Book Reviews / Journal of Religion in Europe 6 (2013) 483–493 491

Wouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western

Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 478 pp., ISBN: 9780521196215,
€ 84.85, Hardback.

Hic sunt dracones. With these words Hanegraaff leads us on a journey to the terra
incognita of Western esotericism, an increasingly popular field of research dedi-
cated to a cluster of historically related traditions that emerged in the wake of the
Renaissance humanist reception of Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and Gnostic currents
of thought and practice. The author’s stated objective is not to write a history of
Western esotericism per se, but rather a history of its scholarly construction as the
rejected Other of legitimate intellectual enterprise – a bold venture that ultimately
ends in failure, although Esotericism and the Academy offers valuable new perspec-
tives on a little-known territory and its inhabitants.
Hanegraaff sets the emergence of Western esotericism as a historiographical
category within the broader historical context of debates concerning the
‘Hellenization’ of Christianity and their decisive influence upon the modern intel-
lectual landscape. Thus the prisca theologia of Plethon, Ficino, and their heirs is
exemplary of a Renaissance ‘ancient wisdom narrative’ with its origins in
Platonising patristic apologetics; while this narrative established the referential
corpus of what would become known as ‘Western esotericism’ (p. 73), the founda-
tions for a properly historical study of the field only emerged via seventeenth-
century Protestant anti-apologeticism (Thomasius, Colberg, Brucker) and its
mission to expose the pagan Platonism that had ‘poisoned’ Christianity (pp. 150–
151). In the wake of the Enlightenment, Western esotericism came to be conceptu-
alised as a “waste-basket category” for disparate domains of knowledge rejected by
disenchanted science (p. 254). Thus Hanegraaff’s book is a call to ‘correct our col-
lective amnesia’ with an ‘anti-eclectic historiography’ that challenges the canon of
modern intellectual culture (pp. 375, 377).
Yet this proposed act of remembering is hindered by the author’s more or less
unwitting promotion of the marginalizing binary narratives he describes. Even if
esotericism could accurately be portrayed as a mere counter-category of post-
Enlightenment intellectual identity, Hanegraaff’s monolithic conception of that
identity is nowhere more apparent than in his book’s opening pages, which launch
into an essentializing depiction of ‘our’ mirror image (p. 3) that may well appear
unintentionally esoterophobic to readers accustomed to engaging a plurality of
scholarly subjectivities. Despite its debt to post-structuralist discourse analysis, at
heart this work remains a Lovejovian history of ideas so unwaveringly internalist in
orientation that agency is ascribed to historiographical categories: variously “the
Enlightenment” (pp. 141, 278, 373), “modern chemistry” (p. 212), “Protestantism”
(p. 221), and “modernity” (p. 374) are said to “define their own identities” through
the production of alterity. In this manner the history and historiography of esoteri-
cism are conflated and presented as free-floating superstructures, torn from their

