The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Twentieth Anniversary Edition, by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl A.P. Ruck, Hermes Press, 1998. (Originally published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1978). ISBN 0-915148-20-X (original) (raw)
Related papers
Medical History, 1983
Both of these books deal with folk medicine but whereas American folk medicine is a collection of 1973 conference papers edited by Professor Hand, Magical medicine is a collection of his own selected essays covering essentially the last decade. The basic tenet of both is that the idea of "medicine" is differentially interpreted and defined according to social, historical, religious, and cultural context. Whereas the former gives individual case histories to describe the variety of folk medicinal practices, the latter tends to be thematic and explores the general ideas and theories which may explain this variety. American folk medicine gives us a wide range of case histories, from the role of a mole's heart in curing epilepsy, through illness as a result of a spiritual imbalance to the explanation of birthmarks on newly born children as a result of a mother's misbehaviour during pregnancy. This rich variety of ethnographic essays documents individual beliefs and practices, social context and world view, sorcery and shamanism from Pennsylvania to Mexico, and traces the European ancestry of many folk practices and superstitions. Magical medicine concentrates on what the author calls the magical elements of folklore that have been incorporated into curing ritual both in the New and Old worlds. The ideas of the magical transference of disease and of disease as divine retribution or as the result of animal intrusion into the body are all dealt with at length, as is the magical symbolism involved in passing one's body through a tree's bowed trunk in order to cure hernia or whooping-cough. The antiquity of such practices in Europe and their possible transference to the Americas during the sixteenth century is also explored, as is the possibility that there may be a common substrate of folk medicine held by all the world's peoples which stretches back into the palaeolithic past. Folk medicine, it seems, is predicated upon mythic explanations which are themselves the rationalization of the irrational. This process of rationalization is at the heart of man's uniqueness, and thus folk medicine is seen as an integral part of his physiological and cultural development.
New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism, 2021
This article argues that esotericism is not a European phenomenon diffused to the colonies, but rather global and originated through the conquest of America. Illustrating its emergence in New Spain and Peru, it discusses how the Eurocentrism of current research models has concealed such aspects, as well as other currents and factors in the Spanish Renaissance. Introducing a decolonial perspective, the article problematizes the boundaries of esotericism through a historically informed definition of “the West.” Finally, it discusses the concepts of “colonialism” and “race” in modern occultism by way of Henri Girgois’ "The Occult Among the Aborigines of South America" (1897), first General Delegate of Martinism in Latin America.
RELIGION, MAGIC, AND SCIENCE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE AND AMERICA
Chapter 2 Magic 25 Chapter 3 Miracles 45 Chapter 4 Witches and Witch Hunting 59 Chapter 5 The "Godly State" 83 Chapter 6 The Anthropological Revolution 111 Chapter 7 Religion and the Scientific Revolution 133 Chapter 8 Esotericism and the Scientific Revolution 153 Chapter 9 A Test Case 173 Epilogue 197 Notes 209 Bibliography 237 Index 275 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The early modern period was one of transition, when people were drawn to the past-to the idea of the lost Golden Age and the Garden of Edenbut also to the future, envisioning all kinds of marvels from submarines and flying machines to running water, frozen chickens, blood transfusions, and heated bedrooms with en suite bathrooms. It is with this Janus-faced vision in mind that I look back on my good fortune to have been a graduate student at the Warburg Institute when Ernst Gombrich was its head, and Frances Yates, D. P Walker, and Charles Schmitt were there to guide me over the shoals of Renaissance and early modern intellectual history. It was they who planted the idea in my mind that well into the eighteenth century, religion, magic, and science were all of a piece. This was the premise on which the Warburg Institute had been founded, and it is one that has stuck with me through all the years of my academic life and is at the core of this book. Remembering my years as a graduate student learning to write ambidextrously so I could sit on and warm at least one hand in the frigid reading room of the Warburg and thinking back to the lunchroom and all those frothy cappuccinos tasting of eggs (because the nozzle of the cappuccino machine steamed milk and scrambled eggs) takes me back to what I now consider my past perfect. There was Frances Yates taking nail scissors from her ample purse to cut through the impossibly thick plastic cover trapping the little piece of cheese that came with crackers for lunch. There was Professor Gombrich and other members of the faculty with their guests, all sitting at the same low tea table with students around them in one of the most democratic and terrifying environments a student could possibly imagine. People, by which I mean, adult academics, actually paused to think before they spoke. Death at the desk was not x Acknowledgments Esotericism at the American Academy of Religion. I thank Antoine Faivre, Jean-Pierre Brach, Joscelyn Godwin, and Wouter Hanegraaff for welcoming me to into the fold of Esotericists, where I have had the good fortune of meeting many scholars in the field, among whom I am especially indebted to
