Esoteric Renaissance, Esalen Center for Theory & Research

"For according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world.... Since then we are generated out of both worlds, we speak in two languages, and we must be understood also by two languages."

~ Jacob Boehme (1575-1624),
German cobbler, and father of modern theosophy

Introduction

Among the more surprising developments in the late twentieth century academy was the birth of Esoteric Studies as a respectable field of inquiry. In the wake of the pioneering work of scholars such as A. J. Festugiere and Frances Yates, major universities-including the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of Amsterdam- established chairs in Esoteric Studies and Hermeticism, while scholars elsewhere, hailing from a diversity of fields, devoted their work to the study of esoteric currents in their many forms, and the profound but occluded influence that esotericism has had on the formation of Western culture, science, and religion. The sheer inattention to such materials, characteristic of the post-Enlightenment academy, is what makes the advent of Esoteric Studies within the modern university so exciting. Here is a field that looks closely at a vital aspect of human spirituality and experience-an aspect whose very essence challenges accepted religious and scientific dogmas but has nonetheless had a formative influence on contemporary culture-and an aspect that has too long been taboo. To question a taboo is always dangerous, but to do so inevitably holds a promise of liberation, discovery, and, in this case, perhaps even a new manifestation of the sacred.

From its inception, the Esalen Institute been a transgressive institution, a place where taboos are broken in the name of healing and sacred liberation. It was with a sense of appropriateness then, that from March 7-12, 2004, Esalen's Center for Theory and Research (CTR) hosted a major gathering of leading esoteric scholars from around the world for its first invitational conference on Western Esotericism. The inaugural theme was "The Varieties of Esoteric Experience" and scholars from three continents gathered to present, discuss, and further the field within the welcoming ambience of the Esalen community and property.

Conference Participants

This new CTR conference series is being convened by Wouter Hannegraff and Jeffery Kripal. Hannegraff holds the University of Amsterdam chair in the History of hermetic philosophy and related currents from the Renaissance to the present, is the author of New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, and is the main editor of the landmark Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Kripal is the Lynette S. Autry Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University, author of Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (winner of the AAR's History of Religions Prize in 1996), and is presently completing a major history of the Esalen Institute.

The other participants included:

Antoine Faivre, professor emeritus of History of western esoteric currents in modern and contemporary at the Sorbonne and the author of the classic, Access to Western Esotericism.
Michael J. B. Allen, a leading Ficino scholar, professor of English and currently the Director of UCLA's Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies).
Claire Fanger (Independent Scholar) is a medievalist with a special interest in the history of magic.
Brendan J French, a scholar on theosophy and Madame Blavatsky, who completed his doctorate in the History of Ideas at the Department of Studies in Religion, University of Sydney, in 2000.
Olav Hammer (University of Southern Denmark), associate professor of History of Religions. He is the author of Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (E.J. Brill: Leiden etc. 2001).
Don Hanlon Johnson (California Institute of Integral Studies), professor of Somatics, who has a long history with the Esalen Institute; he has been very influential, as a scholar and a practitioner, working with a worldwide group of educators who have developed practices for accessing and cultivating the stores of wisdom, creativity, and courage that are contained within our bodies.
Peter Kingsley, Ph.D., who has done much to recover the spiritual wisdom of Parmenides for the contemporary era, is an honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico and an honorary Professor of Humanities at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada.
Georg Luck, Professor of Classics, emeritus, at Johns Hopkins University and is the author of works including Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds and Ancient Pathways and Hidden Pursuits.
Dan Merkur, Ph.D., a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Toronto, Research Reader in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and the author of nine books Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions, and The Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible.
Gregory Shaw (Stonehill College), a neo-Platonic scholar, professor of Religious Studies and the author of Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (Penn State Press: 1995).
Kocku von Stuckrad, an esoteric scholar and researcher/lecturer in the sub-department of 'The History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents' at the University of Amsterdam.
Richard Tarnas, Ph.D., author of The Passion of the Western Mind, is professor of philosophy and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he teaches archetypal studies and the history of Western thought, and was formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute.
Garry W. Trompf (University of Sydney), Professor in the History of Ideas, Department of Studies in Religion, and Director, Centre for Millennial Studies (Sydney).
Arthur Versluis (Michigan State University), one of the major American voices in the study of western esotericism, and the author/editor of numerous books and articles including Restoring Paradise: Esoteric Transmission through Literature and Art, The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance, and Wisdom's Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition.
Elliot R. Wolfson, the Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University and the author of many publications in the history of Jewish mysticism, including the award winning Through the Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism.
Philip R. Wood , Ph.D., Associate Professor of French Studies at Rice University and the author of Understanding Jean-Paul Sartre (University of South Carolina, 1991).
Helmut Zander (Humboldt-University, Berlin), senior lecturer in Early Modern History, and the author of the book Geschichte der Seelenwanderung in Europa (History of Metempsychosis in Europe). At present he is working on a history of Theosophy in the German-speaking countries between 1884 and 1945, including its practical applications, as well as researching the political implications of esoteric movements in the 20th century.

