Two PhD openings in Amsterdam: History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents

TrismegistusA rare opportunity for those considering a PhD in the study of esotericism: The two regular PhD positions at the University of Amsterdam’s Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy (HHP) are both open at the moment. Applications can be submitted until July 15. Read more about the requirements here.

These are four-year PhD tracks, fully paid. The expectation is that one of the positions will be reserved for research on late-medieval to early modern currents (c. 1400-1800), while the other would be reserved for modern esotericism (c. 1800 to present). It’s a unique chance, as new candidates are only admitted every 4-5 years or so.

Published in: on May 18, 2016 at 12:37 pm  Comments (3)  
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The Socialist Roots of Occultism

Marx satan

Caution: This illustration is highly misleading. (Image by Ross Wolfe, The Charnel-House blog)

We’ve grown accustomed to exciting titles that announce “the occult roots” of anything from Nazism to electronic music. While there’s certainly a lot of attention-grabbing hyperbole in such claims, it is true that much of the vaguely deviant, oppositional, and radical segments of Western culture has a touch of the occult – for reasons we are starting to understand quite well (tag: cultic milieu, occulture, rejected/stigmatized knowledge).

But what about the roots of modern occultism itself? In the (educated) popular imagination, occultism is generally considered an atavistic phenomenon, an anomalous and anachronistic flowering of irrationalism belonging to a bygone age. Some scholarship has continued in this vein, whether we think of the brand of intellectual historians that get embarrassed by its rational and scientific deficiency, or left-leaning, progressive academics who, like Adorno, see only a reactionary tendency that must eventually lead to a mysticized political irrationalism of the kind erupting in Germany in the 1930s.

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Published in: on May 11, 2016 at 8:20 am  Comments (1)  
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