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9858_393 | Later 20th century |
9858_394 | In the 1960s and 1970s, esotericism came to be increasingly associated with the growing |
9858_395 | counter-culture in the West, whose adherents understood themselves in participating in a spiritual |
9858_396 | revolution that marked the Age of Aquarius. By the 1980s, these currents of millenarian currents |
9858_397 | had come to be widely known as the New Age movement, and it became increasingly commercialised as |
9858_398 | business entrepreneurs exploited a growth in the spiritual market. Conversely, other forms of |
9858_399 | esoteric thought retained the anti-commercial and counter-cultural sentiment of the 1960s and |
9858_400 | 1970s, namely the techno-shamanic movement promoted by figures such as Terence McKenna and Daniel |
9858_401 | Pinchbeck, which built on the work of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda. |
9858_402 | This trend was accompanied by the increased growth of modern Paganism, a movement initially |
9858_403 | dominated by Wicca, the religion propagated by Gerald Gardner. Wicca was adopted by members of the |
9858_404 | second-wave feminist movement, most notably Starhawk, and developing into the Goddess movement. |
9858_405 | Wicca also greatly influenced the development of Pagan neo-druidry and other forms of Celtic |
9858_406 | revivalism. In response to Wicca there has also appeared literature and groups who label themselves |
9858_407 | followers of traditional witchcraft in opposition to the growing visibility of Wicca and these |
9858_408 | claim older roots than the system proposed by Gerald Gardner. Other trends that emerged in western |
9858_409 | occultism in the later 20th century included satanism, as exposed by groups such as the Church of |
9858_410 | Satan and Temple of Set, as well as chaos magick through the Illuminates of Thanateros group. |
9858_411 | Additionally, since the start of the 1990s, countries inside of the former Iron Curtain have |
9858_412 | undergone a radiative and varied religious revival, with a large number of occult and new religious |
9858_413 | movements gaining popularity. Gnostic revivalists, New Age organizations, and Scientology splinter |
9858_414 | groups have found their way into much of the former Soviet bloc since the cultural and political |
9858_415 | shift resulting from the dissolution of the USSR. In Hungary, a significant number of citizens |
9858_416 | (relative to the size of the country’s population and compared to its neighbors) practice and/or |
9858_417 | adhere to new currents of Western Esotericism. In April 1997, the Fifth Esoteric Spiritual Forum |
9858_418 | was held for two days in the country and was attended at-capacity; In August of the same year, the |
9858_419 | International Shaman Expo began, being broadcast on live TV and ultimately taking place for 2 |
9858_420 | months wherein various neo-Shamanist, Millenarian, mystic, neo-Pagan, and even UFO religionist |
9858_421 | congregations and figures were among the attendees. |
9858_422 | Academic study |
9858_423 | The academic study of Western esotericism was pioneered in the early 20th century by historians of |
9858_424 | the ancient world and the European Renaissance, who came to recognise that—even though previous |
9858_425 | scholarship had ignored it—the effect pre-Christian and non-rational schools of thought on European |
9858_426 | society and culture was worthy of academic attention. One of the key centres for this was the |
9858_427 | Warburg Institute in London, where scholars like Frances Yates, Edgar Wind, Ernst Cassirer, and D. |
9858_428 | P. Walker began arguing that esoteric thought had had a greater effect on Renaissance culture than |
9858_429 | had been previously accepted. The work of Yates in particular, most notably her 1964 book Giordano |
9858_430 | Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, has been cited as "an important starting-point for modern |
9858_431 | scholarship on esotericism", succeeding "at one fell swoop in bringing scholarship onto a new |
9858_432 | track" by bringing wider awareness of the effect that esoteric ideas had on modern science. |
9858_433 | In 1965, at the instigation of the scholar Henry Corbin, École pratique des hautes études in the |
9858_434 | Sorbonne established the world's first academic post in the study of esotericism, with a chair in |
9858_435 | the History of Christian Esotericism. Its first holder was François Secret, a specialist in the |
9858_436 | Christian Kabbalah, though he had little interest in developing the wider study of esotericism as a |
9858_437 | field of research. In 1979 Faivre assumed Secret's chair at the Sorbonne, which was renamed the |
9858_438 | "History of Esoteric and Mystical Currents in Modern and Contemporary Europe". Faivre has since |
9858_439 | been cited as being responsible for developing the study of Western esotericism into a formalised |
9858_440 | field, with his 1992 work L'ésotérisme having been cited as marking "the beginning of the study of |