The facilitators guided this august group of prominent and provocative esoteric scholars through a series of daily presentations, each of which was followed by an opportunity to discuss, challenge, and explore the ideas thus presented. The presentations were based on papers that each participant had shared electronically with the others prior to the conference. This allowed the gathering to move quickly into serious, often delightful, and revelatory, discussions that addressed not only the presenter but also larger issues germane to the study of esotericism itself. All of this discussion of esotericism, magic, and visionary experience, took place within the particularly magical ambience of the Esalen grounds, facilitating a mixture of historical scholarship with the living esoteric tradition that Esalen embodies.

Conference Presentations

The participants arrived on Sunday evening and spent that first night getting acquainted with each other and with Esalen. Wouter Hanegraaff opened the conference the next morning with a talk entitled "Gnosis and Western Esotericism." In many ways, Hanegraaff's talk set the tone for the week to come by considering the slippery relationship between the experiential nature of esotericism and the scholar's attempt to maintain objectivity. Esotericists often claim privileged access to knowledge unavailable to normal forms of inquiry. How is the scholar to deal with such claims? Ought scholarship focus on the form of esoteric experience, or its privileged content? Throughout the week, these questions were explored further in a variety of ways during the subsequent presentations and responses. Hanegraaff, one of the most prominent esoteric scholars in the academy, offered the sort of measured, scholarly but also insightful response for which he is rightly regarded by pointing to the unreflective assumptions about the nature of experience that typically frame such questions. He suggested that experiences cannot be considered in isolation, as if "peak-experiences" existed apart from the very real biographies of the subjects who have them. What scholars call "esoteric currents" do not exist as such, only real people of flesh and blood, "who live their lives and create their work within complex networks of social, discursive and symbolic relationships." Some of them have been defined as "esoteric," while others have not. By pointing to the embodied, biographies of real individuals, Hanegraaff sought a way to pay proper attention to what the esotericist says and enacts without getting painfully tangled in thorny questions about the existence of what the esotericist claims to be ontologically real.

The discussion following Hanegraaff's presentation was also typical for the week to come in that it was both challenging and scholarly as well as collegial and genial. Peter Kingsley responded to Hanegraaff by questioning the validity of ignoring validity questions. That is to say, Kingsley wondered how scholars who devote their lives to studying these phenomena could fail to ask whether such phenomena are real: do esoteric experiences disclose a world beyond the esotericist's subjectivity? Needless to say, Kingsley's challenge was provocative and dominated much of the discussion throughout the day. The discussion transitioned into Kingsley's own presentation, which was both autobiographical and scholarly. Kingsley claimed that he had personally discovered the real esoteric stream coming from Parmenides and Empedocles. Not only did he assert that this stream was a real stream and in no way reducible to biography, Kingsley also asserted that he himself was a participant in this stream. Moreover, this mystical-esoteric tradition that sees into the unity lying beneath all things should be understood as the fons et origo of Western civilization itself. Because we have lost the ancient wisdom we find ourselves culturally and individually in the destructive veil of illusions responsible for the crisis of the contemporary world. As a self-described mystic, Kingsley also pointed to his own difficult experiences working within the academy. The scholar who is also a mystic, and who has the courage to confess this to his or her peers, is treated with contempt, or what may be worse, is simply ignored.

