India and the Occult: The Influence of South Asian Spirituality on Modern Western Occultism (original) (raw)

The Idea of India in the Imaginary of Western Occultism

India and the Occult: The Influence of South Asian Spirituality on Modern Western Occultism, 2014

This is the opening chapter of my book "India and the Occult," where I introduce the main subjects treated in the study and argue, inter alia, "family resemblance" between South Asian and Western esotericism and suggest that Western occultists were much more influential in promoting interest in Yoga and Tantra than is generally acknowledged.

Magic between Europe and India: On Mantras, Coercion of Gods, and the Limits of Current Debates

Religions 2021, 12, 87, 2021

Several scholars have criticized the efforts to explain Indian mantras as spells, but much is left to clarification. Why do submission-versus-coercion characterizations keep reoccurring, albeit disputed? Why does the difference between this-worldly and other-worldly goals also keep its important role in discussions about mantras? Furthermore, how are these ideas tied to analyses of the beliefs of practitioners? We identify three main positions concerning mantras: They are explained as spells, prayers, or both at the same time. However, the criteria for determining whether mantras are magical practices or religious practices apparently allow for characterizing the very same mantra as either of the two or even as ‘magico-religious’. The general theories of magic are not able to explain this problem. In the last part of this article, we analyse the role that the concept of supernatural powers plays in the debates. It was a whole structure of interconnected ideas, deeply rooted in Christian belief in biblical God and fallen angels, which formulated the dominant characterization of magical practices in modern scholarship on India. We propose a three-step scheme which shows how the originally coherent account of Christian theology gradually dissolved into a set of problematic ideas that have typified discussions of Indian mantras over the last six or more decades.

The occult mind: magic in theory and practice

Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2007

At the heart of Christopher Lehrich's The Occult Mind several theses are articulated: that the works of certain occult thinkers are in need of reassessment in light of their intellectual proximity to contemporary theoretical debates, that the "problem of occult analogy" may be seen to haunt the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss and its heirs, and that the question of "magic" is in need of urgent theoretical rehabilitation given the foregoing propositions. Each of these notions is pursued in order to explicate a more general problem for historians: Is it possible to overcome the distinction between historical and morphological methodologies in regard to the study of "esoteric" texts? At several points Lehrich posits that the solution to this methodological problem "would require a spell" and it is only at the end of the book that one realizes that that is precisely what he has done -The Occult Mind appears as nothing less than a twenty-first-century grimoire, a book of incantatory power for anyone interested in the tradition of Western esotericism and its recent academic legitimation.

Chapter 4 Occulting the East: Theosophy and theodicy

The preceding chapters have examined the abstraction of the nineteenth-century colonial gaze, and its impact on the perception of the Orient in popular culture. Orientals, whether narrativised on stage or exhibited at the world fair or mechanized by the magician's automata, were largely represented in dialectic opposition to the European observers-superstitious rather than rational, devious rather than honourable, mystical rather than intellectual, primitive rather than modern. Yet, just as Spiritualism had sought to foster visceral proof of the spiritual world with its ectoplasmic manifestations and photographic plates, so the Theosophists sought to "realise" the Orient and its truths-both in the mystical sense of "realising the Absolute" but also on the pragmatic level of building a home for Theosophy within India, the most spiritual of lands. J. N. Maskelyne-inventor, magician of the Egyptian Hall, and detractor of spiritualism-had predicted such a move: