Abstract
In 1888, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the flamboyant leader of the Theosophical Society, published her occult magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine. The following year, after writing a review of Blavatsky’s work, Annie Besant (1847–1933) became transformed by the enchanting religious torchbearer’s treatise. As a result, Besant, who at the time was an active member of the socialist advocacy organization, the British Fabian Society, switched her full allegiance to the late nineteenth-century pseudo-religious faction, Theosophy. In 1893, four years after Besant’s conversion, the social reformer, secularist, and women’s rights activist traveled for the first time from England to India. There she eventually became Theosophy’s president in 1907 at its international headquarters in Adyar (near today’s Chennai) and became an influential religious and political persona in India.
There is sore need, it seems to me, in our unbrotherly, anti-social civilization, of this distinct affirmation of a brotherhood as broad as Humanity itself.
Annie Besant, Why I Became a Theosophist (New York: The Path Office, 1890): 13
The due realization of sensuous happiness by a human being of the epoch for which the laws are intended is possible only in and by means of organized society.
Bhagavan Das, The Science of Social Organisation or the Laws of Manu in the Light of Atma-Vidya. (Benares, India: Theosophical Publishing Society. 1910): 32 (emphasis in original)
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Notes
- 1.
Theosophy is a religious movement, initiated by Blavatsky (referred to in theosophical circles as HPB) and Henry Steel Olcott, that asserts that all religions are the embodiment of a divine wisdom, or one occult, or secret, spiritual truth. A more detailed description of Theosophy and other esoteric religious movements will follow.
- 2.
Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived. A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 102. W. T. Stead, the editor of Review of Reviews, commissioned Besant to write the review. Notably, Besant was a reformer ahead of her time, who wrote in support of birth control and promoted the use of contraceptives. For further biographical work on Besant, see Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
- 3.
Besant stepped on Indian soil for the first time at 10:24 a.m. on November 16, 1993, according to Olcott’s diary. The event is cited in Anne Taylor, Annie Besant. A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 267. Besant, who became a principal figure in the theosophical movement, held this leadership post in India during the rise of the anti-colonial movement, World War I, Gandhi’s religio-political ascent after his return from South Africa in 1915, until her death in the pivotal year of 1933.
- 4.
In the era of “globalization,” which has spurred significant scholarly focus on “cosmopolitanism” beginning in the 1990s, the term’s meaning, history, and current applications have become an important by-product of that discussion. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book, Cosmopolitanism : Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), has been one of the most hotly debated texts in this field of inquiry. For a broad and informative discussion, see Garret W. Brown and David Held, eds., The Cosmopolitan Reader (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010); and Bruce Robbins and Paulo Lemos Horta, eds., Cosmopolitanisms (New York: NYU Press, 2017).
- 5.
Besant, Why I Became a Theosophist, 13. A detailed explanation of Besant’s use of the term, atheism, extends far beyond the scope of my purposes here, but in summary, Besant’s atheism reflected her repudiation of the traditional notion of a Divine Christ, and Christian dogma, more generally, rather than a rejection of divinity or spirituality. For Besant’s explanation, see her early collection of essays in My Path to Atheism (London: Freethought Publishing Company, 1885).
- 6.
I am using “field” in Bourdieu’s sense, which he defines as: “a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions, by their present and potential situation (situs) in the structure of the distribution of species of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field.” See Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 97. For an elaboration of Bourdieu’s concept related to religion, see David Swartz, “Bridging the Study of Culture and Religion: Pierre Bourdieu’s Political Economy of Symbolic Power,” in Sociology of Religion 57 (1996): 71–85.
- 7.
Das joined the Theosophical Society in India in 1894 and later became a close collaborator of Besant in numerous theosophical initiatives. He was involved, for instance, in the establishment of the Central Hindu College in Benares in 1898, which Besant founded. Politically active throughout his life, Das was committed to the opposition of British rule in India, and his essays and books emphasize the distinctive bond between spiritual innovation and the commitment to social and political reform.
