Our ongoing tendency, based on a long history, in Western culture and the Global North to marginalise knowledge, beliefs and practices that don’t serve our dominant power paradigms, gets a stunningly well-researched shakedown with three monumental academic titles whose authority is grounded on expert scholarship, but whose style is for the general reader.
These books describe human experiences and understandings that upend the white supremacist, colonialist, patriarchal knowledge regimes – including those driving “modernisation” and “globalisation” – that are corralling our world into polycrisis.
In Esotericism in Western Culture, Wouter J Hanegraaff notes the two different meanings of the word “esotericism”. The first describes the dialectics of secrecy concerned with the social regulation of access to specific forms of knowledge. The second – the esotericism that Hanegraaff is concerned with – is a collection of historical traditions, ideas, practices and social formations that are grouped together because they are considered to have certain things in common.
An overarching commonality across this large and multifarious collection, which in our times has come to be labelled “esotericism”, is that it has been rejected or marginalised by mainstream European intellectuals and the public they influence. Random examples from Western culture alone include Islam, European shamanism, Renaissance alchemy and 20th-century “chaos magic”.
The politics of establishing a European identity required that its ‘internal enemies’ (in this case heretics, witches, and magicians) would be identified, set apart, demonised and finally exorcised
According to Hanegraaff, esotericism has been set apart as the problematic “Other” against which the dominant religious and intellectual elites defined, and still define, their very identity. It strongly emphasises specific worldviews and epistemologies, as well as associated practices, that are at odds with normative post-Enlightenment culture in the modern West.
Hanegraaff writes that to ignore the social and intellectual taboo on these topics means engaging in a critical project that he has baptised “counter-normativity”. Counter-normativity refuses to accept our normative standards of what is supposed to be taken seriously and what may safely be dismissed out of hand. As such, counter-normativity is a rejection of the rejection of rejected knowledge.
Hanegraaff argues that what ultimately came out of the developments of pre-Reformation Christianity, Protestantism and modernity was a “potent narrative” about the West that remains extremely influential in our societies and educational institutions.
“It is based on systematic patterns of excluding, marginalising, misrepresenting, or discrediting a wide range of ideas and practices that, in actual fact, were always part and parcel of Western culture but did not fit a narrow ideological agenda of what that culture was supposed to be about.”
The title of a classic from 1975 by the historian Norman Cohn – Europe’s Inner Demons – captures Hanegraaff’s point precisely: “The politics of establishing a European identity required that its ‘internal enemies’ (in this case heretics, witches, and magicians) would be identified, set apart, demonised and finally exorcised.”
This is the “internal Eurocentric narrative” of Western culture - the culturally dominant story of what we’ve been told to see as central to the identity of Europe and the West. It is also the story of what we’ve been instructed, tacitly or explicitly, to dismiss as marginal to that identity.
“We are dealing,” writes Hanegraaff, “with a grand narrative in the true sense of the word: a foundational myth about ‘where we came from,’ ‘who we are,’ and ‘where we should be going.’ Once we understand its nature and manner of operation, we will understand why ‘esotericism’ is commonly perceived as a separate field, a domain of otherness and weirdness. It will also become easy to see why intellectual or religious elites have so often depicted it as a subversive and dangerous threat to foundational Western values or, with even greater effect, as a laughable and silly fools’ asylum.”
Eventually, this polemical narrative became the chief template for “external-Eurocentric” perceptions of non-Western cultures as “irrational,” “immoral,” “backward,” “uncivilised,” or otherwise “inferior”: manifestations of Eurocentrism that are basic to colonialist, imperialist and racist politics, and “typically operate by means of projecting Western heresiological stereotypes such as ‘primitive superstition,’ ‘sinister magic,’ or ‘the horrors of pagan idolatry’” upon peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
For the first time in the history of the British census, in 2021, thousands of respondents declared their religion to be “shamanism”, while surveys in the US suggest that hundreds of thousands of Americans consult shamans regularly
Insofar as the modern study of esotericism exposes the deep ideological structure of internal Eurocentrism and its effects on a global scale, Hanegraaff sees it as “a profoundly decolonial project” that seeks to break the power of the dominant narrative on which the claims of Western superiority have historically been built. It does so by restoring all those marginalised, misrepresented, forgotten, excluded and discredited beliefs or practices – and the people who expressed them – to a status of normality and legitimacy in the complex history of Western culture. This allows us to see that the “foreign Others” are not as “Other” as we’ve been led to believe.
The historical and theoretical underpinning provided by counter-normative intellectuals like Hanegraaff strengthens the mainstream legitimacy of breakthrough works such as Shamanism: The Timeless Religion and The Witch Studies Reader – portals onto worlds that have often either been suppressed or misrepresented by Eurocentrism, or else relegated to the field of “amateur” or inadequately resourced research.