The animated discussion that followed concerned the manner of Kingsley's presentation almost as much as his content. Kingsley presented his material with an edge, hoping (as he said) to jolt his listeners into a deeper engagement with his subject. Some participants wondered whether this confrontational strategy was effective and suggested alternatives. The substantial issue that Kingsley raised remained throughout the conference and can be understood as the difference between two models of scholarship as laid out in Russell T. McCutcheon's Critics not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (2001). McCutcheon suggests that the academic study of religion includes, on the one had, 'religionists' who adopt the model of scholar-as-caretaker and, on the other hand, 'social scientists' who adopt the model of scholar-as-critic. McCutcheon advocates for the scholar-as-critic approach, and Hanegraaff sided with him. Kingsely sided with the religionists, within whose ranks one ought to include scholars like Huston Smith, or Mircea Eliade, the Eranos Circle that formed around Jung and included Henri Corbin, Joseph Campbell, etc. Richard Tarnas, former director of programs at Esalen and presently a professor in Philosophy and Religion at CIIS, offered one of the most helpful comments when he suggested that the language of scholar as critic vs. caretaker was already loaded. "Caretaker" suggests the co-dependent image of one who attends to the dying, and presupposes the death of religion prophesied by secularity but also severely contested by both scholars and the historical endurance of religion itself. Instead of caretakers, Tarnas suggested the term "caregivers", which exchanges the language of co-dependency and fatality for the more generous language of relationship, trust, and even love. Care-giving is not apologetics but courtesy.

After lunch, Georg Luck presented a fascinating paper on the religious and esoteric uses of entheogens, those substances that chemically induce 'god-engendering' experiences. Luck surveyed the academic study of such substances, including William James' famous experiences on nitrous oxide, Albert Hoffman's discovery of LSD, and the postulated connection between the Eleusinian mysteries and a psychoactive ergot. Luck even suggested, more controversially, that careful readings of canonical religious sources such as the Old Testament suggest that psychedelics of some sort may have been present in, for example, the incense burned before the altar of God in front of which so many prophetic visions took place (eg., Isaiah VI).

In the afternoon Gregory Shaw's presentation kept the attention on the ancient world by focusing on the theurgical neoplatonist, Iamblichus. Though largely forgotten today, Iamblichus was the fountainhead for one of the most influential neoplatonic streams in antiquity (the other, of course, being the school that followed Plotinus and Porphyry). Unlike Plotinus and Iamblichus' teacher Porphyry, Iamblichus' Platonism was cosmological and deliberately embodied. Iamblichus believed that his teachers and the philosophers of his day distorted Plato's original intentions by making his system acosmic and dualistic in a way that exiles the gods from the earth. For Iamblichus, philosophy was a form of spiritual practice and reached its goal only when the philosopher participated in the divine theurgy (work of the gods) itself. His esoteric approach intertwined philosophy and magic, the practice of dialectic and the creation of amulets, the cultivation of philosophical clarity and the cultivation of visionary experience. Shaw ended his exposition with a provocative call to scholars of our own day. Iamblichus thought the errors of his teachers and peers lay in their idolatrous excess of rationality divorced from both the body and the in-between realms of divine-human-cosmic commerce (what the religious scholar Raimon Panikkar calls the cosmotheandric realm). If this was true in Iamblichus' day, how much more so in our own? With this question Shaw gently challenged his peers to find ways to integrate their scholarship with the profundity of spiritual and somatic experience.