- 8.
Annie Besant, “Religion and Patriotism in India,” in Essays and Addresses, vol. IV: India (London: The Theosophical Publishing Society, 1913), 296. In support of this view of Besant from a different analytical angle, see Gauri Viswanathan’s chapter, “Conversion, Theosophy, and Race Theory,” in her perspicacious book, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
- 9.
I am using the suffix “-centric” to indicate the focus of these religious groups and their acolytes on their own national culture as preeminent.
- 10.
Nathan Hilberg cites several sources (Festinger, Elliot and Devine, and Egan et al.) to define cognitive dissonance in the following way: “The term cognitive dissonance describes a psychological state in which an individual’s cognitions—beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors—are at odds. People experience cognitive dissonance as aversive and are motivated to resolve the inconsistency between their discrepant cognitions.” See his “Cognitive Dissonance and ‘The Will to Believe’” in Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 10 (2017): 90 (emphasis in original).
- 11.
The reference here is to Spengler’s widely known The Decline of the West, which was originally published in 1918. There is significant secondary material on the topic of late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century anxiety and sociocultural discord. For an overview, see Michael Saler, ed. The Fin-de-Siècle World (London: Routledge, 2015); also Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).
- 12.
There are many studies on world, European, and country-specific history of the era. One might begin with Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), or Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World , 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004).
- 13.
Anne-Marie Thiesse, La Création des Identités nationales. Europe xviiième – xixème siècle (Paris: Éditions Seuil, 1999), 155.
- 14.
The theory of eugenics was initiated by Darwin’s half-cousin, Timothy Galton (1822–1911). For more background, see Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), which also includes some detail on France. In the case of Germany, see Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler. Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); also Pascal Grosse, Eugenik, Kolonialismus und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2000).
- 15.
Peter Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism. Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 15. It is important to distinguish, as Bowler does, the difference between Darwin’s writings and theories and how Darwin was interpreted and applied—Darwinism.
- 16.
See Comte’s Système de politique positive (1851–1854) and Catéchisme positiviste (1851) for his programmatic elaboration of “positivist” religion.
- 17.
Marx’s famous and often cited quote originally appeared in 1844 in his essay “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.”
- 18.
Weber’s reference to “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) appeared in a 1917 speech titled “Science as a Vocation” and the latter “stahlhartes Gehäuse” appeared in Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, originally published in 1904 and 1905. Weber’s expression “stahlhartes Gehäuse” has been translated in several ways and at times vigorously debated. Famously, Niklas Luhmann chose the more poetic “iron cage,” but more recently, Kalberg has translated the term more pragmatically as “steel-hard casing.”
- 19.
Harald Wydra, Politics and the Sacred (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 4.
- 20.
Gerard Delanty, “Introduction,” in Routledge Handbook of International Cosmopolitan Studies, Gerard Delanty, ed. (Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2019), 3.
- 21.
Marco Pasi, “The Modernity of Occultism: Reflections on Some Crucial Aspects,” in Hermes in the Academy: Ten Years’ Study of Western Esotericism at the University of Amsterdam, eds. Joyce Pijnenburg and Wouter Hanegraaff (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 63.
- 22.
Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967).
- 23.
Michael Bergunder, “‘Religion’ and ‘Science’ Within a Global Religious History,” in Aries. Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism 16 (2016): 86–141.
- 24.
See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Hans Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaft und Moderne (München: C. H. Beck, 1997); for the case of Germany, see Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, Archives of Origins: Sanskrit, Philology, Anthropology in 19th Century Germany, trans. Dominique Bach and Richard Willet (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2013); and Sabine Mangold, Eine ‘weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft.’ Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Pallas Athene 11, 2004); related to France, see Roland Lardinois, Scholars and Prophets: Sociology of India from France in the 19th–20th Centuries, trans. Renuka George (London: Routledge, 2018).
- 25.
Weber’s multivolume study was published in four volumes from 1905–1920 under the rubric of sociology of religion.
- 26.
