Counterjihadist Templar Terrorism? Some reflections on the terrorist from Oslo west

Prime Minister's Office, Oslo, Norway, July 22, 2011.

This is not a political blog, but sometimes something happens that gives an urgent feeling to express oneself. The horrible events in Oslo and at Utøya Friday 22 July were of this sort. I happened to have recently returned to Norway for a summer vacation, passing close by the bomb site Friday morning, then to watch the utterly absurd situation unfold on television in Trondheim that afternoon. Like the rest of the country, I have been pretty much glued to the TV screen since then. I have also spent considerable time reading the perpetrator’s 1500 page “manifesto” trying to identify, analyse and dissect motivations and ideological underpinnings, and engaging in long and sometimes heated discussions with friends about all this.

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Published in: on July 26, 2011 at 11:42 pm  Comments (15)  
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News in the blog roll

When I got around to buy the heterodoxology.com domain earlier this year, the idea was to start some renovations of the site. Now, finally, one small step: updating the blog roll. Some inactive old blogs have been removed, and a few new, heterodoxologically relevant ones have been added.

First, the additions: Invocatio is a fairly frequently updated and well informed blog (mostly) about Western esotericism. It is run by Sarah Veale in Toronto, and well worth checking out, among other things for its weekly “Myseria Misc. Maxima” installments. Religion Dispatches is perhaps the leading blog/online magazine for research on religion and contemporary debates about religion, and should have been added long ago. To keep up to date on what happens in the modern pagan communities as well as the occulture surrounding it, Jason Pritzl-Waters’  The Wild Hunt is a must-read. For all lovers of dusty old books I have added the bibliophile blog 8vO. Finally, to satisfy a twin appetite for science fiction and historiography, Mark Novak’s wonderful Paleofuture  blog is now available in the blog roll. It is a great resource for exploring the history of futures past.

Out goes a few blogs that have become inactive (Grimoires, Heteropraxis, Knokkelklang, Dodologist, SNASWE Blog), or turned out to be heterodoxologically less relevant (The Necromancer). More additions are likely to follow.

 

Creative Commons License This blog post by Egil Asprem was first published on Heterodoxology. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Published in: on July 18, 2011 at 5:10 pm  Comments (2)  
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Esotericism and the Academy – a book you should get next year

Next year’s most anticipated publication in the field of esotericism has just been advertised from Cambridge University Press: Wouter Hanegraaff’s much awaited book, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture. The book has briefly been mentioned on Heterodoxology before, but now we can refer to the official abstract from CUP:

“Academics tend to look on ‘esoteric’, ‘occult’ or ‘magical’ beliefs with contempt, but are usually ignorant about the religious and philosophical traditions to which these terms refer, or their relevance to intellectual history. Wouter Hanegraaff tells the neglected story of how intellectuals since the Renaissance have tried to come to terms with a cluster of ‘pagan’ ideas from late antiquity that challenged the foundations of biblical religion and Greek rationality. Expelled from the academy on the basis of Protestant and Enlightenment polemics, these traditions have come to be perceived as the Other by which academics define their identity to the present day. Hanegraaff grounds his discussion in a meticulous study of primary and secondary sources, taking the reader on an exciting intellectual voyage from the fifteenth century to the present day and asking what implications the forgotten history of exclusion has for established textbook narratives of religion, philosophy and science.”

More than just a work on Western esoteric ideas and currents, the book is also a significant contribution to intellectual history more generally, and especially to the history of the humanities. It should therefore deserve attention far beyond the field of esotericism once it is published, in January 2012.

Creative Commons LicenseThis blog post by Egil Asprem was first published on Heterodoxology. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Published in: on July 15, 2011 at 12:24 pm  Comments (3)  
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