From the late nineteenth century onward, the Theosophical Society and related occult milieus reimagined beings drawn from ancient traditions, séance culture, folklore, and occult revivalism and integrated them into new expanded esoteric worldviews and practices connected to spiritual evolution, subtle bodies and multiple planes of nature.

This CFP seeks historically grounded papers that analyse how such beings were defined, understood, classified and ranked in esoteric cosmology or how they were operationalised as relational or explanatory agents in spiritual practice (e.g., "obsession," inspiration, “astral” influence). The conference also seeks to explore how such beings function in relation to the construction of spiritual authority, such as distinctions between the ones who see and the ones who do not or as ethical boundary-markers between the dangerous and the beneficent. The conference seeks to traverse how categories and distinctions circulated between cultures, languages, and institutions, teasing out commonalities and differences that either were blurred, upheld or renegotiated. We seek to explore the knowledge production and practices connected with “fairies,” “elementals,” “ghosts,” and "vampires" and if these are treated as survivals of ancient knowledge, as real or imagined, as metaphors, and as historically situated classifications embedded in practices of reading, ritual, clairvoyant observation, pedagogy, and print circulation.

The conference also seeks to explore the gothic aesthetics often associated with such otherworldly beings in addition to conceptions about nature, animism, and human nature relations. More broadly, we also welcome contributions addressing how theosophical authors translate vernacular beings into technical vocabularies of “astral” and “elemental” life? How do these categories interact with the Society for Psychical Research, spiritualism, and folklore scholarship? How do related groups, e.g., Anthroposophical Society, the Hermetic Order of the

Golden Dawn, and the wider spiritual, esoteric currents—inherit, revise, or contest the early theosophical “unseen world”? We also welcome papers examining the influence of these ideas on art, music, literature, comic books and popular culture.

 

Possible paper topics within this CFP theme:

● Taxonomies of the dead: ghosts, “shells,” and post-mortem states in theosophical afterlife geographies

● “Elementals” and nature spirits: fairy-lore as comparative esoteric classification

● Vampires, “astral feeding,” and moral discourse around desire, addiction, and exploitation

● Thought-forms and “artificial” entities: imagination, affect, and quasi-material psychology

● Clairvoyance as method: authority, verification, and pedagogy in esoteric knowledge-making

● Boundary-work with spiritualism and psychical research: séance risks, obsession, and expertise claims

● Translation and circulation: how terms (astral, deva, kama-loka, etc.) reorganised vernacular beings

● Media and aesthetics: illustration, colour theory, music, and architecture as “evidence” of unseen beings

● Colonial and global entanglements: “comparative religion” approaches to spirits across empires and cultures

● Reception history: how these creature-categories migrate into twentieth-century occult, Pagan and New Age repertoires, including occulture

● Visualising the unseen: diagrams, clairvoyant illustration, and the visual epistemology of occult beings

 

Paper Proposals

To be considered as a presenter in the Conference, please submit an abstract of approx. 300 words with a 50-word biography to Erica Georgiades, via email (erica.georgiades@gmail.com).

All proposals will be evaluated by the conference committee.

Theosophical History Conference & The Theosophical History Journal

The purposes of holding the International Theosophical History Conferences are practical in nature: to maintain interest in the subject, to assess the status of research in the area, and finally to provide material for publication within the Theosophical History journal. If the presenter wishes to publish in the journal, we advise that the style of the final text and endnotes conform to Chicago Style and that a digital submission be sent for review to the editor (Tim Rudbøg

timrudboeg@hum.ku.dk) in Word format no later than two months following the Conference. To visit the website of the Theosophical History journal, please https://theohistory.org/

Presentations

Presentation time is max 20 minutes.

Important Dates

Deadline for submission of paper proposals: 20 June 2026

Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2026

All submissions should be in PDF format and must include a short biographical note in the same document.

Registration & Fees

Students: £50 per day (includes coffee breaks and buffet lunch)

Non-students: £75 per day (includes coffee breaks and buffet lunch)

Location: THE REMBRANDT HOTEL 11 Thurloe Pl, South Kensington, London SW7 2RS, United Kingdom.

Key-Note Speaker

Associate Professor Manon Hedenborg White, Malmö University, President of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE).

Conference Committee

Conference Chairs: Jenny Butler, PhD and Tim Rudbøg, PhD.

Jenny Butler, PhD, is a Lecturer in the Study of Religions at University College Cork and President of The Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions (ISASR).

Prof Tim Rudbøg, PhD, Associate professor, Study of Religion, chair and director of the Copenhagen Centre for the Study of Theosophy and Esotericism, University of Copenhagen.

Prof. James Santucci, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at California State University, Fullerton.

Olivia Cejvan, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher at Malmö University, Sweden.

Bjarke Stanley Nielsen, PhD, Denmark.

Ethan Doyle White, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Erica Georgiades, MRes Religious Experience, University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

LOCATION: THE REMBRANDT HOTEL 11 Thurloe Pl, South Kensington, London SW7 2RS, United Kingdom