THE ROSE CIRCLE RESEARCH FOUNDATION

October 4th, 2008 - 2nd Annual Conference
Location: Masonic Hall, 71 West 23rd St., New York, NY 10010

Join us for the 2nd Annual Rose Circle Conference. We will be presenting speakers from all over the world to further your Esoteric education. Current confirmed speakers include:

• Christopher McIntosh was born in England in 1943 and grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. He studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford and German at London University, later returning to Oxford to take a doctorate in history with a dissertation on the Rosicrucian revival in the context of the German Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. After working in London in journalism and publishing he spent four years in New York as an information officer with the United Nations Development Programme, then moved to Germany to work for UNESCO. In parallel he has pursued a career as a writer and researcher specialising in the esoteric traditions.

His books include The Astrologers and their Creed (1969); Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (1972); The Rosicrucians (latest edition 1997); The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason (1992), based on his D.Phil. dissertation; The Swan King: Ludwig II of Bavaria (latest edition 2003); and Gardens of the Gods (2005). His fictional work includes the occult novel Return of the Tetrad published in Czech as Navrat Tetradi (1998).

He also has a long-standing interest in nature-oriented belief systems. He has lectured widely and is on the faculty of the distance M.A. programme in Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter, England. His home is in Bremen, North Germany. Mr McIntosh is a long-standing member of the Pilgrim Lodge No. 238, London. This is a very unusual lodge in that it was founded in 1779 by Germans living in London and still conducts its rituals in German. It also uses an unusual German working different from the regular English Emulation working.

• R. A. Gilbert, British author of numerous masonic, historical and rosicrucian books, journals and articles (most recently having co-authored ‘Freemasonry: A Celebration of the Craft” with John Hamill, Director of Communications for the United Grand Lodge of England. Bob Gilbert is England’s foremost book antiquarian. As former Librarian and Archivist to the SRIA, he became well known for his numerous contributions to Rosicrucian Scholarship. R. A. Gilbert is an expert on Freemasonry and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn & Christian Esoterica in general. He is a Past Prestonian Lecturer (1997) and former editor of Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (AQC) while currently serving as chairman of QCCC Ltd.

Articles by Gilbert:
http://www.mastermason.com/luxocculta/westcott.htm
http://www.mastermason.com/luxocculta/hermetic.htm

Books by Gilbert:
http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=R.%20A.%20Gilbert&page=1
http://www.bookfinder.com/author/r-a-gilbert/

SHAUNA DOYLE DE BRUN: Confirmed Conference Paper

HERMAN HESSE (1877-1962)

LITERARY FIGURES AND ESOTERICISM: HERMAN HESSE

Hermann Hesse´s book, Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), is a literary representation of a life seeking to discover one’s innermost being and the path to self- realization; in other words, Gnosis. The Glass Bead Game in essence relates the autobiographical culmination of Hesse´s own inner search for Gnosis while incorporating and invoking prior esoteric teachings and practices. With especial reference to the following quotations from the book.

“How far back the historian wishes to place the origins and antecedents of the Glass Bead Game is, ultimately, a matter of his personal choice. For like every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, at least the idea of it. We find it foreshadowed, as a dim anticipation and hope, in a good many earlier ages. There are hints of it in Pythagoras, for example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles in the late period of classical civilization. We find it equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture; and the path of its prehistory leads on through Scholasticism and Humanism to the academies of mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on to the Romantic philosophies and the runes of Novalis´s hallucinatory visions. This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of the Mind toward the ideal goal of a universitas litterarum, every Platonic academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion.”
Page 7.

“In the symbols, ciphers, signatures, and abbreviations of the Game language an astronomical formula, the principles of form underlying an old sonata, an utterance of Confucius, and so on, were written down. A reader who chanced to be ignorant of the Glass Bead Game might imagine such a game pattern as rather similar to the pattern of a chess game, except that the significances of the pieces and the potentialities of their relationships to one another and their effect upon one another multiplied manyfold and an actual content must be ascribed to each piece, each constellation, each chess move, of which this move, configuration, and so on is a symbol.”
Page 110.

The Glass Bead Game

We re-enact with reverent attention
The universal chord, the masters´ harmony,
Evoking in unsullied communion
Minds and time of highest sanctity.

