Yves Mühlematter - Occult Roots of Religious Studies

Edited by

Christian Kassung

Sylvia Paletschek

Erhard Schttpelz

Helmut Zander

Volume

On the Influence of Non-Hegemonic Currents on Academia around 1900

ISBN 9783110660173

e-ISBN (PDF) 9783110664270

e-ISBN (EPUB) 9783110660333

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2021 Yves Mhlematter and Helmut Zander, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Yves Mhlematter

Helmut Zander

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. In the historiographical narratives on the history of religious studies this dimension is usually completely absent, even if the connections to other disciplines emerging in the 19th 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, 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 although Friedrich Max Mller, 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 studies, has intensively dealt with Blavatskys Theosophy. Hardly any other picture emerges for the chairs with strong ties to religious studies around 1900, for example in Indology, where esoteric connections have also remained practically unnoticed. In this volume, Marco Frenschkowski uses the debates in Great Britain as an example in order to document how close the connections could actually be. Further research might reveal a broad panorama of relations in other regions and at other periods.