Forbidden Knowledge: Anti-Esoteric Polemics and Academic Research

by Wouter J. Hanegraaff

Having been involved over the last eight years in editing the two-volume Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, recently published by Brill, it was impossible for me not to be confronted almost daily with basic questions of definition and demarcation. What is it that justifies gathering such an enormous amount of often spectacularly different currents and personalities, from late antiquity to the present, under one and the same terminological rubric? The question has occupied me ever since I first began to be interested in the field, but by the time I had to write the Introduction to the Brill Dictionary, I was surprised at how easy I found it to answer. Having briefly discussed the most important terms and categories that have traditionally been used by scholars to speak about the field, I concluded that

…seemingly innocuous terminological conventions are often the reflection of hidden or implicit ideological agendas. Perhaps no other domain in the study of religion has suffered from such biases as seriously as the one to which this Dictionary is devoted, for it covers more or less all currents and phenomena that have, at one time or another, come to be perceived as problematic (misguided, heretical, irrational, dangerous, evil, or simply ridiculous) from the perspectives of established religion, philosophy, science, and academic research.

This simple conclusion—reminiscent, in a way, of James Webb’s concept of “rejected knowledge” —provides the starting-point for the present article. In brief, I will argue that the field of study referred to as “Western esotericism” is the historical product of a polemical discourse, the dynamics of which can be traced all the way back to the beginnings of monotheism. Moreover, it is in the terms of this very same discourse that mainstream Western culture has been construing its own identity, up to the present day. This process of the construction of identity takes place by means of telling stories—to ourselves and to others—of who, what and how we want to be. The challenge of the modern study of Western esotericism to academic research ultimately consists in the fact that it questions and undermines those stories, and forces us to see who, what and how we really are. Instinctive resistance against the breaking down of certainties implicit in such (self )knowledge is at the very root of traditional academic resistance against the study of Western esotericism.

Excerpted from Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, Volume 5, Issue 2.

30 pages, ebook

Published May 8, 2005

About the author

Wouter J. Hanegraaff (1961) studied classical guitar at the Municipal Conservatory at Zwolle (1982-1987) and Cultural History at the University of Utrecht (1986-1990), with a specialization in alternative religious movements in the 20th century. From 1992-1996 he was a research assistant at the department for Study of Religions of the University of Utrecht, where he defendedhis dissertation New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought on 30 november 1995 (cum laude). From 1996 to 2000 he held a postdoctoral fellowship from the Dutch Assocation for Scientific Research (NWO), and spent a period working in Paris. On 1 september 1999 he was appointed full professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam. From 2002-2006 he was president of the Dutch Society for the Study of Religion (NGG). From 2005-2013 he was President of the EuropeanSociety for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). In 2006 he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie van Wetenschappen, KNAW); since 2013 he is an honorary member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism.

Editorial Activities

From 2001-2010 Hanegraaff was editor (with Antoine Faivre and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke) of Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism (Brill publ.) and from 2006-2010 editor of the " Aries Book Series: Texts and Studies in Western Esotericism" (Brill publ.). He is member of the editorial board of the journals Aries (Brill), Numen (Brill), Religion Compass and Esoterica , and of the advisory board of Journal of Contemporary Religion (Carfax) and Nova Religio (University of California Press).

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This paper makes the case that "Western esotericism" as a field—necessarily divorced from the larger "Western culture" in which it is naturally otherwise embedded—results from a millennia-long "Grand Polemical Narrative" rooted in "the basic opposition of pagan versus nonpagan" inherent in the project(s) of monotheism(s), founded from the time of Moses on the rejection of "idolatry," first among the Egyptians, then everyone else. Notably, this charge of idolatry was levied against the Roman Catholic church by Henry More in his 1669 An Exposition of the Seven Epistles, which coined the term Gnosticism "as a pejorative umbrella concept for what polemicisms like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, Hippolytus of Rome and Ipiphanius of Salamis had rejected as heresy in the 2nd and 3rd centuries."

Similarly, magické—literally "the art of the mágoi, or Persian priests"—was among the Greeks a polemic term "referring to what was seen as the opposite of legitimate and overt religious practice," and this sense carried through to Christian discourse against pagan idolatry, where it became "equivalent to trafficing with demons, who, as was well understood, were the very same entities that had manifested themselves as 'gods' to the pagans." This same rhetoric was then turned on the Church of Rome by the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, particularly by such Calvinists as Philips van Marnix, effectively applying the doctrine of sola fide to render the rituals and most of the sacraments of the Roman Church as pagan magic. This turn leaves marks today, both among those who claim that Roman Catholics are not Christians, and among academics who confine their definitions of religion to systems of belief and doctrine, leaving aside matters of "symbol, myth and ritual," whether studying mainstream religions, historical sects, or Western Esotericism.

All this leads the author to conclude that

the importance of the study of Western esotericism goes far beyond a mere “academic interest” in some historical currents and ideas that happen to have been neglected by earlier generations. On the contrary, this domain of research should be recognized as centrally important to historians of religion and culture because it is only by virtue of excluding its basic components—as imagined in the polemical imagination—from the realm of the acceptable that Western culture as such has been able to define its very identity. If I am correct in arguing that the most essential components of that identity are at bottom polemical concepts, it follows that we cannot understand them in isolation, as if they exist in and for themselves. Instead, we need to understand the dynamics of the underlying discourse that created them; and this, in turn, requires us to try and step outside the latter and analyze it from a neutral point of view.

I tend to agree, though my interest in the topic extends far beyond. that as well, as you may have noticed.