The final talk of the day was by Antoine Faivre, in many ways the most esteemed scholar present at the conference. Faivre has done more than any living person to legitimate and further the field of esoteric studies and, as evidenced by both his presentation and its constructive reception, his scholarship remains vigorous, creative and essential to the field. Faivre sought to delineate the differences between esotericism and mysticism. In his view, esotericism may be understood to involve four essential features: the doctrine of universal correspondences, living Nature, the imagination as a form of mediation, and transmutation. Mysticism, by contrast, is marked by the desire to surrender, the desire for union, the experience of ineffability and the experience of transmutation. The properly esoteric is therefore more representational and visionary, while the mystical is more experiential. A number of respondents sought to complicate Faivre's delineation by pointing to figures who seem to straddle the fence (eg., Hildegard of Bingen), and Faivre allowed that the taxonomy was more heuristic than essential.

Tuesday's morning and afternoon sessions tended to concentrate on the esoteric elements present in the middle ages and renaissance. Claire Fanger lead a fascinating discussion on the nuances of the Latin words experiencia and experimentum (both derived from the verb experior meaning to test or trial, and translated into English as 'experience' and 'experiment', respectively). While the terms experiencia and experimentum shared a great deal of semantic meaning in the middle ages, contermporary English usage radically separates the terms: experience is wholly subjective, experiments are ideally objective and repeatable. Fanger highlighted the way these words were used in specific medieval magical and mystical texts. She said that the diction in these texts may have begun to split the semantic meaning of these words, thereby bequeathing a heritage that would eventually transform into the subject-object division characteristic of modernity.

Elliot Wolfson, in his paper, considered the visionary experiences of thirteenth-century kabbalists (Jewish mystics). These kabbalists engaged in a practice of mediation that involved emptying the mind of images, concepts, and words in order to attain a pure state of attention. This resulted, Wolfson said, in the mystic's heart taking the form of a "translucent mirror," which itself mirrored the mystic's pure mind. But beyond this experience of pure consciousness, the kabbalists eventually encountered the Torah (Jewish scripture) as an imaginal form. Wolfson considered the way that this account allows us to see that pure consciousness is not necessarily the final word in either esotericism or mysticism. Moreover, if this is so, then the work of interpretation is never entirely left behind. Even at the heights of visionary experience, at least for these kabbalists, language, culture, and interpretation remain essential elements.

Michael Allen's presentation on Ficino was one of the most exciting of the conference, due to Allen's evident zeal for his subject. Allen chose to simply speak from his own love and knowledge of Ficino instead of recounting the details of his paper, which most participants presumably read. Allen described the milieu within which Ficino practiced his Platonic and esoteric philosophy. He shared the strange details of Ficino's medical prescriptions for scholars, which included a concoction involving the seed of young boys and various other elements in order to ward off the lethargy that attends excessive study. And he especially shared Ficino's own zeal for the philosophic quest (zetema) that motivated his monumental translations, commentaries, magical texts, and original philosophy. Allen said that the process of meditating on a proof for God or the immortality of the soul; the journey towards discovering such a proof; and the ecstatic journey towards understanding and insight: all of these are the lifeblood that courses through Ficino's work. Allen, no doubt, shares this zeal and spoke from that place of lived excitement about his subject in a manner that drew similar confessions out of other participants.

Arthur Versluis followed Allen with an equally engaging presentation that focussed primarily on John Pordage, a theosopher in the current of Jacob Bšhme. Pordage was one of the most influential theosophers of the early modern period and yet, despite his importance, the academy has been almost entirely silent about him. This allowed Versluis both to explicate Pordage's works, the only English translations of which were done by Versluis himself, and to explore the politics of occlusion within the academy. Versluis noted also how important the study of Pordage is particularly because we possess an outside account (not his own) of what his praxis was, accounts that give us insight into the gnostic dimensions of Christian theosophy.

After dinner, Olav Hammer presented a very different type of paper that considered the methodological habits (habitus, as Bordieu says) common within the study of religion, generally, and esotericism more specifically. Hammer noted that 'methodological agnosticism' which seeks to avoid any metaphysical commitments is generally assumed to be the scholarly practice with the most integrity for religious studies. However, Hammer considers the hegemony of methodological agnosticism to be suspect, more of a trope than a reflectively held position. What Hammer wants instead is to advocate for a more thoroughgoing hermeneutics of suspicion-that methodological approach based upon the assumption of methodological naturalism and rooted in the traditions springing from Darwin, Marx, Freud, etc. This raised many questions, perhaps the chief of which was whether such a hermeneutics wasn't disingenuous or incourteous. Can a scholar entrusted with access to a community, (especially a living one, though some participants wondered whether we oughtn't also to maintain good faith with the departed) really subject that community to the violence of the hermeneutics of suspicion? Doesn't such a hermeneutics imply an antagonistic relationship between the scholar and his or her subjects? Other participants (Kingsley, especially) wondered whether methodological agnosticism and the hermeneutics of suspicion exhaust all of our methodological options; don't they both go too far in the direction of scepticism, and why couldn't a more adventurous metaphysic, as Tarnas calls for in his paper, be employed in scholarly work?

Jeffery Kripal presented Wednesday morning on his long-term writing project about the history of the Esalen Institute. As a comparative religion scholar with a broad background of research, which includes the homo-erotic life of the Hindu saint Ramakrishna, the hidden mystical life of religious scholars, and the nature of East-West mysticism in general, Kripal has sought to look at Esalen in a much richer and more encompassing historical context. Thus, from this vantage point he has called Esalen "the American tantra." Kripal recounted his early meeting with Mike Murphy (initiated by a phone call, out of the blue, from Murphy at a disputed hour in the middle of the night) and the way that he was attracted to Esalen's renegade spirit of openness and spiritual inquiry, its embrace of somatic and sexual life, and its commitment to healing, as well as its central importance to the intellectual and spiritual history of the late 20th c. United States (and beyond, as seen in the Soviet-American exchange that took place over twenty years at Esalen). Kripal's presentation was complemented by pictures of Esalen's early brochures and catalogues, which revealed Esalen's implicitly tantric nature with its focus on the human body. Incidentally, while his book is still in production, a first volume of scholarly essays edited by Kripal is set to appear shortly from Indiana University Press. Kripal has marshalled his own considerable powers in collaboration with others to tell Esalen's story in a way that will certainly result in Esalen's being given a significant place in the story of American religion and spirituality.

Philip Wood followed Kripal with one of the most elegant presentations of the conference, drawing a parallel between ego-transcendence and vision in esoteric and mystical experiences and the power of great art to elicit the vision of beauty. It the wake of "God's death", as Nietzsche put it, art has become the chief means of such release (catharsis). As Wood says, "the aesthetic experience proffered by the finest modernist literary works in particular, do not merely resemble certain mystical experiences but are mystical experiences, albeit perhaps not of the highest order." It is hard to do justice to the eloquence of either Wood's prose or his presentation in so short a space. His invocations of Baudelaire, Proust, Shakespeare and Milton, and his command of French and English were artistic themselves, and while they may not have elicited mystical experiences from the others, he did manage not only to present but, in some sense, to perform his thesis.

Dan Merkur's controversial presentation returned to the issue of psychedelics. Merkur's paper argued two points: one, about the possibility that a thirteenth century school of Eucharistic interpretation (the school of Laon) might secretly have engaged in the use of a psychedelic drug, combined with meditation on the passion of Jesus, to induce experiences of mystical death and resurrection; and two, that the alchemist and visionary John Dee's discussion of the alchemical marriage of the Moon and the Sun, in the Monas Hieroglyphica, concerned experiences of mystical death-and-resurrection and mystical divinization, respectively. This too, like the school of Laon, involved the use of entheogenic substances. Merkur suggested that spiritual alchemy arose when psychoactive drug use ceased to be understood in terms of Christian and classical myth, and was instead comprehended from the standpoint of natural magic. The response to Merkur's paper was skeptical of his speculation that language could be decoded to reveal the use of psychoactives. Though Merkur insisted that he didn't see a unified code stretching through history, others found that his work did suggest such a code, and they were reluctant to accept this supposition without further evidence.

