Heterodoxology

Soon with a new cover – and nicer price tag.

Today I have signed a contract for the paperback version of my second book, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900–1939. With a list price of $240, the hardback (Brill, 2014) hasn’t exactly been a coffee table book. (Content-wise it probably still isn’t.) The paperback will appear with SUNY Press (who also published my first book, Arguing with Angels), and hopefully we can cut the price close to 1/10th of the existing edition. Publication date still to follow.

Why should one eagerly await this book? If you don’t trust the blurb, there have been a few reviews that tell you why. There has also been a roundtable discussion, and even some controversy. That can’t hurt, right?

Aries 17:1 (2017)

The latest issue of Aries has just been published: A special issue on Esotericism and the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), edited by Markus Altena Davidsen and myself. As we explain in our editorial, “What Cognitive Scienece Offers the Study of Esotericism”, Western esotericism and CSR have developed in parallel over the past couple of decades, each, in their own ways, pushing the academic study of religion into new territory. Given that esotericism is full of psychologically rich sources (from visions and trances to hidden correspondences and esoteric hermeneutic techniques), it seems that much could be gained from bringing these two fields together. My Occult Minds project has already been taking steps in this direction. The intention behind the Aries special issue, however, is to push this agenda in a collaborative way, by publishing articles on esoteric subject matter informed by a range recent theories of cognition, together with a response article by someone in the field of CSR. We were happy to get Jesper Sørensen in this role, a central figure in the “Aarhus school” who has worked on problems that are  directly relevant to esotericism.

(more…)

The Problem of Disenchantment – Coming to a university library near you.

I received exciting news this morning that my second book The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse, 1900-1939 is now officially published and available from Brill. Based on my PhD research it’s been a long time in the making (about 6 years), so it will be very satisfying to see the final hardbound result (waiting for my author copies). Time to request review copies and tell your local university library to stock it! Of course, you should do that with the other publications from the esoterica “brat pack” as well.

For a teaser of my book, here are three flattering blurbs from three exceptional scholars:

This is a path-breaking book! It not only opens up an interdisciplinary space in which to analyze a range of responses to disenchantment within and between the history of religion, the history of science, and the history of esotericism, but it articulates a method – Problemgeschichte – for doing so. The method allows Asprem to surface many contending views on the place of mysterious incalculable powers in the modern world, which cut across disciplines in surprising ways, and to demonstrate the value of a critical constructivism build on naturalistic grounds for scholarly work.

– Ann Taves, University of California at Santa Barbara.

The complex interface between the sciences, religion, and esoteric forms of thought and experience is one of those “elephants in the living room” that many know about but almost no one knows how to talk about. Egil Asprem knows how to talk about it, and very well indeed: through a historical genealogy of the interface, through a careful tracing of the debates around the limits of reason and science, and through an astute rethinking of Weber’s seminal notion of disenchantment. The result is extremely satisfying and rich beyond measure.

– Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred.

Egil Asprem’s study has the potential of causing a Copernican revolution in our understanding of the “disenchantment of the world”. Grounded in meticulous textual analysis of a large sample of representative sources – from the “hard” natural sciences via psychical research to the “soft” domain of religion and esotericism – it combines sensitive historical research with sharp theoretical reflection and should lead us to question some of our most deeply ingrained assumptions about the nature of modernity.

– Wouter J. Hanegraaff, University of Amsterdam.

Their words, not mine.

As a couple hundred people apparently discovered already, I uploaded a pdf of the full review article on Defining Magic to my Academia page a few days ago. There are a few minor edits in it too. If you are looking for something citeable, I’d advise using the pdf instead of the three original blog posts.

End of communication.