A wealth of literature now exists on this cultural link. For Europe, one might begin with Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance : Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1984), which was originally published in French in 1950. The Western fascination with India also existed in the United States in American Romanticism. Walt Whitman’s poem “Passage to India” is just one example.
- 27.
Company Raj refers to the era of the British East India Company’s political and economic charge in India, which began in the late eighteenth century and extended to the mid-nineteenth century. In 1858, during the reign of Queen Victoria, India became a colony of the British Empire (named thereafter Crown Raj) until Indian independence in 1947. For more expansive historical background, see Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 2018); or Thomas R. Trautmann, India : Brief History of a Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
- 28.
For biographical information and analysis of Jones’ work, see Michael J. Franklin, Sir William Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995); Garland Cannon and Kevin Brine, Objects of Inquiry: Life, Contributions and Influence of Sir William Jones (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Bruce Lincoln, “Mr. Jones Myth of Origins,” in Theorizing Myth. Narrative, Ideology and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 76–100; and Thomas R. Trautmann, “The Mosaic Ethnology of Asiatick Jones,” in Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 28–61.
- 29.
On the emergence of national identity in Europe, see Anne-Marie Thiesse, La Création des Identités nationales; Tuska Benes, In Babel’s Shadow: Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008); Eric J. Evans, The Shaping of Modern Britain: Identity, Industry and Empire, 1780–1914 (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2011); comparatively, see Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); and more generally, Christopher A. Bayly’s aforementioned, The Birth of the Modern World. For India, a rich set of scholarship now exists. One could begin with two seminal works by Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986) and The Nation and Its Fragments : Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). The series of essays in Subaltern Studies is also an important reference.
- 30.
For Germany, see Perry Myers, German Visions of India, 1871–1918: Commandeering the Holy Ganges During the Kaiserreich (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); for England, see Christopher A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- 31.
Mary Louise Pratt has made this point superbly in her Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 2008).
- 32.
On the mutiny, see the aforementioned Metcalf and Metcalf, Bose and Jalal, or Trautmann.
- 33.
There are several important studies on British liberalism and its intersection with Indian thought. See Christopher A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties. Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Andrew S. Sartori, Liberalism in Empire. An Alternative History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); and Christopher A. Bayly, Eugenio F. Biagini, eds. Guiseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism (1830–1920) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 34.
See Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2008), especially the chapter “British Liberalism and British Empire,” 68–108.
- 35.
Ibid., 74; also important in this context is Christopher Bayly, Recovering Liberties.
- 36.
For biographical accounts of Roy, see H. D. Sharma, Raja Ram Mohan Roy: The Renaissance Man (New Delhi: Rupa & Co, 2002); and Bruce C. Robertson, Raja Rammohan Roy: The Father of Modern India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Dayananda Saraswati (1824–1883), who flirted with Theosophy, founded the Arya Samaj. See Kenneth W. Jones, Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and pertaining to the Arya Samaj, see Cassie Adcock, The Limits of Tolerance: Indian Secularism and the Politics of Religious Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 37.
See Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India (New York: Vintage, 2015); also see Kathryn Tidrick, Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), who explores extensively Gandhi’s time in South Africa.
- 38.
See Michael Bergunder, “Experiments with Theosophical Truth: Gandhi, Esotericism and Religious History,” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82.2 (2014): 398–426; while in London Gandhi read Blavatsky’s important works and Besant’s Why I Became a Theosophist, which he heard her deliver as a lecture as well. See Tidrick, Gandhi, 11.
- 39.
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 199.
- 40.
Ibid., 365.
- 41.
Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society. Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 8–9.
- 42.
On Theosophy, one might begin with Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Handbook of the Theosophical Current, eds. Olav Hammer and Mikael Rothstein (Leiden: Brill, 2013); and Kocku von Stuckrad’s chapter, “Merging Occultism, Philosophy, Science, and the Academic Study of Religion: The Theosophical Society” in The Scientification of Religion. An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800–2000 (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014). For more detailed background on Blavatsky (commonly referred to as HPB) and Olcott, see Sylvia Cranston, HPB : The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993); Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). For an important examination of the term esotericism, a term frequently used to describe these innovative religious movements, see Michael Bergunder, “What Is Esotericism? Cultural Studies Approaches and the Problems of Definition in Religious Studies” in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 9–36.