We draw upon the iconography
Whose mystery is able to contain
The boundlessness, the storm of all existence,
Give chaos form, and hold our lives in rein.

The pattern sings like crystal constellations,
And when we tell our beads, we serve the whole,
And cannot be dislodged or misdirected,
Held in the orbit of the Cosmic Soul.

(See The Poems of Knecht´s Student Years, Page 412)

Hesse, Hermann, Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1970).

Shauna Doyle de Brun is an MA student at the University of Exeter, Centre for the Study of Esotericism.

Confirmed conference paper: FRANK ALBO

THE VESICA PISCIS

THE VESICA PISCIS, THE UNSEATING OF EUCLID,
AND THE RE-APOTHEORIS OF GEOMETRY IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

This paper posits that the sudden appearance of vesica piscis in the nineteenth century was due to the advent of non-Euclidean geometry. Non-Euclidean geometry threatened traditional views of geometric truth and it was met with vehement resistance from English Freemasons who endorse a geometric theology resting on the infallibility of Euclid. Masonic pundits championed the re-apotheosis of geometry which they indelibly linked to the vesica piscis and its formulation in medieval architecture. Their theories influenced nineteenth century ideas of harmony and proportion promulgated by British architects C.R. Cockerell and F.B. Bond.

1. The Vesica Piscis - Dürer’s brainchild
The term vesica piscis, derives from the Latin translation of Dürer’s practical manual of geometric theory, Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt (1525).

2. Frederick Bligh Bond (1864-1945) – necromancer of GlastonburyBond was an architect, Freemason, and numerologist who claimed that the vesica piscis was latent in the plan of Lady Chapel in Glastonbury. His theories of architecture were influenced by Cockerell.

3. Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863) – evangelist of the vesica piscis. The nineteenth century professor of architecture responsible for vivifying the popular mystique of the vesica piscis as a formula of exemplary proportion handed down from the Freemasons.

4. Thomas Kerrich (1748-1863) – evangelist of the vesica piscesKerrich argued that the visica piscis had informed the proportions of nineteen churches. His studies published I a popular antiquarian journal impacted Cockerell’s theories of medieval design.

5. Cockerell’s Rules of Design – from Freemasonry to Cesariano
Cockerell presents his tripartite rules of design for ideal beauty and proportions in architecture, which he credits to the Vitruvian commentator, Cesare Cesariano, and the medieval Freemasons.

6. The Unseating of Euclid – nineteenth century innovation of non-Euclidean geometry
The emergence of non-Euclidean geometry in the nineteenth century challenged the universality of Euclid and spawned a proliferation of Masonic texts on the sacrality of the vesica piscis.

7. Re-apotheosis of Geometry in Victorian Britain – Freemasonry’s geometric theology
The Masonic idea that geometry is an exclusive and secret science handed down by God to Euclid and the architect of Solomon’s Temple. In Freemasonry, geometry is a touchstone of divine power.

8. Cockerell’s unwitting legacy – the vesica piscis and the Church of Scientology
From the geometric mysteries of the vesica piscis sparked off by Cockerell’s studies of medieval proportions to an aerial signpost marking the sacred writings of the Church of Scientology.

KABBALAH & CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUAL REVIVAL: Ben Gurion University, May 20-22, 2008

Kabbalah and Contemporary Spiritual Revival: Historical, Sociological and Cultural Perspectives
Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation and the Goren-Goldstein Center for Jewish Thought
Ben Gurion University, May 20-22, 2008Conference Hall A (Ulam Knasim Aleph)

Tuesday, May 20th
9:30-10:00
Reception

1st session
10:00-11:30
Greetings
Prof. Rivka Carmi, President of Ben Gurion University
Prof. Hayim Kreisel, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Director of the Goldstein-Goren International Center for Jewish Thought
Boaz Huss, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev : Studying Contemporary Kabbalah - Achievements and Challenges
Philip Wexler, Hebrew University of Jerusalem : Toward a Social Psychology of Contemporary Spirituality

2nd session
11:45-13:15
Chair: Philip Wexler, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Jonathan Garb, Hebrew University of Jerusalem : The Spiritual-Mystical Renaissance in the Contemporary Haredi World
Michel Rosenthal, University of Haifa : “Are you willing to cover your head?” Notes on the spiritual economy of blessings at Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak’s lectures

