related critiquing:

By enlarging ourselves with tattoos, we’re belittling ourselves in the process. It’s a sign of our low expectations that having control over flesh decorations is considered to be the limit of our capacities as an individual.

Kind of related—how do you as a priest dress to be counter-hip so that hipsters will “relate” to you? We’ve been down this road before. Anyone remember “folk Masses” with tambourines?

Be authentic. Be real. Invest in a chain of tattoo-removal clinics. That is all.

Critiquing Pagan Studies

Several friends mentioned today an essay based on the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism   (Leiden: Brill, 2009) which in its abstract makes this critique:

[The essay] demonstrates that pagan studies is dominated by the methodological principles of essentialism, exclusivism, loyalism and supernaturalism, and shows how these principles promote normative constructions of ‘pure’ paganism, insider interpretations of the data, and theological speculations about gods, powers, and a special “magical consciousness.” It seems thus that the methodological discussions in MTSR have little effect on pagan scholars. In the concluding discussion, I raise the questions why this is so, and how we might do better in promoting a naturalist and theoretically oriented approach to studying religion.

I made an interlibrary-loan request for the article — or extended book review, whichever it is— and will read it with interest. Off-hand, I see a couple of issues. First, the one source is a reference book, one that sells for a high price and will be available in limited places.

In my experience, contributors (and I was one) to such books tend to summarize their work but not to break new ground. The new thinking appears in conference papers, in journals such as The Pomegranate, in monographs, and in more focused edited collections, as opposed to reference books.

Second, Pagan studies includes more than potential readership of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. In  Pomegranate alone you will find anthropologists, sociologists, folklorists, scholars of Western esotericism, and historians publishing as well as religious-studies scholars of various sorts. Their methodologies and theoretical perspectives are going to be different as well.

Nevertheless, Markus Altena Davidsen‘s  accusations of essentialism, exclusivism, loyalism, and supernaturalism are calculated to discredit the field by suggesting that its practitioners lack (from his perspective) theoretical rigor.

Ironically, those are the qualities that critics such as Ben Whitmore want to accuse scholars of Paganism of failing to display in sufficient quantity.

Without having yet read the article, I would say that Davidsen identifies a possible cliff that Pagan studies could go over. That it has indeed gone over such a cliff, I dispute.

To switch metaphors, I would not want to see scholars of Paganism build the walls of their own ghetto, and as much as I can, I will struggle against that impulse when it arises.

 

Ten Pagan Authors Interviewed

The editors of The Wiccan/Pagan Times have taken ten interviews with contemporary Pagan authors and published them in ebook and paperback format.

Presented here are some of the many memorable interviews we have published over the last 13 years. We have taken 10 of these interviews and put them together with author bios, pictures and weblinks so you can explore the authors further.

Interviewed are Anna Frankin, Dorothy Morrison, Edain McCoy, John Michael Greer, Kristin Madden, M. R. Sellars, Margot Adler, Patricia Telesco, Raymond Buckland and Yasmine Galenorn. Preserved here is a place in time within the pagan community when we were still new, but growing. We feel these interviews convey the flavor and the heart of the pagan community.

I have ordered it.

The Wizard and the “Reality” Ghosthunters

Oberon Zell, co-founder of the Church of All Worlds and headmaster of the Grey School of Wizardry, looks to have a bit part in a reality TV series, Ghost Girls. Its Facebook page calls it “an off-beat Supernatural/Reality Based TV show pilot about three ‘Real’ claravoyant [sic], beautiful women, who also happen to be divas of the supernatural. They and thier [sic] unusual friends commune with ghosts, and seek the unusual and unexplained mysteries.”

“Uncle Oberon” hopes to see some product placement for some of his Mythic Images Collection as well. And why not? They might as well decorate the set with real Pagan art, instead of something just “faked up” (to use Gerald Gardner’s phrase) for the filming.

Talking about Tlaloc, 5

I think it is time to rebuild the shrine to Tlaloc under the bridge — the one that was mysteriously augmented last summer.  I had taken it down before the spring run-off, which is just a memory now.

Once the heat abates a little, I need to hike back over the ridge and leave an offering at Camera Trap Spring. The rattlesnake that has been there on my last two trips is its “guardian,” I have decided. What should I bring it, a bouquet of mice?

Actually, I owe that snake a favor, since it did not bite one of the dogs when it had all the opportunity and provocation.

Got to see if the bears have attacked the current camera, too. If they have, I may cede the territory to them for a couple of months. But I will leave an offering too

Meanwhile, the fires. As a former resident of Manitou Springs, I was sweating this Waldo Canyon Fire. As a volunteer firefighter, I can say here in my area we have had an easier time so far than last year — so far — with only one little piece of excitement on Tuesday. That, and we’ll be out patrolling this weekend, looking for illegal campfires.

The Witches and the Stripper

Someone at the Daily Mail no doubt had a good time writing the headline “The drunken stripper from the Golden Banana, a coven of Salem witches and the ‘groping’ man horrifically impaled when she crashed into a flatbed truck.”

Yes, it is link bait, and I bit. Wouldn’t you?

But it made me think: One of the many untold stories about the beginnings of the Craft in North America (I can’t speak for other places) is the involvement of people who were in or peripheral to the world of sex work.

I have to make some revisions to an article that I wrote for an edited collection on sex and new religious movements. I’m doing Wicca, no surprise there, and am concentrating on sexual metaphor in ritual.  I think, however, that the editor wants more on the “sexy witch” archetype.

Certainly a lot could be said about that, but in one article? Likewise,  a lot could be said—but has not—about the nexus of sexual experimentation and contemporary Paganism. It’s not just Paganism, of course—alternative sexual relationships and new religious movements have intersected many times. Hence this book. Consider, for instance, the Oneida Community and its doctrine of “complex marriage,” a sort of 19th-century polyamory.

The sexual impulse and the religious-creation impulse are often closely linked, it seems.

British University Lecturer Faces Wrath of Choronzon

Joanne Bedford, who teaches creative writing at The Open University in the UK, has a simple writing technique:‘

• Select
• Copy
• Paste

Then you change a few words. Evidently that is the part that requires university-level instruction, since her students certainly arrive knowing the first part.

It’s one thing to plagiarize Dylan Thomas as well as some lesser-known (but alive and angry)  British writers. But read to the end and you see that she also stands accused of plagiarizing Aleister Crowley.

Which of his works? Inquiring minds want to know.

By the way, Choronzon has a Wikipedia entry. (Via University Diaries.)