ESSWE Agenda

Magic, loosely defined, is the attempt to engage with the world through the imagination or psyche, in order to obtain some form of knowledge, benefit or advantage. Celestial magic engages with the cosmos through stellar, planetary or celestial symbolism, influences or intelligences. This academic conference will explore the history, philosophy and practice of celestial magic in past or present societies. The conference organisers invite proposals for papers of 30 minutes which may deal with text, imagery, practice or theory. We welcome proposals on any time period or culture. The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2012.

Issues relating to health (understood in a broad sense) can be seen as an intrinsic part of the field of esotericism, but surprisingly little attention has been given to how health is understood and construed in esoteric discourses. The conference is thus as an attempt to fill an important lacuna in the study of Western esotericism. Suggested topics include (but are not limited to), esoteric notions and discourses on health, sexuality and well-being, "occult" causes for disease, "occult medicine", notions of therapeutic benefits of magic and meditation, alchemical approaches to health, alternative forms of medicine, etc.

Over the last decade geography has turned its attention to engaging with those elements of place that remain unseen and to exploring the relationality between materiality, agency and the invisible as affect or spectrality. This session seeks to explore the way that place not just affects us, but stirs, moves, disturbs, confuses and distorts our perception. In particular, the session focuses on the occult and occluded facets of various geographies. Here the occult pertains to that which is hidden or obscured from our perception but potentially not to that which is unknowable. The occult provides a way in which to enframe those uncanny aspects of place such as unseen agency, strange naturalisms, magic, ecologies of the spectral, and positions them within esoteric practice. As such, the occult as a movement represents a history of practice that seeks to work with and manipulate the invisible and unseen aspects of place; the occult in its various manifestations therefore signifies an often ignored, yet deliberately hidden, frontier in geographical practice.

There are two dominant understandings of Pythagoras in the Pythagorean tradition (and research about it): Pythagoras as a “shaman” and “religious leader” on the one hand, as a “philosopher” and “scientific genius” on the other. Since F.M. Cornford’s seminal article “Mysticism and Science in the Pythagorean Tradition” (1922/1923) various attempts have been made to reconcile these understandings (e.g. Dodds, Burkert) as well as to analyze them separately (e.g. Huffman). Most recently, scholarship has tended to compartmentalize different facets of Pythagorean knowledge and in doing so has failed to provide a context in which to explore questions of their origins, development, and interdependency.

The 2013 Annual Meeting of the NGG focuses on lived religion, that is religious practice such as it is actually enacted and religious identities and beliefs such as they are actually held. The opposite of lived religion is thus not ‘dead religion’, but ‘prescribed religion’, the religion of catechisms, canons, and creeds. We invite papers that explore the lived religion of groups and individuals, including the unofficial and everyday dimensions of the great religious traditions, non-institutional and post-Christian religion (e.g., ‘new age’, neo-paganism), and tensions between lived and prescribed religion. The conference welcomes anthropological, sociological, cognitive, and historical perspectives, and we especially encourage papers of a methodological or theoretical nature. The conference aims to advance the study of lived religion by critically and systematically reflecting on the core question ‘how do we approach and theorise lived religion’?

This meeting will explore the theme of altered consciousness in relation to popular culture, psychology, philosophy, religion, medicine and literature during the period 1918-1980.

The next meeting of the American Academy of Religion will include a session organized by the group for Western esotericism (co-chaired by Cathy Gutierrez and Marco Pasi). The deadline for the submission of proposals (originally 1st March) has now been extended to 4th March 12.00 PM EST, so there is still some time to submit a proposal if you wish to do so.

This two-day event is jointly organised by the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and the Arts University Bournemouth, in association with the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). The conference seeks to investigate the formative role that occultism and magic have played in Western and non-Western visual and material culture. It aims to present original research in this feld as well as to establish a productive dialogue between both senior academics and current and recent graduate students with a particular research interest in occultism and visual culture.

In ancient Greece, the Pythagoreans worshipped perfect numbers and turned them into musical scales. Two thousand years later, Nicolaus Copernicus still heard their sound in the perfection of the universal spheres. Numerologists, alchemists and the Gnostics all attempt to explain the mysteries of the universe with the precision and beauty of mathematics. And what would the voluptuous garments displayed in Renaissance painting be without the clear lines and structured order of geometry? Already these few examples show that mathematics has always been more than is commonly represented in popular culture in the wider British context.

Of all the divinities of classical antiquity, the Greek Hermes (= Roman Mercury) is the most versatile, complex, and ambiguous. His functions embrace both the marking of boundaries and their transgression, commerce and theft, rhetoric and practical jokes; he also plays the role of mediator between all realms of human and divine activity, embracing heaven, earth and the netherworld.