Introduction

On the Wednesday evening of Esalen's third annual series on Western Esotericism, "Hidden Truths, Novel Truths: Myth and the Work of Fiction in Western Esotericism," some of the scholars invited to Esalen for this conference gave a brief presentation to the greater Esalen community of staff and catalogue seminarians, after which there was time to engage in some questions and comments. This special event during the course of the week exemplified Esalen's commitment to making its CTR conferences as accessible as possible to a broader audience so that more than just the specialized scholars are able to enjoy the fruits of these gatherings. During that evening, scholars brought to Esalen from all over the world engaged in informal talks and discussions with people who were attracted to be at Esalen that week, such as massage and body workers, ecstatic dance practitioners, seminar participants, and the varied spiritual seekers who make up the staff at Esalen.

Wouter Hanegraaff, chair in the History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, opened the evening's activities by facilitating a panel discussion covering how scholars define and study the topic of Western Esotericism. As the evening unfolded, Hanegraaff explained how esoteric scholars focus their scholarship on specifically counter-cultural and marginalized spiritual movements and religious figures in Western history. In particular, he drew attention to what Antoine Faivre has called the four distinguishing marks of Western Esotericism. They are:

1. A focus on hidden, invisible or secret wisdom
2. A cosmology that emphasizes the living organismic whole of reality
3. A way-of-knowing molded by theories of correspondence
4. A strong reliance on personal spiritual or mystical experience

After describing these four areas, Hanegraaff then turned to the topic of this year's conference, the use of myth and fiction within the esoteric traditions themselves. With the huge success of Dan Brown's novel The DaVinci Code, and the anticipation of the major Hollywood film of the same title, the topic seemed highly relevant. Brown's work, although most definitely fiction, draws on and plays with very real aspects from the mainstream (or "exoteric") Western religious traditions. While many have praised Brown's DaVinci Code for its ability to challenge people's attachments to orthodox and stifling dogmas, some academic scholars, whose primary commitment is to truthful scholarship and historical accuracy, are concerned that the book and movie will twist the truth so thoroughly that people will confuse fiction with reputable historical scholarship into the West's esoteric traditions. As a result of the growing media storm over Brown's work, the issue of how fiction affects our everyday conception of truth and reality was of prime concern during the four days of conference discussions.

Conference Presentations

The formal presentations began on Monday morning with Matthew D. Rogers, a graduate student at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. His paper was titled Poliphilo's Children: Esoteric Discovery, Recollection and Anamnesia in Contemporary Fiction. In it, he focused upon the Hypnerotomachia Poliphilo ("Strife of Love in Dream"), first published in Venice in 1499 by Francesco Colonna. This work is a long dream-narrative in which the protagonist seeks to recover his beloved among ancient buildings and monuments, and amidst the festivities and ceremonies of pagan cults. Drawn from mythic narratives of late antiquity such as the Metamorphoses of Apuleius and the Christian Psychomachia of Prudentius, Colonna's book reflects the paradigmatic story of the bereaved Orpheus, both as a tale of lost love and tragic affection, and as a metaphor for the loss and attempted recovery of knowledge. The esoteric content of the Hypnerotomachia, along with its narrative complexity and rich descriptions, has made it a point of reference in three recent novels. John Crowley's Ægypt (1987), John Banville's Shroud (2002), and Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's The Rule of Four (2004) each make the Hypnerotomachia a sort of metafictional feature of their respective stories. All three of these books speak directly to the nature of intellectual work and the value of personal memory. Among several interesting themes connecting the late medieval work with the contemporary novels, Rogers asked if the Hypnerotomchia, arriving on the heels of the printing press, represents a response to the exteriorization of thought and memory, and therefore provided yet another contemporary link to today's exteriorization of knowledge to the digital and the world wide web.

Christopher McIntosh, Universities of Bremen and Exeter, followed Rogers with Rosicrucianism: A Theme to Conjure With. This paper explored the rich and many-faceted relationship between Rosicrucianism and fiction on various different levels. He showed how the fictional element in the early 17^th century Rosicrucian manifestos were prefigured in earlier literary works, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, and then how later Rosicrucian movements and the mystique-laden accounts of their own alleged history and traditions were presented as truth by their followers and apologists. Finally, McIntosh surveyed the literature that was informed by or made use of Rosicrucian themes, including Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel Zanoni, G.W.Surya's novel Moderne Rosenkreuzer and Jorge Luis Borges' story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, giving examples of both positive and negative portrayals of Rosicrucianism in later fiction.

Both of the Monday morning papers exemplified how the Western Esoteric tradition has served as fertile ground for literary fiction, while also providing legitimacy for later proponents and fodder for enemies. The afternoon's presentations focused on authors who, although they wrote in fiction, had a deep concern with the direction of twentieth century European civilization, and their esoterically-inspired fiction is clearly a tool to analyze, critique and attempt to change that civilization.