3rd session
14:30-16:00
Chair: Elliot Wolfson, New York University.
Wouter Hanegraaff, University of Amsterdam : Kabbalah in Gnosis Magazine (1985-1999)
Graham Harvey, the Open University, UK : Paganism: negotiating between esotericism and animism

4th session
16:30-18:00
Chair: Graham Harvey, Open University, UK.
James R. Lewis, University of Wisconsin : The Science of Kabbalah
Chava Weissler, Lehigh University: Performing Kabbalah/“Kabbalah” in the Jewish Renewal Movement

Wednesday, May 21st
5th session
9:00-11:15
Chair: Jody Myers, California State University.
Marianna Ruah-Midbar, Zefat Academic College : Jewish Spirituality in the New Age – Emerging Jewish-Israeli Phenomena in the Junction with New Age Culture
Joseph Loss, Haifa University: Transforming Experiences in the practice of Buddha Dhamma (the Path of the Buddha) in Contemporary Israel
Adam Klin-Oron, Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Messages for the End: Eschatological Thought in 20th Century Channeling and its Israeli Varieties

6th session
11:45-13:15
Chair: Zeev Gris, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Zvi Mark, Bar-Ilan University : The Contemporary Renassaince of Breslov Hasidism—Ritual, Tikkun and Messianism
Jonatan Meir, Hebrew University of Jerusalem : The Revealed which Conceals: R. Shalom Sharabi’s Kabbalah, Esotericism and the Printing of Kabbalistic Books

7th session
14:30-16:00
Chair: Jim Lewis, University of Wisconsin.
Jody Myers, California State University : Kabbalah for the Gentiles: Diverse Souls and Universalism in Contemporary Kabbalah
Yaakov Ariel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill : From Habad Emissaries to Kabbalah Centers: New Jewish Religious Movements and the Revitalization of Judaism in the later decades of the Twentieth Century.

8th session
16:30-18:00
Chair: Yakov Ariel, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Elliot R. Wolfson, New York University : Apocalyptic Transposition and the Status of the Non-Jew in Habad Mysticism
Yoram Bilu, Hebrew University of Jerusalem : Making the Absent Rabbi Present: Virtuality, Iconophilia, and Apparitions in Messianic Chabad

Dinner, Mateh Ba-Midbar

Thursday, May 22nd
9th session
9:30-11:00
Chair: Chava Weissler, Lehigh University.
Rachel Werczberger, Hebrew University of Jerusalem : Jewish Self-Healing - The Case of Jewish Spiritual Renewal in Israel
Shlomo Fischer, Tel Aviv University : Can New Individualist Spiritualism Also Coexist with Violence and Collective Commitments? New Spiritual Developments Among the Religious Zionist Community in Israel

10th session
11:30-13:00
Chair: Boaz Huss, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Omri Ruah-Midbar, Bar Ilan University : A Comparative Study of Current Spiritualities through three Musical Versions of ‘Im Nin’alu’
Tamar Katriel, University of Haifa : Precursors to contemporary New Age spirituality in Israeli cultural ethos

2009 CONFERENCE FOR ART HISTORIANS:FINLAND

Jyväskylä, Finland

Kongressi: Mind and Matter - Nordik 2009 Conference for Art Historians
Viimeisin muutos 28.03.2008
Alkamisaika: keskiviikko 17. syyskuuta 2008, 00.00
Päättymisaika: perjantai 19. syyskuuta 2008, 00.00
Paikka: Seminaarinmäki Main building, C1, C3, C4, C5
Date: September 17–19 2009 Location: The University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Keynote speakers: David Morgan (USA), Naomi Stead (Australia), Per H. Hansen (Danmark).
Organizers: The Department of Art and Culture Studies / Art history, Nordik committee for art history, Taidehistorian seura – Föreningen för konsthistoria ry, The City of Jyväskylä.

Further information: http://www.jyu.fi.nordik2009

Mind and Matter – The 9th Nordik Conference will be arranged in Jyväskylä, Finland on 17-19th of September 2009. The Conference invites Nordic, European and other art historians for three days to approach to the theme Mind and Matter.

Mind and Matter concentrates on systems of beliefs and thinking in Art and Art History and their relation to empirical material. We wish to focus on practices and problems arising from the interaction of empirical material and abstract or immaterial principles such as thoughts, beliefs, ideas, religions and political ideologies. Discussions of methodological strategies invite to reflect on the interdisciplinary character of art history. We encourage contributions from various theoretical issues and practices to explicit visual analysis, and welcome all fields of art history including visual studies, architecture, design, new media and museology.

