Introduction: Things We Do Not Talk About

by Jeffrey J. Kripal, Wouter J. Hanegraaff

Scholarly analyses of how and why the two domains of esotericism and eroticism are so intimately interwoven are difficult to find. Moreover,the closely related problem (or is it a promise?) of how the history of sexuality in the West might be related to the history of Western esotericism implies a range of further questions that still remains virtually untouched. In the absence of any such developed analysis, only a few tentative suggestions will be made here. In a historical field this new, this rich, and this provocative, all we can reasonably do is point to the heavy fruit hanging low on the branches, and then hope a sufficient number of readers will choose to begin plucking it. Our own general sense is that such fruit contains its own important truths, but these are, at best, difficult to grasp for a whole host of intellectual, linguistic,political, historical, and social reasons.

In different ways and for different reasons, or so we would suggest,the domains of Western esotericism, on the one hand, and that of eros and sexuality, on the other, have both tended to become the object of censorship, suppression, concealment, and a certain polite public silence. Both the esoteric and the erotic have, in effect, been repressed, made to hide, “made occult,” as it were. Rather like the Greek god of fertility, Pan, whose iconography was transformed into the cloven-footed and horned “Devil” within the repressions of the Christian imagination, that which is repressed always returns, but as something else, as something “dark” and “dirty,” even “demonic,” that is, as something we should not talk about. And so we don’t. It was one thing to speak of Pan. It is quite another to speak of the Devil.

If we ask ourselves how and why this has happened, it may be useful to distinguish between five categories of “things we do not talk about”: those that are concerned, respectively, with secrecy, taboo, concealment, intimacy, and ineffability. As each of these terms carries a different, if also related, semiotic range and its own set of connotations, it seems wise to discuss each in turn before we proceed to the essays. In the process,we hope to give some sense of the essays themselves—their content, their excitement, their own spoken secrets.

22 pages, ebook

Published June 12, 2008

About the author

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Ph.D. (History of Religions, The University of Chicago, 1993; M.A., U. Chicago; B.A., Religion, Conception Seminary College, 1985), holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he serves as Associate Dean of Humanities, Faculty and Graduate Studies. He also has served as Associate Director of the Center for Theory and Research of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.