Jean-Pierre Brach, Chair of History of Esoteric Currents in Early Modern and Contemporary Europe at the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes of the Sorbonne, presented The Interweaving Of Occultism, Literary Fiction, "Orientalism" And Metaphysics in the Elaboration Of René Guénon's Le roi du monde (King of the World). As an exposition of the "primordial tradition," which presents a single root and source of all legitimate religious lineages as a cure for a deadening and decadent secular world, Guénon was consciously taking up a narrative already present in different sources, both foreign and French, most notably F. Ossendowskii's popular Beasts, Men and Gods. While Guénon offered a much more attractive and seemingly consistent portrayal of the "King of the World," who through his intermediaries has informed all true spirituality from his subterranean stronghold, Brach demonstrated the many different streams—myth, history, imagination, esoterics, fiction and even deceit—in the coming into existence of one of the great "mystery accounts" of the 20th century.

Christine Maillard, professor of German Literature and History of Ideas at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg, presented Matriarcal Mythology and Gnostic Knowledge in Hermann Brochs Novel Die Verzauberung (The Spell). Hermann Broch wrote The Spell in the early thirties, while Hitlerian fascism was first appearing in Germany, and asks the question of the possibility of "gnostic" knowledge and its pertinence to a society whose values and orientations are undergoing a deep crisis. In depicting an agrarian society with an earth-mythology, opposed to urban modernity, the novel presents a constellations of characters with archetypal meaning: Mother, in possession of the secret wisdom of Nature and the power of divination and therapy, opposed to the evil Magician, a false prophet who manipulates the masses as did the German dictator. With the novel, Broch contributed a phenomenology of the collective unconscious, as it was theorized by C. G. Jung at the same period, and shows the individual confronted with this unconscious and with the emergence of an individual religious quest in a secularized world. Maillard also pointed out how Broch's main characters elucidate a gender analysis (gnostic matriarchy vs. controlling patriarchy) quite ahead of its time.

On Tuesday the presentations continued to expand upon the use of esotericism within literature, focusing upon poetry. Arthur McCalla, professor in the Philosophy/Religious Studieas Department at Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, presented"Eternal Sun/Black Sun": Illuminism and Illusion in Romantic Poetics. He explored how Romantic writers embraced the esoteric conception of poetry as symbolic knowledge and the poet as the recipient and transmitter of revelation. Illuminism, as a subset of the western esoteric tradition corresponding to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, both influenced and paralleled Romanticism. Again resonating with the theme of secularization, the poets take over for the priests. Similarly, the Romantic valorization of myth as an intuitive, analogical expression of truth echoed the esoteric interpretation. In response to McCalla's talk, the group explored the relationship between earlier Romantic conceptions of poetic and mythic truth and more contemporary esoteric currents.

Blake's "Jerusalem" and the Mystification of Fiction was delivered by Sheila A. Spector, who noted that Blake's final prophecy has consistently defied readers, eliciting comments like it is "a perfectly mad poem" (Southey), its "crowning defect is obscurity" (Alan Cunningham), and it is "a work primarily marked by incommensurate elements" (Fred Dortort). Spector argued that the primary reason why Blake's major prophecies in general have proved so difficult is that their archetypal and linguistic bases are mystical, rather than conventionally Christian. She demonstrated how Blake uses the basic literary elements of Jerusalem not to convey information, but as a vehicle for mystical vision along kabbalistic lines: Los stands in for Adam Kadmon, Albion is the fallen Adan, and the cosmic setting correlates to the four kabbalistic worlds.

The next presenter was Katherine Barnes, a Lecturer in English at the Australian Defence Force Academy of the University of New South Whales, Australia, and an expert on Australian poet Christopher Brennan. In Reading and Writing the Esoteric: Christopher Brennan's Poems in Context, Barnes argued that one reason Brennan's work has not received the attention it merits is that he was writing from a perspective informed by Western esotericism, in interaction with Romanticism and Symbolism, and the influence of this perspective on his poetry has not been fully grasped. Her presentation considered evidence of Brennan's familiarity with esoteric ways of thinking (such as the notion of correspondences, Kabbalah and the Gnosticism and Neoplatonism of antiquity) in the lectures he gave on Symbolism in Sydney in 1904, and related this to books he owned and books to which he had access to in the Public Library of New South Whales during the 1890s and early 1900s. Barnes delighted conference attendees with Brennan's poetry, which uses imagery from alchemy and Hermeticism to convey a notion of a higher or transcendent self in poems such as "1908" and "The hollow crystal of my winter dream." She elucidated Brennan's own mythical exploration of the higher self by combining insights from esotericism, Romanticism and Symbolism.