Suggested topics for presentations are

POLITICS OF ART HISTORY: politics and ethics of method and practice; discourses of canonizing, ethnicity, gender, national identity, multiculturalism; politics of displays; art and cultural policy.

SPIRITUAL LANDSCAPES: landscape as motive and form; mental structure; cultural construction.

PICTURING MEMORY: memory and visual culture; collecting; oblivion; heritage.

CREATIVE PROCESSES: emotion, experience and interpretation in art and art history; performativity; psychology and philosophy of art.

VISUALISING FAITH AND BELIEFS: popular religious imagery; esoteric dogma and visual form; iconoclasms; clashes of religious cultures; spirituality; piety.

DESIGN MATTERS: concept design; designing sustainability; usability; immateriality and materiality.

http://www.jyu.fi.nordik2009

ESOTERIC TRADITION WITHIN 16th & 17th CENTURY MUSICAL CIRCLES

Claudio Monteverdi

CCWE Conference 2008
Saturday 11 Octobre
Western Esotericism and the Arts

Abstract
Esoteric Tradition within Sixteen and Seventeen Centuries Musical Circles
Laurence Wuidar
(Docteur en musicologie de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles / FNRS)

It is well know that esotericism may be a starting point for musical compositions, such as the works composed for the Masonic loges. It is also well know that esotericism may be the secret key to decipher a musical score, such as the too famous Bach-numerology topic. It is much less known that a lot of composers and musicians were also alchemists, astrologers or magicians.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse various esoteric activities of some sixteenth and seventeenth century composers and musicians, mainly in Italy, where the Inquisition was forever prone to censure them. The esoteric expression of a humanistic encyclopaedism reveals how the figure of the composer was not imaginable per se. Thus we distort history by regarding them only as composers or musical theoreticians. Only by breaking down the wall between the disciplines can we reconstitute the visage of musicians, such as Claudio Monteverdi, Lodovico Zacconi, Pier Francesco Valentini, Theodato Osio or Guido Trasuntino. The interest and the activities (teachings, writings and experiments) of these musicians for the sciences and arts, such as astrology or alchemy, tell us how their knowledge was a multidiscipline one. It also tells us how the musical process of composition has, in fact, synergies with such arts and sciences. That is ‘quintessentially’ true if we look at the enigmatic canons, the hidden message they veil to the profane and reveal to the initiated, as well as the manner they were resolved after a process of ora, labora & invenies (to quote the motto we find in the Mutus liber, in the Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae of Heinrich Khunrath and in many other enigmatic canons). The composers were the custodians of secret rules, whether astrological, musical or alchemical, they taught to a small number of disciples. Thus their musical activities can not be completely understood if we are not first aware of their esoteric activities.

CALL FOR PAPERS CCWE CONFERENCE 2008

THIS IS A CALL FOR PAPERS FOR THE SECOND CCWE CONFERENCE

to be held on Saturday 11th October 2008
in the Unitarian Memorial Church in Cambridge CB1 1JW UK

WESTERN ESOTERICISM & THE ARTS

The Association for the Study of Esotericism website www.aseweb.org gives the following useful definition of esotericism:

The word “esoteric” derives from the Greek esoterikos, and is a comparative form of eso, meaning “within.” Its first known mention in Greek is in Lucian’s ascription to Aristotle of having “esoteric” [inner] and “exoteric” [outer] teachings. The word later came to designate the secret doctrines said to have been taught by Pythagoras to a select group of disciples, and, in general, to any teachings designed for or appropriate to an inner circle of disciples or initiates. In this sense, the word was brought into English in 1655 by Stanley in his History of Philosophy.

Esotericism, as an academic field, refers to the study of alternative or marginalized religious movements or philosophies whose proponents in general distinguish their own beliefs, practices, and experiences from public, institutionalized religious traditions. Among areas of investigation included in the field of esotericism are alchemy, astrology, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, magic, mysticism, Neoplatonism, new religious movements connected with these currents, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century occult movements, Rosicrucianism, secret societies, and theosophy.