Knowing Primitives, Witches, and the Spirits: Anthropology and the Mastery of Nonsense
Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts, 2013
In this article I am taking up an argument originally offered by Jonathan Strauss regarding the notion of the irrational as a privileged space in medical discourses in France in the nineteenth century. Strauss argues that the role of irrationality and “nonsense” was that of a “legitimizing force” for medicine in that “the very incomprehensibility of the mad created a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes.” Building upon Strauss’s argument that the mastery of the irrational in the medical sciences was an essential ground legitimizing the expertise they purported to offer, I will demonstrate that a similarly privileged space was claimed by early anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the discipline’s purported ability to understand the seeming “nonsense” of “the native.” The empirical mastery of domains consigned to the illogical realm of human social life translates into the characteristic anthropological concerns with non-Western ritual and belief and the foundation of an empirical method based on experience that would allow field-workers to “see” unknown or irrational forces. I will demonstrate this central point by starting with an analysis of how figures of the invisible and irrational drove Bronislaw Malinowski’s foundational ethnographic work in the Trobriand Islands. I will then go back in time to outline the precursors of these figures as seen in the problem of evidence and the modes of investigation deemed proper to the investigation of witchcraft in the context of the “witch craze” in sixteenth-century Europe. Arguing that the problem of establishing proof in reference to invisible forces has durably shaped our modes of investigating human social and cultural life ever since, I then bring this epistemological thread forward in time via an analysis of the irrational in Jean-Martin Charcot’s nineteenth-century research on hysteria. The essay then draws to a close roughly in the time period in which it began with a brief account of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s expulsion from an anthropology that was by the 1930s dominated by Malinowski’s vision of ethnographic method and the evidence this method could produce.
Encounters with Sorcery: An Ethnographer's Account. Anthropology and Humanism, 35: 192–203.
Anthropology and Humanism, 2010
Drawing from data collected during fieldwork from Westerners participating in ayahuasca ceremonies in the Peruvian Amazon, I discuss the ways they make contact with spirits. I particularly focus on the issue of sorcery, illustrating differences in the ways it is perceived by Westerners and Peruvians. I argue that although it is possible that both populations have the same or very similar experiences with ayahuasca, their subjective interpretations and metanarratives are quite different because of the very different cultural paradigms to which they have been exposed. In the Amazonian cultural framework, local ayahuasca users tend to interpret any negative or dark experiences during ceremonies as attacks, by malevolent shamans, hired by other members of their community. The more individualistic Western cultural framework leads Westerners to interpret these experiences as part of their own psychic processes. I found, however, this pattern to be challenged, in that Western shamanic apprentices have integrated the concepts of sorcery and shamanic warfare into their worldview. I discovered that, in many ways, a shamanic apprenticeship for a Westerner involves a radical shift in interpretations of shamanic experience. Certain personal experiences during my fieldwork, which I discuss in this article, challenged my own faith in the dominant anthropological paradigm—that shamanic experiences are culturally defined—as well as my largely secular worldview.
Ancient Fears and the New Order: Witch Beliefs and Physiognomy in the Age of Reason
By common accord, the eradication of witch beliefs is one of the most important signs of the new order established in the Enlightenment. During the ‘Age of Reason’, experimental and mathematical sciences began to form the basis of new philosophies; mechanistic processes supplanted the spiritual as a method of explaining the world; witch beliefs and other superstitions began to lose their validity, and – accordingly – witch hunts, trials and executions became a thing of the less enlightened past. But there is also much evidence to the contrary, indicating that the old superstitions were not abandoned during the Age of Reason, but co-existed comfortably alongside new intellectual and philosophical thought systems like Cartesianism and Deism. Witch beliefs weathered the Enlightenment in two ways: out in the open – in the form of eighteenth-century witch hunts and witch executions – and underground, sublimated not only in ‘art’, such as the fairy tales of Romanticism, but also in ‘science’, such as physiognomy, a discipline embraced or at least condoned by the best and brightest of the Enlightened Age, including Goethe, Herder, Lenz, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn. The witch trial of Anna Göldi and physiognomic analyses of the poet Anna Louisa Karsch will serve as my test cases for this assertion. Throughout, I will take a look at an organ that has not only played an important role in both witch beliefs and physiognomy, but is also at the centre of the enlightened credo of ‘seeing is believing’: the eye.