Occulture describes the growing presence of esotericism, occultism, magic, and spirituality in media, popular culture, and contemporary arts as part of the spiritual revolution in Western contemporary societies. The empirical study of occulture has been carried out through two main theoretical frameworks. In sociology and media studies, scholars have described the mediatization and commodification of esotericism, while in religious studies, scholars have examined artists as spiritual seekers. This article argues that these perspectives are pieces of a larger mosaic. It proposes applying a material cartography of occulture, capable of showing the relationships among different actors (artists, artworks, and audiences) - which can embody both secular and religious values. This article proposes a navigational cartography based on five key and 5) spiritual seekers vs. religious dwellers.
In his article "Toward a Realistic and Relevant `Science of Religion'" Benson Saler compliments me for urging scholars of religion to acquaint themselves with evolutionary theory in order "to re-establish a unifying framework for the study of religion." But he was also skeptical about my defense of a macro-level study of religion which he thought would have to be autonomous-wholly independent of the "findings and theorizing of other sciences, particularly the biological and cognitive sciences." Consequently, Saler insisted that a truly scientific study of religion must be unashamedly reductive, involving explanation of religious phenomena not only in terms of cognitive processes but also, "eventually," by way of neural processes alone. I agree with Saler's claim that the social sciences are not autonomous; that the sciences are all of a cloth in that they are necessarily constrained by the laws governing reality at the sub-atomic level of the physical universe. And that is to say that the emergent levels of reality including the biological, psychological, social, and cultural are identical with the physical. But like Poldrack in the epigram above, I will show here why it is "not quite right" to say that the study of these emergent levels of reality is the same thing as the study of physics.
This essay critically discusses Stanley Stowers's History and the Study of Religion (2024) as a bold criticism of antirealist and constructivist approaches and therefore a contribution to a realist turn in the study of religions. It interrogates the validity of its theoretical cornerstone of "religion as a social kind" and its distinction of religious "subkinds". Moreover, the essay highlights the methodological strengths of Stowers's critique of Christian origins narratives and his emphasis on non-elite religious practices, yet questions the payoff of the "social kind" framework relative to recent scholarship in the field. With the help of comparative perspectives from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Judaean traditions, the essay assesses the broader applicability of Stowers's theory and proposes additional perspectives. Ultimately, while recognizing its contributions, the essay calls for further conceptual clarification and integration with wider theoretical and historical debates.
This paper calls for careful consideration of the ethnographic connotations of ancient phenomena often designated "magic" as performed by "magicians" (especially & micro;ayoc, & micro;aysia, & micro;aytxoc) and for the retirement of English terms related to "magic" in the study of antiquity altogether. Deployment of such terms obscures precisely the ostensibly foreign and specifically "Persian" aura which attended references to Magians and Magian skill (better terms) as well as the commonly adopted ancient theory that Magian practices had disseminated throughout the ancient Mediterranean world (to Egyptians, Babylonians, and Syrians/Judeans) from the Persians themselves. I demonstrate this with reference to Greek ethnographic writing on Persian Magians and through a case study of Philo of Alexandria, Pliny the Elder, Apuleius of Madaura, Celsus and Origen, and pseudo-Clement.
This article experimentally applies anthropological perspectives to ancient European religions, focusing on Slavic pre-Christian beliefs. It aims to offer nuanced analytical tools and a reflective framework to interpret these religions, primarily by examining how Christian sources portray Slavic paganism and discussing the emic-etic distinction's advantages and limitations. The article categorizes the strategies employed by medieval Christian writers in their writings and summarizes the emic-etic debate in the study of religion and its connection with the insider-outsider debate. In evaluating these sources and the religious systems they describe, the author suggests that both insider and outsider perspectives contain inherent emic and etic aspects. The proposed "acad-etic" position encourages acknowledging modern academic presuppositions that may influence understanding the data. The article underscores the need for a holistic approach, considering historical and social contexts and the discursive strategies used in describing ancient religions.
This article investigates how the Sufi theorist Muhyi al-Din ibn `Arabi's (d. 638/1240) conception of metaphysical perplexity (hayra) relates to the entropic brain hypothesis, which has been proposed by Robin Carhart-Harris in the fields of human neuroscience and psychopharmacology. Studies have demonstrated a correlation between the ego and the default mode network (DMN). The ego relates to the I-ness (ananiyya) of a person according to Ibn `Arabi. As this article demonstrates, in the secondary state of self-organized criticality (SOC), where there is a propensity to make sense of and organize the world around us, emphasis on the I-ness and a self-imposed reality-filter creates a metaphysical veil (hijab) that prevents perception of the divine reality that permeates all existence. This veil is only removed in the primary state of criticality where spiritual unveiling (kashf) reveals the divine reality of all things.
I take "neo-perennialists" to share the following, minimal claim: there exists a crosscultural category of experiences that can be defined as "mystical". I first clarify the neo-perennialist project and defend its overall feasibility. I then criticize the narrow focus on mystical experiences that has characterized much neo-perennialist research, and research based on the above-mentioned core claim. With "narrow" I refer both to the specific understanding of mystical states that has become dominant in the literature, and the tendency to focus on mystical experiences specifically, out of all possible altered states. I finally analyze some criteria, external to the phenomenology of extraordinary experiences, that one might appeal to in order to justify restricting a neo-perennialist account, or study, to (certain) mystical states. I close the essay with a call to (i) refine the definition of "mystical experience", and (2) push the cross-cultural study of altered states of consciousness beyond mystical states.
While acknowledging that the Michael Stausberg et al’s (2025) “Reflections on Stanley Stowers’s New Realist Theory and the Study of Ancient Mediterranean Religion” makes some useful points, serious misunderstandings and misrepresentations plague it. Contrary to the “Reflections”, the subkinds of religion are highly interactive and in dynamic relations. The adopted theory of kinds is neither essentialistic nor monothetic. My History and the Study of Religion: The Ancient Mediterranean As a Test Case (Stowers 2024b) uses throughout two prominent approaches to social kinds, epistemic and ontological. The authors of the “Reflections” misunderstand the social field that is the environment for the subkind from which Christianity arose, confusing its two opposing poles. Their idea that voluntary associations should be another subkind completely misses the criteria of types of religious practices and the properties of the kinds, both cognitive and social.
This essay critically discusses Stanley Stowers’s History and the Study of Religion (2024) as a bold criticism of antirealist and constructivist approaches and therefore a contribution to a realist turn in the study of religions. It interrogates the validity of its theoretical cornerstone of “religion as a social kind” and its distinction of religious “subkinds”. Moreover, the essay highlights the methodological strengths of Stowers’s critique of Christian origins narratives and his emphasis on non-elite religious practices, yet questions the payoff of the “social kind” framework relative to recent scholarship in the field. With the help of comparative perspectives from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Judaean traditions, the essay assesses the broader applicability of Stowers’s theory and proposes additional perspectives. Ultimately, while recognizing its contributions, the essay calls for further conceptual clarification and integration with wider theoretical and historical debates.
In this response to Schaefer's Wild Experiment, we pick up Schaefer's affective account of science and rationalism in order to follow the decidedly modernist tensions of knowledge production in the field of religious studies. We do so through the contemporary intellectual genealogy of comparison as method, especially as it is configured through the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, in which the analogy of botany figures prominently. We surface within religious studies contradictory aspirations to be both art and science, and we argue that any affective account of scientific knowledge and its others should also make recourse to fantasy and unconscious psychic processes.
This essay engages key insights in Donovan Schaefer's Wild Experiments. In addition to Schaefer's claim that scientific reason is infused with feeling and passion, I sit with a moment where he alludes to Denise da Silva's description of how Euro-American sovereignty denies its own affectivity. I simply contend that heightening our sense of this denial enables us to explore the different ways that the reason/passion couplet gets constructed by marking racialized gender and sexuality as excessive and ungovernable.
The study of esotericism emerged during the 1990s as a new academic program of research focused on previously-neglected historical traditions in Western culture. During the first decade of the 2000s, it established itself as a new field that was widely (although not exclusively) referred to as "Western esotericism." But during the 2010s, questions began to be raised about this focus on the occident, leading to the emerging new agenda of creating a "global history of esotericism." I will argue that the initial proposals in this direction, while undoubtedly inspired by the best of intentions, are unconvincing on a theoretical level and unintendedly Eurocentric. By focusing on "esoteric" practices rather than discourse, the new CAS-E project may have found a way forward that avoids these deficiencies. While its immediate predecessors are weakened by an oppositional logic of mutual exclusion, the CAS-E agenda of global comparativism is perfectly compatible with historical research focused on esotericism in Western culture.
This article offers some brief comments and critical reflections on the project description for "Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective." While there is much to praise in the proposal, I make three critical suggestions regarding: its definition of esoteric practices; the social and political dimensions of esotericism in its relationship to questions of power, race, and gender; and finally, the ironic "exotericization" and commodification of esotericism in the contemporary global context, where esoteric themes are not only ubiquitous in mainstream venues such as fiction, film, and social media but are also mass produced and sold widely in the consumer marketplace.