Peter O'Leary, coming from the Art Institute of Chicago, presented ARK as a Spiritual Phenomenon: Reading Ronald Johnson's Poem. O'Leary unpacked Johnson's 1996 poem (composed over the previous two decades) as an initiatory journey. O'Leary noted that: "The poem's essential plasticity integrates inherently organic structures – of consciousness, of creativity, and of language – revealed through a process of visualizing the poem holographically, as if it were an incipient mandala the reader-initiate slowly builds in his or her own imagination." O'Leary took a close reading of "Beam 16," one of the 99 parts of the whole work, as an heuristic for the poem, using it as an interpretive model for approaching the entire revelatory structure of the whole poem, availing the metaphor of the mandala, particularly as it is understood through the alchemical writings of Carl Jung and the theological writings of Grover Zinn. The depth of Johnson's work became apparent as conference attendees further participated in ferreting out esoteric allusions in addition to O'Leary's comprehensive analysis.

Whereas Monday and Tuesday's talks focused on how the rich tradition of Western Esotericsm has fueled so much incredible poetry, fiction, criticism and study, on Wednesday the doyén of Esoteric studies, Antoine Faivre, took the conference in a counter direction with his paper Borrowings and Misunderstandings: Animal Magnetism in Edgar Allan Poe's Tales and the Strange Case of their Reception. Faivre revealed how theories and practices of mesmerism and animal magnetism were an object of strong interest for Poe, although he never seemed to have put much credence in their claims; they rather represented a welcome wealth of material for some of his tales. However, readers, especially in Europe, received his stories as non-fiction accounts; indeed this was the style in which several were written for periodicals that did not take the space to disabuse readers of this misperception! Faivre regaled the attendees with stories of similar 'reception cases' that worked the other way around—scientists whose sincere but outlandish theories became the butt of satirical literature—all to present some serious theoretical questions around authorial intention and reception in literary studies.

Arthur Versluis, professor of American Studies at Michigan State University, went further than Faivre, pointing out uses of the esoteric that shade from misreading or misunderstanding to potentially catastrophic political outcomes. In Fictional Histories, Versluis investigated a contemporary discourse revealed in the course of recent research into the archetype of the Inquisitions in the West, one that is noticeable particularly during the modern period, but that has ancient antecedents. This kind of history reinterprets conventional history according to a consistently paranoid pattern—it hunts through conventional history in order to seek out heretics, villains, or scapegoats, often now with names like "Illuminati" or "Reptilians." This other kind of history is an anxiety-ridden hybrid of history and fiction that has all too many contemporary exemplars. And although these streams of thought are filled with esoteric references, Versluis' thesis is that "In the end, it seems to me, reptilophobes are closer to witch-hunters than to witches, closer to the Inquisition than to heretics, and thus despite their claim to an esoteric truth (the reptoid hypothesis) they in fact belong to a long and fairly dangerous Western tradition of anti-esotericism that has not yet been sufficiently explored or understood, and that is quite important in coming to understand Western esotericism itself."

Wednesday afternoon continued the look into darker aspects of the Esoteric traditions. Marco Pasi, professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, explored Arthur Machen's Panic Fears. Pasi began by noting that much of Western Esotericism holds a "positive epistemology" that asserts a hidden reality that can be discovered, almost always with a beneficial outcome or effect for the discoverer. But in Machen's 1894 work The Great God Pan, this epistemology is turned upside-down. In it a scientist has developed an operation allowing one to open the 'doors of perception' and perceive the world as it truly is. But when the operation is performed on a young girl, the outcome is not enlightenment but rather leaves the girl shrieking in abject horror and reduced to a blabbering idiot. Pasi finds similar accounts of a "negative epistemology" in the works of Rudolf Steiner and Georges Gurdjieff, thus complexifying our understanding of esotericist's endeavors while weaving the concept into the broader anti-modern anxiety within Western Esotericism.

Wouter Hanegraaff, professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, continued the theme of "negative epistemology" by looking at the works of one of America's creepiest authors, H.P. Lovecraft. In his paper titled Fiction in the Desert of the Real: Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythology, Hanegraaff focussed on aspects of the Cthulhu mythology most relevant to Western esotericism, with special emphasis on the relation between fiction and reality. With special reference to the works of Hans Jonas and Michel Houellebecq, Hanegraaff also investigated the question of Lovecraft's sources and the relation of his work to Western esoteric and magical traditions. Lastly, Hanegraaff addressed the phenomenon of occultist appropriations of the Cthulhu mythology.

