Occult Roots of Religious Studies (original) (raw)

The first and primary thesis of this book is that religious studies have little-known and sometimes repressed origins which lie in the field of esotericism. The second thesis, which stems directly from this idea, holds that esotericism is an intrinsic part of hegemonic cultures and not a separate, small, "secret", or "occult" field of minority groups. These two themes run through all the essays in this volume. By adopting this perspective, we aim to shed new light on the history of the academic discipline of religious studies and esotericism. 1 In the historiographical narratives on the history of religious studies this dimension is usually completely absent, 2 even if the connections to other disciplines emerging in the 19 th century (e.g. ethnology, cultural anthropology, geography of religion) are addressed or if the connection with ideological patterns of interpretation, e.g. evolutionary doctrines, which also play a central role in occultism, is present. One can read a lot about academisation, professionalisation and disciplinary differentiation, and, last but not least, about the dissociation from theology, 3 but nearly nothing about the connections with esoteric currents. It is less surprising that such perspectives are missing in the research on institutional developments in the genesis of religious studies 4although Friedrich Max Müller, whose appointment to the chair for "Comparative Philology" in Oxford, established in 1868, and his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873) are considered to be founding acts of religious