- 43.
John Warne Monroe, Laboratories of Faith: Mesmerism, Spiritism, and Occultism in Modern France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 235.
- 44.
Updated scholarly work on Theosophy in the United States is needed. See Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); related, see Emily Ogden, Credulity. A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); on Russia, see Maria Carlson, No Religion Higher Than Truth. A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
- 45.
Jean-Pierre Laurant, L’Ésoterisme Chrétien en France au XIXe Siècle (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1992), 139.
- 46.
Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment. British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 87.
- 47.
For an excellent assessment of the political characteristics of the Arya Samaj, see C. S. Adcock, The Limits of Tolerance.
- 48.
For a massive tome that deals with the history of anthroposophy in intricate detail, see Helmut Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland: theosophische Weltanschauung und gesellschaftliche Praxis 1884–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008); and his recent and more accessible, Die Anthroposophie . Rudolf Steiners Ideen zwischen Esoterik, Weleda, Demeter und Waldorfpädogogik (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019). An updated scholarly account of Steiner’s life and work in English is needed.
- 49.
Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life. Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10. Acknowledgment and appreciation should be expressed to the anonymous reviewer of this monograph who urged me to pay closer attention to these linkages.
- 50.
For an excellent biography of Haeckel, see Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life. Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). In my view, Haeckel’s political views and his role in Monism, however, receive inadequate attention in Richard’s otherwise thorough and insightful book. See my assessment in Rev. of The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought, by Robert J. Richards, Review of Politics, 71.3 (2009): 505–08.
- 51.
For more insight into Haeckel’s travel writings on India, see my “Monistic Visions and Colonial Consciousness: Ernst Haeckel’s Indische Reisebriefe” Seminar 44.2 (May 2008): 190–209.
- 52.
For further reading on Monism in Germany, see Olaf Breidbach, “Monismus um 1900 – Wissenschaftspraxis oder Weltanschauung?,” in Welträtsel und Lebenswunder. Ernst Haeckel – Werk, Wirkung und Folgen, eds. Werner Michler, et al. (Linz: Kataloge des Oberösterreichisches Landmuseum, 1998), 289–316; Paul Ziche, Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung, 2000); Todd Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany. The Rise of the Fourth Confession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- 53.
For an excellent overview of the era, see Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic from Its Origins to the Great War, 1871–1914, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Frederick Brown, For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010) on this era. In French, see the older but highly relevant book by Jean-Pierre Azéma and Michel Winock, La troisième République (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1970). An important historical backdrop in France is the transformation toward laïcité and the Loi du 9 Décembre 1905 concernant la separation des Églises et de l’État. See the fresh, detailed, and innovative comparative work of Murat Akan, The Politics of Secularism: Religion, Diversity, and Institutional Change in France and Turkey (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
- 54.
For an excellent and concise review of the esoteric movement in France during the Belle Époque, see Jocelyn Godwin’s short exposé, The Beginnings of Theosophy in France (London: Theosophical History Center, 1989).
- 55.
Papus, whose religious writings and organizational initiatives provided an important source for the French cosmopolitan religious world of the era, successfully ventured to establish his own esoteric movements that flourished in France until his death during WWI in 1916. See Marie-Sophie André and Christophe Beaufils, Papus Biographie. La Belle Epoque de l’Occultisme (Paris: Berg International, 1995).
- 56.
Synarchy is a sociopolitical utopia that d’Alveydre defined straightforwardly as the opposite of anarchy. Synarchy will receive more attention in a later chapter.
- 57.
Like Papus, F. Charles Barlet is a pseudonym. His birth name was Albert Faucheux.
- 58.