Seeing someone whose appearance does not align with (often racialized) gender norms can prompt transphobia, a reaction that is as much about what we feel as about what we (think we) know. In this essay, I use what Donovan Schaefer calls “cogency theory” to diagnose, if you will, and ultimately to disrupt transphobic seeing. I find cogency theory helpful because it undoes modern presumptions that knowing (aligned with secularism) and feeling (aligned with religion) are polar opposites; presumptions that, as I describe herein, the practice of photography and its role in modern life also disrupts. I close by experimenting with two examples of art photographs featuring gender nonconforming subjects – one with religious overtones, one without – as resources for disrupting transphobic seeing.
This response to the symposium on Wild Experiment examines the running theme of the emotional aspects of scholarship, especially as it applies to religious studies. This includes consideration of the role of affects in transphobic misunderstandings of science, the scholarship of Jonathan Z. Smith and its skepticism toward emotion, and the imbrication of affect and race science.
This article expands on the recently started debate in Method & Theory in the Study of Religion (2024) on the relationship between discursive and critical realist approaches in the study of religion. It aims to steer future debates on this topic in more concrete directions by focusing on four interrelated themes worthy of further attention: 1) how to approach “discourse,” the analysis of discourse, and relationship between the discursive and the non-discursive; 2) how to approach the relationship between “word and world”; 3) how discursive approaches would position themselves towards critical realist claims about the ability of generic definitions of religion to “accurately” describe “ontic” actual social realities; 4) and how the “social reality” of religion could be approached and studied from the perspective of a textual approach in the discursive study of religion.
The study of esotericism emerged during the 1990s as a new academic program of research focused on previously-neglected historical traditions in Western culture. During the first decade of the 2000s, it established itself as a new field that was widely (although not exclusively) referred to as “Western esotericism.” But during the 2010s, questions began to be raised about this focus on the occident, leading to the emerging new agenda of creating a “global history of esotericism.” I will argue that the initial proposals in this direction, while undoubtedly inspired by the best of intentions, are unconvincing on a theoretical level and unintendedly Eurocentric. By focusing on “esoteric” practices rather than discourse, the new CAS-E project may have found a way forward that avoids these deficiencies. While its immediate predecessors are weakened by an oppositional logic of mutual exclusion, the CAS-E agenda of global comparativism is perfectly compatible with historical research focused on esotericism in Western culture.
The emergence of the academic study of Esotericism was closely linked to both Religious Studies and Sociology. In the 1970s sociologists Colin Campbell, Marcello Truzzi, Edward A. Tiryakian, and Patricia A. Hartman, with historian of religion Mircea Eliade, wrote pioneering studies on occult and esoteric subjects. These initially marginal works gained traction in the study of new religious movements ( NRM s) and of non-religious subcultures. The study of Western Esotericism proper is dated to the publication of Antoine Faivre’s Access to Western Esotericism (1994); in the three decades since, the field has expanded, developed, and fissured. This article argues that the same process of rejection of universalist typologies and text-based studies (which were popular in the mid to late twentieth century) to focus on lived experience can be mapped in both Religious Studies and Esotericism Studies. This shift established deconstructive relativism as the dominant mode in both Esotericism Studies and (to a lesser extent) Religious Studies. Current methodological frameworks have changed of late, with the postmodern trends of previous decades giving way to a retheorized realism, albeit one aware of researcher positionality and contested access to knowledge.
The guiding proposal for the ‘Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective’ project ( CAS-E ) offers both a particular definition of ‘esotericism’ and an approach to the process of definition itself. This commentary first briefly compares this definition and approach to our parallel definitional work. The CAS-E definition begins by taking “contemporary scientific and technological discourse as a global foil.” This leads to a definition based on four criteria: (i) esotericisms aim “to identify and influence present and future life events”; (ii) they “assume special knowledge”; (iii) they emphasis “forms of (ritual) efficacy”; and (iv) they are “alternative rationalities,” that are “contested and precarious” in relation to dominant discourses, especially natural science. We raise critical questions about this fourth definitional criterion, calling for further clarification, and suggesting that it might be usefully framed as a meta-criterion that holds the others together.
In this afterword, the directors of the Center for Advanced Studies ‘Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective’ ( CAS-E ) at Friedrich- Alexander-Universität offer a brief response to the comments by Carole Cusack, Mark Q. Gardiner, Steven Engler, Wouter Hanegraaff, Elizabeth McAlister, Jason Josephson Storm, and Hugh Urban. Reflecting on various theoretical and methodological discussions within CAS-E , particularly in light of the center’s fellows’ highly heterogeneous materials, conceptual challenges, and disciplinary frameworks, the afterword also sketches promising avenues for future research at CAS-E . These avenues focus on themes and debates, such as global religious history, family resemblances and the researcher’s situatedness, and alternative rationalities.
