The 1st International Conference on Contemporary Esotericism will be held in Stockholm this August. The deadline for submitting papers is drawing closer (March 30), and there have been a couple of updates – including a new keynote speaker. Check out the call for papers below.
Esoteric news, January 2012
Among the updates: 1st International Conference on Contemporary Esotericism
A number of newsworthy things have popped up in the world of esotericism scholarship lately, but as I have been tied up with reaching deadlines, they have not found their way to Heterodoxology yet. The solution? A brief list of updates, below. Some of it you may already have read about over at Invocatio, the Phoenix Rising website, or some other etheric place, but no harm is done in hearing something twice.
International Conference on Contemporary Esotericism: Call for Papers
As advertised before, there will be a book out next year on Contemporary Esotericism, edited by Kennet Granholm and myself. The volume brings together well-established and up-and-coming scholars in the field of esotericism, with brand-new research articles on contemporary esoteric topics. In connection with the book, we are organising an international conference on the same topic, to be held at Stockholm University next August. Below you will find the full call for papers. You can also check out the conference website. It’s early, but we will accept proposals as soon as they start coming in, so no need to postpone thinking about it.
INASWE launched with lecture on Jung and Eranos
The European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) is expanding. The society was established in 2005. Since then it has encouraged the establishment of regional subgroups, to promote research and teaching about esotericism on the local level and on independent initiatives. In 2007 the first such local initiative was established in the Scandinavian countries (SNASWE). Since last year scholars at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, largely on the initiative of Professor Boaz Huss, have worked to establish an Israeli Network for the Study of Western Esotericism (INASWE).
Contemporary Esotericism – a pre-production advertisement
One of the reasons for not writing here very often this spring is that I am co-editing a major volume in my “spare time”. Last week I visited my good friend, colleague and co-editor Kennet Granholm at Stockholm University, to discuss some final issues. This weekend, we ship the manuscript off to Equinox Publishing – a full 689 pages – ending a period with much editorial work. To celebrate this, I’ll kick off some pre-production advertising of the volume, which bears the title Contemporary Esotericism.
Quantitative heterodoxology
Last week Science published an article introducing the term “culturomics” – the quantitative study of cultural trends. By constructing a database out of the by now 15 million books that Google have digitized over the past years, a Harvard based research team led by Jean-Baptiste Michel have created a powerful searchable tool which makes it possible to create quantitative date for analysing cultural trends. As they state in the abstract:
We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.
In short, this is a tool which has the potential to revolutionise research methods in a vast number of fields. The best part: Google Labs have made the tool (the Ngram viewer) publicly available. Before even starting reading the article I found myself thinking about a number of applications for my own research and field. Below follow some rough examples, and preliminary results which already seem to challenge established knowledge in the history of esotericism.
New BPH support blog
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, professor and coordinator of the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents program at the University of Amsterdam has created a new blog specifically for the situation at the Ritman Library. The first post contains a list of academics who have signed the petition (I posted something similar yesterday) This will likely be the place to follow the situation as it continues to unfold.
Follow it at The Ritman Library Must Be Preserved. Spread the word.
Esotericism, Religion and Science in Toronto – report on the IAHR (part 2)
Following up the last post, here comes a report on the esotericism panels at the IAHR in Toronto, organized by Marco Pasi. As you can read about below, they go straight into a central debate in the field of esotericism studies at the moment.
British magic after Crowley: review
Although Aleister Crowley has become the icon of modern ritual magic and occultism, magic did not end with his death in 1947. While approximately a dozen books have been devoted to Crowley, surprisingly little has been written about his legacy in contemporary occultism. His impact on later currents such as contemporary witchcraft, Satanism, and various pagan groups has often been mentioned, but vast areas still remain uncharted, from Chaos Magic and cyber paganism to the recent history of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Golden Dawn, and Crowley’s A\A\. The result is that a relatively broad range of contemporary western esotericism remains essentially unstudied. Below follows my review of Dave Evans’ contribution to this field of study, recently published in Aries 10.2. Hyperlinked for the occasion.
IAHR: Two panels
As mentioned a couple of times before, I am going to Toronto next weekend to join the IAHR World Congress. It only happens every five years, and is a big happening in the fields of religious studies/Religionswissenschaft. This year there will also be a considerable presence of esotericism research. Marco Pasi, Cathy Gutierrez and Allison Coudert are hosting a large panel on “Western esotericism and its boundaries”, which, by systematically tackling the issue of the cultural and geographical boundaries of this concept will no doubt be an important occasion for this field of research. In addition there is the “Seduced by Science” panel, which I co-host with Tessel M. Bauduin. For anybody who’s interested, I attach more details about these two panels below.