Kocku von Stuckrad also presented on John Dee, especially his famous conversations with angels. John Dee was a 16th c. natural philosopher/scientist (he wrote on mathematics, astronomy, etc. and served Queen Elizabeth I as court astrologer) who surprisingly devoted his later life to the practice of conversing with angels. For Dee, this involved collaborating with assistants possessed of visionary capabilities, as well as engaging in mantic practices such as gazing into a crystal ball. Von Stuckrad demonstrated that these ostensibly occult activities were not incidental to his scientific work but extensions of it. That these practices, like his science, arose out of Dee's quest for the ultimate truth should cause us to reconsider the origins of modern science itself. This fascinating chapter of early modern science subverts many of the standard accounts of the history of science, which imagine it as if it sprang fully-grown out from the mists of superstition, as Athena did from the head of Zeus.

Thursday, the last full day of the conference, began with a presentation by Esalen member and professor of somatics, Don Hanlon Johnson. Johnson, one of the founders of the field of somatics, noted that in his experience, the pioneers of somatic practice often tended to be engaged in esoteric practices, as well, including aura reading, spiritual healings, intuitive visions, etc. In his autobiographical paper and presentation, Johnson suggested that this is due to something fundamentally new breaking into western society, an awareness of the esoteric experience of the body. This is the body as experienced, the body as a locus of spiritual energies, and not the reductionist body of either theological or materialist abstractions. Esoteric experiences are often, but no means exclusively, connected with psychedelic experimentation, and thus give us purchase on a new way of embracing and healing the body and, thereby, life. However, esoteric experience can also be dangerous, especially when co-opted by an exclusive authority (cf. the Germany of the third Reich). Something exciting however, is taking place here in the West, an egalitarian esotericism that is truly democratic. Esalen is crucial to this story. As Johnson wrote in his paper, "Esalen, CIIS, Naropa, and Spirit Rock are among the few places where something truly new is happening: the cultivation of esoteric experiences that involve reflection, feedback, clarification, refinement, writing and criticism, with no outside authority allowed to capture the flag of interpretation." This truly democratic esotericism may be the west's great spiritual gift to the world-one that doesn't, of course, erase our culpability in so many other areas. It is, moreover, as Kripal also pointed out in his presentation, one of Esalen's monumental contributions to the religious, spiritual and human landscape of the future.

Gary Trompf, considered the role that anthropological work can play in the emerging field of esoteric studies. Drawing primarily on his work and research on Melenasia, as well as South America, equatorial Africa, and inland South Vietnam, Trompf's presentation considered a variety engaging, even titillating phenomena, including such things as: possession, dreams, visions, shamanism, prophetism, "auditory hallucinations," clairvoyance, bilocation, special states of concentration and curious ordeals, types of healing practice, hynoptic fascination, and NDEs (near death experiences). Trompf added a necessary voice to the conference, one that extended the study of esotericism beyond western culture, even in its vast historical diversity, to consider the important esoteric elements and lessons to be had from across the contemporary globe.

The final two presentations both focused on the phenomenon of modern Theosophy, the spiritual-esoteric movement founded by Madame Blavatsky and Col. Henry Olcott towards the end of the 19th c. This was a bit contentious in an of itself as many of the leading voices in contemporary esoteric studies have deliberately excepted Blavatskian theosophy from consideration. Antoine Faivre and Arthur Versluis, following a line of argumentation that finds support, for example, in the work of scholars like Nicholas Berdyaev, claim that Theosophy ought not be considered continuous with the phenomenon of theosophy (small "t") whose paradigmatic exponent was Jacob Bšhme. Bšhmean theosophy is really Christian theosophy and relies upon an array of shared sources, tropes, etc., including traditional alchemy, Christian visionary experience, and so forth. The Theosophical movement, by contrast, is more eclectic, drawing most heavily on a combination of spiritualism and an appropriation of Asian traditions. Faivre maintains that Theosophy is quite different and inferior to the coherent tradition of theosophical experience and literature that mostly vanished by the end of the 18th c.