After years of study – including ethnographic fieldwork with Mentawai communities on Siberut Island, Indonesia, and psychedelic use in the Colombian Amazon – anthropologist Manvir Singh concludes that shamanism as an institution is a near inevitability of human societies: “a captivating package of practices and beliefs” that appears over and over because of its deep psychological appeal. He defines a shaman as a specialist who, through non-ordinary or altered states – also described as “trance” or “ecstasy” - engages with “unseen realities” and provides services like healing and divination.
“Shamanism characterised the earliest human religions,” writes Singh, “echoes in industrialised societies today, and will perpetually re-emerge.” Neo-shamanism, he argues, is just as “real” as more traditional forms, and is rapidly gaining traction in the Global North. For the first time in the history of the British census, in 2021, thousands of respondents declared their religion to be “shamanism”, while surveys in the US suggest that hundreds of thousands of Americans consult shamans regularly.
In trying to limit shamanism to far-flung or archaic societies, most commentators have denied the “universality” of its principles and the intrinsic human need that it addresses: to try to control life’s uncertainties. The Ancient Greek Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, Judeo-Christian prophets including Jesus, and multiple miracle-touting US TV personalities, are all shamans under Singh’s definition. “A serious global perspective helps to curb cultural vanity,” he writes, “showing commonality where people otherwise assume difference and even superiority.”
Addressing psychedelic use in shamanism, Singh draws conclusions that burgeoning hordes of psychedelic tourists and growing numbers of users in their own countries won’t want to hear: the evidence for psychedelic therapy being a recapitulation of an ancient, worldwide shamanic tradition is scant at best.
The Witch Studies Reader highlights how tens of thousands of poor, Indigenous and/or ageing women in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have been murdered for their association, real or imagined, with witchcraft
“This narrative might feel good,” writes Singh, “but it mangles history in service of ideology. In so doing, it reinforces a distinction between primitive and civilized while projecting images that are Western-centric and attention-grabbing onto the diversity of the world’s spiritual practices.”
Dedicated “to witches everywhere”, The Witch Studies Reader – edited by Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward, professors of sociology and feminist studies respectively – is a beautifully-produced 500-page grimoire of over 30 essays by writers from around the world, with a fore fronting of witches of colour and voices from the Global South.
I’m gobsmacked by the breadth, research quality and radicalism of this anthology, which is “a gathering of the global coven” in “an intersectional and decolonial approach to writing about witches.”
This lens requires that readers in our culture look beyond the fashionable valorisation of witches, and grapple with the reasons that contemporary witch hunts have been omitted from Global North accounts of witches and witchcraft. It also requires that we note “the ways that colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist logics enable the exploitation and control of aging women’s bodies, labour, and resources in every corner of the globe – with witchcraft accusations being but one method used to exercise this control of women.”
Whilst incorporating fascinating insights and research on the kind of witchcraft “glamour” and political activism we see breaking into the mainstream media in Western culture, The Witch Studies Reader highlights how tens of thousands of poor, Indigenous and/or ageing women in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have been murdered for their association, real or imagined, with witchcraft in the past eighty years. This violence is ongoing.
Witch hunts, like colonialism and state-sanctioned slavery, are often presumed to be located at a historical point in time, away from which our society has progressed. In this important book, feminist researchers of contemporary witchcraft-related murders upend that presumption, documenting how the forces of patriarchy, global capitalism and land displacement continue to intersect to make women vulnerable to scapegoating during times of economic crisis.
Ushering the esoteric counter-normative into “academic discourse”, with many scholars who are witches themselves, this book opens with a spell:
May each word to follow
be an offering
to the infinite altar that holds our collective brilliance,
the place where every witch’s heartbreak wail and freedom spell
has claimed its little corner,
there, waiting, for the next witches
to carry on the work
Further Reading
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, tr. William Weaver, (Vintage, 2001). This satirical novel by Italian philosopher/writer, first published in 1988, demonstrates that the importance of esotericism to major poets and novelists isn’t dependent on whether they endorse its ideas or worldviews. The novel is so full of references to Kabbalah, alchemy and other esoteric subjects that critic/novelist Anthony Burgess suggested it needed an index.
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade (Princeton University Press, 2004). Romanian emigrant-scholar Eliade (1907-1986) was one of the founders of the modern study of the history of religion. His study on shamanism, first published in 1951, quickly became the standard. While some of his findings have been eclipsed in the years since, his work is still necessary reading for shamanists.
Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic and Power by Pam Grossman (Gallery Books, 2019). Part-memoir part-exploration, Grossman’s account of her initiation into witchcraft, the meaning of the “witch” as a powerful emancipatory archetype, and the expression of witchcraft and magic in the worlds of art, literature and radical politics, is an inspiring and erudite read. See also Grossman’s Witch Wave podcast.