9858_441 | Western esotericism as an academic field of research". He remained in the chair until 2002, when he |
9858_442 | was succeeded by Jean-Pierre Brach. |
9858_443 | Faivre noted that there were two significant obstacles to establishing the field. One was that |
9858_444 | there was an engrained prejudice towards esotericism within academia, resulting in the widespread |
9858_445 | perception that the history of esotericism was not worthy of academic research. The second was that |
9858_446 | esotericism is a trans-disciplinary field, the study of which did not fit clearly within any |
9858_447 | particular discipline. As Hanegraaff noted, Western esotericism had to be studied as a separate |
9858_448 | field to religion, philosophy, science, and the arts, because while it "participates in all these |
9858_449 | fields" it does not squarely fit into any of them. Elsewhere, he noted that there was "probably no |
9858_450 | other domain in the humanities that has been so seriously neglected" as Western esotericism. |
9858_451 | In 1980, the U.S.-based Hermetic Academy was founded by Robert A. McDermott as an outlet for |
9858_452 | American scholars interested in Western esotericism. From 1986 to 1990 members of the Hermetic |
9858_453 | Academy participated in panels at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion under the |
9858_454 | rubric of the "Esotericism and Perennialism Group". By 1994, Faivre could comment that the academic |
9858_455 | study of Western esotericism had taken off in France, Italy, England, and the United States, but he |
9858_456 | lamented that it had not done so in Germany. |
9858_457 | In 1999, the University of Amsterdam established a chair in the History of Hermetic Philosophy and |
9858_458 | Related Currents, which was occupied by Hanegraaff, while in 2005 the University of Exeter created |
9858_459 | a chair in Western Esotericism, which was taken by Goodrick-Clarke, who headed the Exeter Center |
9858_460 | for the Study of Esotericism. Thus, by 2008 there were three dedicated university chairs in the |
9858_461 | subject, with Amsterdam and Exeter also offering master's degree programs in it. Several |
9858_462 | conferences on the subject were held at the quintennial meetings of the International Association |
9858_463 | for the History of Religions, while a peer-reviewed journal, Aries: Journal for the Study of |
9858_464 | Western Esotericism began publication in 2001. 2001 also saw the foundation of the North American |
9858_465 | Association for the Study of Esotericism (ASE), with the European Society for the Study of Western |
9858_466 | Esotericism (ESSWE) being established shortly after. |
9858_467 | Within a few years, Michael Bergunder expressed the view that it had become an established field |
9858_468 | within religious studies, with Asprem and Granholm observing that scholars within other |
9858_469 | sub-disciplines of religious studies had begun to take an interest in the work of scholars of |
9858_470 | esotericism. |
9858_471 | Asprem and Granholm noted that the study of esotericism had been dominated by historians and thus |
9858_472 | lacked the perspective of social scientists examining contemporary forms of esotericism, a |
9858_473 | situation that they were attempting to correct through building links with scholars operating in |
9858_474 | Pagan studies and the study of new religious movements. |
9858_475 | On the basis that "English culture and literature have been traditional strongholds of Western |
9858_476 | esotericism", in 2011 Pia Brînzeu and György Szönyi urged that English studies also have a role in |
9858_477 | this interdisciplinary field. |
9858_478 | Emic and etic divisions |
9858_479 | Emic and etic refer to two kinds of field research done and viewpoints obtained, emic, from within |
9858_480 | the social group (from the perspective of the subject) and etic, from outside (from the perspective |
9858_481 | of the observer). Wouter Hanegraaff follows a distinction between an emic and an etic approach to |
9858_482 | religious studies. |
9858_483 | The emic approach is that of the alchemist or theosopher. The etic approach is that of the scholar |
9858_484 | as an historian, a researcher, with a critical view. An empirical study of esotericism needs "emic |
9858_485 | material and etic interpretation": |
9858_486 | Arthur Versluis proposes approaching esotericism through an "imaginative participation": |
9858_487 | Many scholars of esotericism have come to be regarded as respected intellectual authorities by |
9858_488 | practitioners of various esoteric traditions. Many esotericism scholars have sought to emphasise |
9858_489 | that esotericism is not a single object, but practitioners who read this scholarship have begun to |
9858_490 | regard it and think of it as a singular object, with which they affiliate themselves. Thus, Asprem |
9858_491 | and Granholm noted that the use of the term "esotericism" among scholars "significantly contributes |
9858_492 | to the reification of the category for the general audience—despite the explicated contrary |
Subsets and Splits