Helmut Zander examined the manner in which the Theosophical Society provided its adherents a way beyond the materialism of the late 19th and early 20th century as well as provided a solution to the problem of religious pluralism. The Theosophical Society did this through its use of the perennial philosophy, influencing much of contemporary comparative religion to do so as well. The aim was to establish objective similarities among religions to provide proof of the objective realities of a spiritual realm. Zander drew particular attention to the Society, which adopted a transhistorical hermeneutic outside of the realm of established religion. This became a mass movement, and included the formation of Esoteric Schools that instructed adherents in an occult "path of Discipleship", as the Theosophical leader Annie Besant called it. The German Theosophical teacher Rudolf Steiner split with the Theosophical Society in 1912 in protest against Besant's proclamation that the boy Krishnamurti was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Zander drew attention to the fascinating political struggles that drove Theosophical history. He also situated the Society in western streams and noticed the historical import of this movement for the West.

Brendan French, for his part, focussed on the Theosophical trope of ascended masters, considering the way this language served to legitimate Theosophical claims. The Society derived its authority from the presumed existence of a brotherhood of adepts known as the 'Masters of the Wisdom'. French noted the hermeneutical problems this reliance upon putatively real masters created for adherents, some of whom even engaged in quests to discover the Himalayan centers wherein these masters were believed to live (the Parzival-like quests often ended badly, even sometimes in the death of the explorers). The language and rhetoric of ascended masters continues in contemporary New Age circles and French used this example from Theosophical history to illustrate the potentially deep problems of tying esoteric discourses to evidentialist assumptions. The evidentialist requires empirical evidence-historical, sensory, etc.-for his or her religious beliefs, but esoteric experience by its nature subverts empirical attempts at explanation. The somewhat tragic result is the wedding of modernist assumptions to the esoteric critique of modernism in such a way that the former curtails the claims of the latter.

Conclusion

Are there conclusions to be drawn from this first annual invitational conference on Western Esotericism? No doubt there are many, most of which will become apparent in the coming years of this conference series. Already, this first conference seemed to have been a seminal gathering, allowing the emerging field of esoteric studies to interact, exchange views and scholarship, and to further the development of collegiality so important to the legitimation of academic fields. Two themes seemed to characterize the conversations of the week and will likely be important considerations at future conferences, as well. The first is the tension between various models of scholarship, the scholar as caregiver vs. the scholar as critic. No consensus emerged here, but the question is a crucial one. Will the field of esoteric studies be one that seeks to advance esoteric work in the world, as Kingsley would like, or will it be a critical study that seeks historical and anthropological illumination, as Hanegraaff argued for? Or, will it be a field committed to unmasking the power strategies encoded in this field of discourse, as Hammer would like? A second theme relates to Esalen itself. This is the recognition that esoteric studies has a kind of epochal importance due to its democratic commitment to academic freedom, which allows esoteric spirituality to be discussed in a truly new way apart from the strictures of authoritarian bodies. Something of this egalitarian nature has characterized many esoteric pioneers, John Pordage for example, or Jacob Bšhme, but there is a bolder freedom manifesting in the contemporary scene. As Kripal and Johnson pointed out, Esalen is a major player in this emerging democratization of esotericism. It offers a promising way to reintroduce the spiritual-in all of its sublime power-as a force for liberation rather than oppression, and as a force for healing rather than exclusion. For sure, this is an ongoing task, as present in Esalen workshops and somatic practices as in the dialogue of scholars. But the dialogue plays an important role in diffusing this revolutionary practice into the mainstream where its import will undoubtedly be strongly felt.

As the conference closed, the organizers decided to host the next meeting in April 2005. The topic then will be "Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in Western Esotericism." Several of the presenters at this conference will be invited back to tackle that topic along with some new faces that will join this conference series for the first time.