It is also important to consider that the major world religions have all been influenced in various ways by esotericism, and Western esotericism has influenced Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Artists in the literary, musical and visual fields have long been influenced by and involved with esoteric teachings and practices, some of these connections are well known, Botticelli and astrology, Mozart and Freemasonry, Yeats and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but many remain less known or hidden, so that the extent and importance of these influences tends to have been underestimated or unrecognised.

Papers are invited which look at Western Esotericism and the Arts, from a variety of academic and practitioner disciplines. Please send an email of your abstract in two hundred words to Dr Sophia Wellbeloved sophia@gurdjieff-books.net

Deadline for papers 31st JULY 2008. The registration fee must be received before speakers can be confirmed.

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Reverend Dr Malcolm Guite
Chaplain of Girton College Cambridge is both poet and priest.
see his website
http://www.malcolmguite.com/links.html

The registration fee is £30.00 for the day, includes light lunch, coffee and tea student rates available. Contact: Dr Sophia Wellbeloved at sophia@gurdjieff-books.net

The Cambridge Centre for the study of Western Esotericism is independent of any academic or esoteric communities, the co-ordinators share an interest in the need for a wider dialogue between scholars and practitioners in the field of Western Esotericism and in the establishment of a secular space in which an interdisciplinary network can thrive (see people).

DR MALCOLM GUITE: KEYNOTE SPEAKER ccwe conference 2008

Abstract of MALCOLM GUITE’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Western Edotericism and the Arts.

This paper will trace the hidden course and some of the sources of the stream of “esoteric” thought and imagery which flows, so often unnoticed through western arts, and in particular will look at literature. The line of esoteric insight and understanding which passes through Boehme to Swedenborg, to Blake and from Blake through to Yeats and so into the “mainstream” of high modernist literature is well known. Less well known is the way renaissance revivals of hermetic learning pass down through Milton, to later poets and especially Coleridge, who was familiar in the original languages of almost the entire Corpus Hermeticum and was also reading and critiquing the German mystical writers and Swedenborg. Indeed it was through Swedenborgian circles that the meeting between Coleridge and Blake was arranged, a hugely significant event which is completely ignored by mainstream literary history. I will suggest in this paper that there is a line to be traced from Coleridge to many “mainstream” nineteenth and and twentieth century writers.

Perhaps the most unlikely literary group to be formed and informed by esoterica, the Oxford Inklings, the group of creative Christian apologists centred around CS Lewis which included Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield. I will show that the works of this latter group depend very strongly for their shape and meaning on astrological structure and also on a mysticism of primal sound and harmony. Specifically we will look at how esoteric tradition from the Order of the Golden Dawn passes through Charles Williams to Lewis, whilst at the same time Owen Barfield, a devotee of Rudolph Stiener, is able to persuade Lewis, through the thought of Coleridge, of the creative and truth-bearing powers of imagination.

I will explore the way in which Tolkien’s concept of mytho-poeia affects both his own and Lewis’ writings and finally at the way in which these many themes are harmoniously linked in Tolkien’s work especially the Silmarillion, whose initial images of creation can be traced back via Georgio’s mystical “Harmonia Mundi” to the earliest orphic traditions. At present the Inklings are pigeonholed as “conservative Christians” and often used as blunt weapons in the conflicts between conservative Christianity and both secularism on the one hand .and non Christian spirituality on the other. My contention is that the rediscovery and defence of Christian mysticism in the works of these writers involves a recovery of just those esoteric and mystical elements which could make Christianity a harmonious participant in our contemporary spiritual awakening and not, as some would have it, a fearful forbidder.

MALCOLM GUITE was born in Nigeria and raised in Africa and Canada, Malcolm Guite is a poet and singer-songwriter living in Cambridge, where he also works as a priest and academic. He has published two collections of poetry; Saying the Names 2002 and The Magic Apple Tree 2004 and has also published poems in Radix, The Mars Hill Review, Crux, Second Spring and the Ambler. He has played in rock’n’ roll band The Crocodiles, trad jazz outfit Ecu-Jazz, and is currently front man for Cambridge rockers Mystery Train. He has collaborated with Kevin Flanagan on jazz-poetry and also the oratorio The Ten Thousand Things for which he wrote the libretto. His CD The Green Man is out on Cambridge Riffs and iTunes. www.malcolmguite.com

Books:
What Do Christians Believe? Granta 2006, (Dutch Edition 2007, Greek Edition 2007, American Edition 2008), part of Granta’s new series on different faith-systems: What Do We Believe?.