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/18748929-00604006

492 Book Reviews / Journal of Religion in Europe 6 (2013) 483–493

moorings in socio-economic tumult, cultural interchange, and the experiential

wellsprings of doctrine in biography and religious praxis.
The almost complete absence of wars, expulsions, financial crises, revolutions
(and most glaringly the Reformation itself) from his account lends Hanegraaff a
blank slate on which to Whiggishly depict the rise and fall of disembodied dis-
courses as a triumphant march towards the emergence of his own methodological
paradigm. For Esotericism and the Academy is essentially an extended polemic
against the phenomenology of religion, which dominated the academic study of
religion in the Netherlands until the ‘anthropological turn’ that remains
Hanegraaff’s chief inspiration. Evans-Pritchard and Geertz even make a brief
appearance (pp. 75–76) to explain the persistence of a belief in the prisca theologia
among our continent’s inhabitants, despite the emergence of a historical-critical
methodology that was “simply superior” (p. 127): empirical science is of no avail
when it comes to cherished ‘sentiments and values,’ or to the ‘metaphysical pathos’
(Lovejoy) adhering to supposedly immutable truths.
Much as depictions of colonial fauna bear the unmistakeable traces of an alien
imaginary, so the denizens of Hanegraaff’s continent too often appear as curious
hybrid creatures in which the author’s contemporary Dutch sensibilities threaten
to overwhelm unique historical forms just as surely as the ‘one-size-fits-all’ arche-
typal template of the sui generis approach to religion. Thus Ficino is said (contra
Hankins) to have conceived of the era of the prisci theologi in terms of a “timeless
metaphysics” (p. 50), while the “mundane contingencies of history” were nothing
more to him than the external manifestation of “meaningful synchronicities”
(p. 43). If Ficino is transformed into Jung, Eliade lends his countenance to the first
‘religionist’ pseudo-historiographer, Gottfried Arnold, who could only respond to
the ascent of the superior historical-critical paradigm with a feeble discursive
‘strategy’ portraying true Christian religion as an irreducible experience of ‘the
sacred’ (p. 149). Such projections of a very recognisably contemporary worldview
rival Arnold’s Impartial History of the Church and Heretics as an exercise in partisan
history writing – a problem only compounded by Hanegraaff’s repeated and
strongly normative insistence that his position is “non-ideological” (pp. 150, 218,
313, 377), which serves to veil a transcendental ahistorical subject manifestly
derived from the Calvinist imago Dei.
An account of the intellectual construction of ‘Western esotericism’ as a histo-
riographical category can only be misconceived if it fails to consider the history
of European religious esotericism in its narrower etymological sense, i.e. restricted
religious doctrines and practices typically dealing with the production of radically
altered states of consciousness. These are less visible to the contemporary historian
due to their transmission in oral or manuscript form; alas, in Esotericism and
the Academy they are altogether invisible. As the thrust of the Protestant ‘anti-
apologetic’ polemic was directed less towards the paganism in Roman Catholicism
(p. 147) than towards the esoteric inspirationism within Protestantism, some
 Book Reviews / Journal of Religion in Europe 6 (2013) 483–493 493

recourse to the fate of Reformation spiritualist currents and their appropriation of

addressative magical practices was essential here. After all, the struggle to define
and maintain orthodoxy within a splintered Christendom cannot be reduced to
the internal contradictions afflicting polemical narratives.
This book is at its best when it addresses the period of Hanegraaff’s greatest
expertise, modernity proper, although here too ‘the truth of history’ prevails as his-
toriography proves to be a “more fundamental science” than psychology (p. 293).
A chapter on German Romantic historiographies is particularly valuable: yet once
again, Hanegraaff participates in the very Othering he condemns by portraying the
theory of a ‘ganglionic’ unconscious as a “full-blown counter-metaphysics directed
wholesale against Enlightenment rationalism” (p. 263). This binary opposition
glosses over important continuities with the Enlightenment paradigm: Reil,
Schubert, and their colleagues brought the prisca theologia into the realm of bio-
logical ‘instinct,’ and esoteric techniques for the production of altered states into
the realm of experimental psychology. In the final analysis we are dealing here not
only with the historiography of philosophy but also with that of psychology: while
the Renaissance magi may well have been poor historians, they were nevertheless
profound psychologists concerned with the influence of what are today termed
subliminal psychological processes.
The conflation of history with scholarly historiography that pervades Esotericism
and the Academy is consummated in Hanegraaff’s closing attempt to define
Western esotericism as “an imaginative construct in the minds of intellectuals and
the wider public” (p. 377) – albeit founded upon marginalized beliefs in ‘cosmothe-
ism and gnosis’ (categories the author adopts from Thomasius). As the deconstruc-
tion of a mnemohistorical fiction we might therefore expect ‘the history of Western
esotericism’ to be a short-lived academic discipline. But as long as we are also stud-
ying marginalized European religious practices with historically and functionally
related homologues in Levantine Jewish, Islamic and Indo-Tibetan contexts, there
remains the promise of fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration, and so we should
not expect this newly discovered continent will soon dematerialise like a fata mor-
gana before our very eyes.

Hereward Tilton
University of Exeter