For background on terminology such as spiritism and spiritualism, see John Warne Monroe, “Crossing Over. Allan Kardec and the Transnationalisation of Modern Spiritualism,” in Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling, ed. Cathy Gutierrez (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 248–274.
- 59.
Wouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 254. Hanegraaff is referring here to the Weberian concept of “disenchantment.”
- 60.
Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League (New York: American Elsevier, 1971). This is related of course to the Sonderweg thesis (special path) of German history, which has been heavily debated and criticized. See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) for a pathbreaking critique of Germany’s so-called special path.
- 61.
See Faivre’s Access to Western Esotericism (New York: State University of New York, 1994), which is the first comprehensive work on esotericism published in English. The text is a collection of essays, originally published in French during the 1970s. Faivre also established the first chair of the history of esoteric religions at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1979.
- 62.
Especially important for general introduction are Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013); and Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge, trans. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (London: Equinox Pub., 2005). For more detailed discussions about the study of esotericism as a science and the academy, see Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy; and von Stuckrad, The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800–2000 (Boston: De Gruyter, 2014).
- 63.
Bruce Lincoln’s notion of “weak comparison” assumes that comparative inquiry is not all-encompassing; rather, guided by Lincoln’s approach, Spiritual Empires seeks to pursue “inquiries that are modest in scope, but intensive in scrutiny, treating a small number of examples in depth and detail, setting each in its full and proper context.” Lincoln employs the analogy of apples and oranges as fruit to further elaborate the point: “In such endeavors, apples and oranges provide no more than a starting point, beyond which one is obliged to reflect on the trees that produce them, the environments in which these grow, the people who cultivate and consume them, and what exactly we mean by ‘fruit.’” Bruce Lincoln, Apples and Oranges. Explorations In, On, and With Comparison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 11.
- 64.
Much of the intellectual debate over esotericism has been built around the questions of defining esoteric religion in the first place and tracing its roots and causes. Michael Bergunder’s aforementioned essay, “What is Esotericism?” provides an essential reading and overview of the debates surrounding this field of study; also the works of Hanegraaf and Stuckrad provide important insight to defining esotericism.
- 65.
Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine. Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
- 66.
David Allen Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment: Occultism and Politics in Modern France (DeKalb, Ill: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005).
- 67.
In English, see two seminal essays on the topic: Julian Strube, “Occultist Identity Formations Between Theosophy and Socialism in fin-de-siècle France,” in Numen 64 (2017): 568–595; and “Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism: A Genealogical Approach to Socialism and Secularization in 19th-century France,” in Religion 46.3 (2016): 359–388.
- 68.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism. Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Peter Staudenmaier, Between Occultism and Nazism. Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Eric Kurlander, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). Despite the excellence erudition of these studies, the focus on links to the Nazi era is apparent in the German context.
- 69.
Some examples include Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons : The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Kris Manjapra, The Age of Entanglement : German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) just to provide an ever so modest snapshot of this work.
- 70.
Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 140.
- 71.
Bruce Lincoln explains, “when a taxonomy is encoded in mythic form, the narrative packages a specific, contingent system of discrimination in a particularly attractive and memorable form. What is more, it naturalizes and legitimates it. Myth, then, is not just a taxonomy, but ideology in narrative form.” Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth. Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 147.
- 72.
Michael Bergunder, “What is Esotericism?,” 19.
- 73.
The notion of hybridity, or the mixture of identity and culture, has been worked out by Homi Bhabha. See Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). Among other critics of hybridity, Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik complain in similar ways that hybridity tends to present an all-encompassing analytical framework that tends to smooth over the differences of unique localities, particularly in the postcolonial era. See Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality” in Race and Class 36.3 (1995): 1–20; Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997); more recently, Amar Acheraiou criticizes Bhabha’s exclusive reliance on the late nineteenth century and lack of a broader and thus more fruitful “diachronic” approach. See Acheraiou, Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- 74.
Peter van der Veer, The Value of Comparison (Durham, Duke University Press, 2016), 28.
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Myers, P. (2021). Introduction. In: Spiritual Empires in Europe and India. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81003-0_1
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