In preparation for Ashgate: Faith Hope and Poetry to be published in their series Studies in Theology, Imagination and the Arts.

Contributions to books:
‘Through Literature’, a chapter on exploring the doctrine of the Incarnation through the medium of English Literature in Beholding the Glory ed. Jeremy Begbie DLT 2000.

‘Poetry, Playfulness and Truth…’ a chapter on the theology of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest in Faithful Performances; Enacting Christian Tradition ed. Trevor Hart and Stephen Guthrie Ashgate 2007.

Contributions on Numbers and Exodus in Reflections for Daily Prayer; Lent to Pentecost Church House Publishing 2008.

Six poems in Live Simply Canterbury Press 2008

Articles and Poetry
‘The Art of Memory and the Art of Salvation: The Centrality of Memory in the Sermons of John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes’, in The Seventeenth Century, IV. 1, Spring 1989.

‘”This is my Blood”: Sacrament and Community on an Outer Estate’ in The Franciscan, Summer 1996.

A New Start APU 2000 (Editor and author of ‘Introduction’). A collection of stories by mature students about their experience of struggle, hope and renewal through university education.

‘Faith Hope and Poetry; Transfiguration’ a study in The Mars Hill Review, no. 21 together with a sonnet sequence ‘Canon C 26:1’.

‘The New String’ an article on Christian music from an interfaith perspective in Faith Initiative issue 15 Spring/Summer 2006.

‘Poetry and Transfiguration’ in The Reader Autumn 2007.

His poems have been published in Radix, Second Spring, Mars Hill Review, Crux, Poetry on the Lake and The Ambler.

EASR conference Brno, 7-11. September 2008

Brno, Czech Republic

Call for Papers

EASR conference Brno, 7.-11. September 2008

1.
Panel: ‘Ex Oriente Lux: The Presence of Western Esotericism in Eastern Europe’

Convenors: Marco Pasi (University of Amsterdam) and Osvald Vasicek (University of Amsterdam), on behalf of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE)

In recent decades the academic study of esotericism in the west (particularly France, the Netherlands, Germany and the Anglo-Saxon world) has experienced a rapid growth. In academic institutions in Paris, Amsterdam and Exeter, specific chairs have been created, while increasing attention is given to this area of research also from other fields of religious, cultural, historic, and sociological studies.

Due to several difficulties – mainly linguistic, but also political until 1989 – the status of research of esotericism in Eastern Europe is for the greater part unknown. For this particular panel we are therefore looking for papers that will discuss the development of the study of western esotericism in Eastern Europe and/or single topics related to the presence of western esotericism in the same geographical area. We would especially like to encourage Eastern European students and academics to share their research, knowledge and insight.

The academic study of esotericism has developed mainly in a historical perspective, but we will also consider proposals from others perspectives, such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Topics may likewise vary from alchemy, astrology, magic, hermetism, theosophy, spiritualism, occultism, and range from medieval sources to contemporary esoteric movements.

If you are interested to propose a paper for this panel, please send an e-mail with abstract to: Osvald Vasicek, MA (o.vasicek@uva.nl). Abstracts should be limited to 200 words and should be accompanied by a short personal description of the author with academic affiliation and/ or other academic qualifications. PhD, and exceptionally MA, students are also encouraged to submit a proposal.

Deadline for proposal submission is 24 April 2008.

For more information on the conference and registration see: http://www.phil.muni.cz/relig/easr2008
For more information on the academic study of esotericism see: www.esswe.org and www.amsterdamhermetica.nl.

2.
Call for Papers

EASR conference Brno, 7.-11. September 2008
Panel: ‘The Political Temptations of Western Esotericism’Convenors: Marco Pasi (University of Amsterdam) and Osvald Vasicek (University of Amsterdam), on behalf of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE)