On Thursday morning the group returned to more benign and beneficial uses of Western Esotericism. Claire Fanger presented Mirror Magic: Therapeutic Narcissism and the Magical Body in Dion Fortune's Lilith LeFay Novels. In the novels Sea Priestess and Moon Magic, Fortune develops the character of Lilith LeFay Morgan, an archetype of the fatal woman, dark, mysterious, sexually attractive, an ageless adept. This fatal woman has an unusual quality for the type: instead of destroying the men who fall in love with her (always sick, repressed, lonely, and near nervous collapse) she heals them. She does this not by satisfying their needs in any ordinary sexual way, but rather by inducing them to do magic with her. She requires their admiration, and uses the reflection they provide to build her image of herself as Priestess of Isis, taking their energy to feed her goddess, sacrificing them in order to rebirth them as healed and whole. If we take Lilith LeFay Morgan as a magical body in the form worked out in the novels, particularly Moon Magic, there is an interesting overlap between this magical body in particular and the notion of the ego ideal as Freud describes it in his work On Narcissism. Lilith LeFay is a beneficial narcissist who channels the libido of men who love her into her magical body to benefit not only the fictional characters in the novel, but also its readers. Fortune was familiar enough with Freudian writings to have had some sense of these categories, and she claims that the return of Lilith LeFay in Moon Magic resulted from an unconscious process, perhaps a magical one. Fanger concluded that Fortune was engaged in a form of magic which was also intended as psychotherapy.

Daniel Levine, graduate student at Rice University, captivated the assembled scholars with Filling the Gutters: Comic Books as Occult Fiction. Although the occult has always been a source of inspiration for comic writers—and two of the contemporary scene's biggest names, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, write explicitly on occult and esoteric themes—Levine's main thesis was that comic art is in itself, functionally, an occult art. His argument lies in the "gutters," the white spaces between comic frames that serve as temporal spaces driving the overall narrative. Levine showed how the gutters do not always serve as mere temporal guides, but can also break up simultaneous actions or thoughts that can lead to extremely rich narrative textures.

The final talk of the conference, given by the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University Jeff Kripal, was Golf in the Kingdom: Plato and Ramakrishna for Republicans, which was an excerpt from the manuscript of Kripal's forthcoming work The Enlightenment of the Body: A Non-Ordinary History of Esalen. In this piece Kripal treats the "mystical realism" of Michael Murphy's occult fiction as the latter is performed in the author's most successful novel, Golf in the Kingdom. Kripal interpreted the novel through the metaphysical lenses of Plato's Symposium and The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, both of which were central to the text's composition. Then, he added some historical context to the novel by describing some of the early institutional life of Esalen. During Kripal's presentation, the group was entertained by some "inside" stories from Michael Murphy himself. These ranged from internecine battles within Esalen and the budding human potential movement of the sixties to some the hot political intrigues of the early seventies.

Conclusion

Throughout the week the most lively discussion centered around how scholars, as the educators and truth-tellers of society, should portray esoteric texts when the claims of those texts are demonstrably false. For example, many fundamental texts of the Western Esoteric tradition—such as the Zohar or the collected Hermetica—were falsely attributed to ancient authorities. In history this practice was common. Some scholars in this conference argued that this somewhat deceptive practice could not be called a lie because the intention was to attribute the original authorship to an ancient spiritual figure in order to grant greater gravitas to the spiritual instructions in the text. In contrast, several scholars wanted to call The Da Vinci Code a lie, for it appears the author merely appropriated esoteric scholarship to legitimize his book, while conveniently leaving out relevant facts in order to keep his story lively and interesting.

Others argued that all religious, occult or esoteric literature is a fiction in some sense, with the reservation that prophetic or visionary literature may have truly been experienced by the author. But returning to The Da Vinci Code, several felt that as scholars they must comment upon a work with such wide social relevance that has obviously struck a chord with popular audiences. Michael Murphy noted that for many Catholics The Da Vinci Code is liberating, and Kripal added that this is true because the book presents a "what if" so much more powerfully than the "what is" presented by the church. Kripal added that texts have such power over people because people themselves are texts, in the sense that people's identities are basically narratives. Levine noted that the book has at least gotten people to ask questions about received dogmas.

But Claire Fanger objected, saying that the role of the scholar is to expose untruths, and McIntosh brought up the specter of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which, in his view, needs to be debunked. Barnes noted that perhaps English departments have a role to play in teaching the public to better distinguish between good and bad literature. Barnes said that both The Da Vinci Code and the Protocols are badly written.

Separating truth from fiction in literature that holds religious or spiritual meaning—whether exoteric or esoteric—often leads one into a social, political and moral minefield. At the end of the week, the assembled scholars did not have a unified strategy for navigating this minefield, but all agreed that the continued study of how esoteric currents still influence popular culture is an important and worthy endeavor. Looking forward to next year's conference, Wouter Hanegraaff offered a strong call for scholarly attention to Western esotericism. Although the power to inspire and liberate may often come from a fictional narrative, he emphasized that an equally important part of liberation can be found through good scholarship and the commitment to truth and historical accuracy.