The relationship between Western esotericism and politics is certainly not virgin territory. Just to mention two examples, Auguste Viatte in his classic work on illuminism (Les sources occultes du romantisme, 192 had discussed the political significance of esoteric ideas in the period preceding the French revolution; and James Webb explored the interplay of esotericism and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries in two important books (The Occult Underground, 1974; and The Occult Establishment, 1976). Furthermore, since the mid-1980s the French academic journal Politica Hermetica has devoted its annual issues to this complex relationship. However, there is still much that academic research can say on this topic. One of the avenues which still have to be explored is the relationship that the research field itself may have with politics in the formation and the discussion of its object. How political is the study of esotericism? Which political assumptions may lead scholars to define esotericism in a certain way instead of another? How political is the choice of defining esotericism as specifically ‘western’, as opposed to ‘non-western’ in a cultural climate impregnated by discourses on the ‘clash of civilizations’? During the 20th century esotericism has been often associated to radical politics, both left- and right-wing, revolutionary and reactionary. If esotericism has been for a long time a suspect and sensitive field of research in the academia, its relationship with politics has often created an explosive mixture. Is it possible to study this relationship while avoiding the Scylla of apology and the Charibdis of sensationalist condemnation?
For this panel, we are looking for papers that will explore the politics of studying esotericism in all its possible aspects. Papers dealing with historical instances of the relationship between politics and esotericism will also be considered. Possible areas of interest may be, for instance, the use of esoterical themes in the construction of national identities in the 19th and 20th centuries or political theories of social regeneration based on esoteric thought.

If you are interested to propose a paper for this panel, please send an e-mail with abstract to: Osvald Vasicek, MA (o.vasicek@uva.nl). Abstracts should be limited to 200 words and should be accompanied by a short personal description of the author with academic affiliation and/ or other academic qualifications. PhD, and exceptionally MA, students are also encouraged to submit a proposal.

Deadline for proposal submission is 24 April 2008.

For more information on the conference and registration see: http://www.phil.muni.cz/relig/easr2008
For more information on the academic study of esotericism see: www.esswe.org and www.amsterdamhermetica.nl.

ESSWE CALL FOR PAPERS 2nd INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

View of the City and print of the University of Strasbourg (1885)

The 2nd International Conference of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism will be devoted to the theme “Capitals of European esotericism and transcultural dialogue.”
The conference will be organized by the University of Strasbourg (Equipe d’accueil d’Etudes germaniques, EA 1341/UDS) and the Maison interuniversitaire des Sciences de l’Homme-Alsace (MISHA) in partnership with the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE).

It will be hold between 2 and 4 July 2009 in Strasbourg, France, Maison interuniversitaire des Sciences de l’Homme-Alsace.

CALL FOR PAPERS
During recent decades, the role and impact of esoteric currents within western culture has elicited a growing number of scholarly works. This study brings into play a complex pattern of intellectual discourses and historical phenomena, in close relationship not merely with political and religious spheres, but also with different fields of knowledge and their processes of elaboration.

In 1998, an international conference on the theme “Mystics, Mysticism and Modernity” was organized by the Marc Bloch University of Strasbourg with the aim of studying the impact of esoteric currents on the construction of modernity in society, art and literature at the start of the twentieth century. Following on this research into the connections between esotericism and culture, the present conference aims to make a lasting contribution to the writing of a “ different” cultural history, integrating a detailed analysis of the part that esoteric currents have played in the building, development and interactions of national and of cross-national identities.

Esotericism and Spatiality
Scholarship in the field of esotericism has hitherto often been dominated by a “monographic” bias, a tendency to privilege the study of individual authors or specific currents considered particularly relevant to a given context or period, and therefore stressing the chronological dimension of the topic. Without forsaking historical methods, the conference on “Capitals of European Esotericism and transcultural dialogue” proposes a somewhat different approach, underlining the importance of geographical and intellectual patterns, networks, interactions and exchanges, with the purpose of illustrating the relevance of the “spatial” dimension of culture.

The goal of this conference is, thus, to contribute to the delineation of a landscape of Western esoteric currents by sketching a transhistorical map of their places of emergence and their main centers of diffusion. Following the inaugural conference of the ESSWE held in Tübingen in July 2007 and devoted to “The Construction of Tradition”, it has been decided to dedicate the conference in Strasbourg–itself an important “capital of European esotericism”–to the complementary themes of locality and spatiality.

The concept of “Capitals of European esotericism” finds support–inter alia–in research integrating the “spatial turn” in cultural sciences and history, as well as in geocritical approaches to the study of discourse, more particularly envisaged in their spatio-cultural rooting. The birth and development of a plurality of Western esoteric currents will accordingly be considered as essentially linked to certain privileged loci, where a number of diverse traditions, influences and activities have converged and crystallized, for complex historical and cultural reasons which it will be our task to investigate.

Focus-point: the city as a crucible of cultural identity for European esoteric currents

The various threads of Western esotericism have evolved from and around a number of intellectual centers linked, on the one hand, to local and/or national cultures and, on the other hand, also subject to cultural transfers and exchanges involving elements belonging to foreign horizons, notably oriental ones. Urban communities have been shown to play a major part in these processes of cultural interaction. Certain capitals or cities have acted–sometimes over prolonged periods of time–as diffusion centers for specific currents or disciplines, such as alchemy or Freemasonry (for example, Venice, Avignon, and Marseilles ). Of particular relevance in this perspective is the case of “border-towns”, bearing the stamp of a dual culture or acting as intercultural foyers, which appear for these reasons to qualify even better as places of emergence of such currents (for example, Trieste, Strasburg, Prague, and Cordoba).

Interest may also focus on the common trajectories of economic centers and high places of esoteric thought and activity, and on their social imbrications, as well as on the related topic of patronage which, simultaneously attracting and stabilizing persons and activities in certain spots, nonetheless stimulates the circulation of people and ideas between them (the Medici in Florence, Gonzague in Mantua, Rudolf II in Prague, etc). In the same way, major printing and publishing centers (such as P. Perna’s office in Basel, the Beringos Brothers in Lyon, Diederichs in Munich), or the intellectual exchanges between rival cultural poles (such as Venice and Florence at the turn of the sixteenth century), also deserve attention.

The study of such cultural phenomena may be conducted at different levels:
- On a regional or national scale, emphasizing the many links existing between local cultures, prevailing political conditions, and the historical development of esoteric currents.
- On a cross-cultural and supranational scale, taking into consideration the successive phases of the process of globalization of esotericism, notably relations between East and West.

Another important issue is the literary activity fostered by these “capitals of European esotericism” throughout history, whether they have specifically given rise to a body of literature directly influenced by esoteric speculations and/or practices, or whether they are themselves the object of mythical/literary representation(s) in works of fiction dealing with, or influenced by, esotericism.

Contributors to the conference are invited to use various scholarly methods and approaches from different disciplines: cultural history, art history, history of ideas and of Western esotericism, investigation of the socio-economic conditions of the production of fictional and literary works, etc.

Examples of themes on which contributions will be welcome:

- Mapping of Western Esotericism: identification of greater or lesser urban cultural centers linked with one or more specific currents of European esotericism: “masonic capitals”, centers for the diffusion of theosophical doctrines and writings (such as Amsterdam, Berleburg, London, Dornach), etc.

- Economic and cultural exchanges, esoteric currents and the city: investigation of the interactions between commercial, intellectual, artistic and publishing activities as linked to the presence, development and productions of European esotericism (Lyon, Venice, Berlin, Florence, Paris). Some attention should also be given to the role and operation of esoteric periodicals or journals per se, as well as-more generally-to the presence of esoteric themes or events in cultural media.

- Capitals of European esotericism and multi-cultural dialogue: Western esotericism and the reception of oriental literature and traditions (New York, Paris, Cairo, London).

- Esotericism, fictional imagination and the City: artistic and literary works which display an intimate connection between esoteric themes and the (fictional or real) depiction of a given (or imaginary) city (such as Prague in G. Meyrink’s The Golem, or London in A. Machen’s The Three Impostors).

Approaches combining several of these themes and/or perspectives are of course welcome.

It should also be kept in mind that “Western esotericism” is by no means construed as limited to Christianity, but includes esoteric speculations and practices belonging to other religious cultures (such as Jewish Kabbalah and Neo-Sufism), whose complex (often long-standing and influential) interactions with Christian culture make them an integral part of “European esotericism”.

Working languages: French, German & English.

Conference Committee: Jean-Pierre Brach (Ecole pratique des Hautes-Etudes, Vème section, Paris, vice-president of ESSWE), Sylvain Briens (UDS), Aurélie Choné (UDS), Christine Maillard (UDS).

Conference Chairman: Christine Maillard
Proposals (title and short abstract) should be send to Christine Maillard, christine.maillard@misha.fr, with your name, academic position, and titles of major publications.

Submission deadline : June 15th, 2008.