The Forbidden Gospels Blog
I write daily on a blog devoted to the subject of extra-canonical early Christian literature, including the New Testament Apocrypha, Nag Hammadi collection, the Tchacos Codex, and Gnostic writings. I invite you to visit sometime at The Forbidden Gospels Blog.
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| Nag Hammadi Books, Coptic Museum, Cairo |
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Book Note: Esotericism and the Academy (Wouter J. Hanegraaff)
This is just a quick note to let you know that Hanegraaff's newest book on esotericism has been published by Cambridge. The book studies the Academy's marginalization of esotericism in the modern era. Hanegraaff puts forward a convincing argument that esotericism has had an incredible impact on western thought since the Renaissance, and the time has come to acknowledge and study this. It is about time!
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture.
The Table of Contents:
Introduction: Hic sunt dracones 1. The History of Truth: Recovering Ancient Wisdom Competing Macrohistories – Platonic Orientalism – The Christian Apologists – The Wise Man from the East: Gemistos Plethon – The Platonic Theologian: Marsilio Ficino – Secret Moses: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Christian Kabbalah – The Universal Catholic: Agostino Steuco – The End of a Cycle
2. The History of Error: Exorcizing Paganism Against the Pagans – Against the Fathers – The Anti‐Apologist: Jacob Thomasius – The Heresiologist: Ehregott Daniel Colberg – The Pietist Reaction – The Birth of Religionism: Gottfried Arnold –Enlightenment and Eclipse – The Historian: Jacob Brucker – The Parting of the Ways
3. The Error of History: Imagining the Occult Tainted Terminologies 1: Superstition – Tainted Terminologies 2: Magic – Tainted Terminologies 3: Occult – Alchemy between Science and Religion – The Organization of Secrecy – The Occult Marketplace – Elemental Fiction – Compendia of Rejected Knowledge – Secret Traditions and Hidden Histories – The Waste Land
4. The Truth of History: Entering the Academy Magnetic Historiography: German Romantic Mesmerism and Evolutionism – The Archetype of Eranos: Carl Gustav Jung and the Western Unconscious – Eranos and Religionism: Scholem, Corbin, Eliade – The Return of the Historians: From Peuckert and Thorndike to Frances Yates – Antoine Faivre and Western Esotericism – Esotericism in the Academy Conclusion: Restoring Memory
Here is the publisher's description:
Academics tend to look on 'esoteric', 'occult' or 'magical' beliefs with contempt, but are usually ignorant about the religious and philosophical traditions to which these terms refer, or their relevance to intellectual history. Wouter Hanegraaff tells the neglected story of how intellectuals since the Renaissance have tried to come to terms with a cluster of 'pagan' ideas from late antiquity that challenged the foundations of biblical religion and Greek rationality. Expelled from the academy on the basis of Protestant and Enlightenment polemics, these traditions have come to be perceived as the Other by which academics define their identity to the present day. Hanegraaff grounds his discussion in a meticulous study of primary and secondary sources, taking the reader on an exciting intellectual voyage from the fifteenth century to the present day and asking what implications the forgotten history of exclusion has for established textbook narratives of religion, philosophy and science.
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:38:00 +0000
Book Note: Dark Mirrors by Andrei A. Orlov
Andrei Orlov presents us with a new book on a wicked subject: the origins and development of the demons Azazel and Satanael in early Judaism and Christianity.
I remember when, a few years ago, Professor Orlov was working on the temptation narratives in the gospels and presented a paper in the New Testament Mysticism Project on Satan. He noted that the narrative of Satan was an upside down version of patterns of ascent of heroes in the Judeo-Christian tradition. I recall how this insight was met with enthusiasm among the group, and it appears to have become the impetus for Professor Orlov to explore this symmetry more fully. Now he gives us the results of that exploration in a wonderful book just published by SUNY. It is called Dark Mirrors: Azazel and Satanael in Early Jewish Demonology.
The book takes up the correspondence of inverse symmetry, when the antagonist or protagonist of the story takes the place of his opponent by acquiring peculiar attributes and conditions of his counterpart. He notes that in the Book of the Watchers, the fallen angels and the hero Enoch mirror each other in the exchange of offices, roles, attributes, and even wardrobes (5). Professor Orlov traces this pattern in two traditions, one involving Satan as the source of evil, the other Azazel. His study plays close attention to the sacerdotal dimension of this demonology, showing that the peculiar transformations of the adversaries have cultic signficance within the liturgical settings of the Jewish tradition (7).
The book is written along these chapter lines:
1: "The Likeness of Heaven": Kavod of Azazel in the Apocalypse of Abraham
2: Eschatological Yom Kippur in the Apocalypse of Abraham: The Scapegoat Ritual
3: The Garment of Azazel in the Apocalypse of Abraham
4: The Watchers of Satanael: The Fallen Angels Traditions in 2 Slavonic Enoch
5: Satan and the Visionary: Apocalyptic Roles of the Adversary in the Temptation Narrative of the Gospel of Matthew
6: The Flooded Arboretums: The Garden Traditions in the Slavonic Version of 3 Baruch and the Book of Giants It is wonderful to see this book come into being from its glowing inception during our seminar to its book form. And wow! SUNY finally made a gorgeous cover.
I leave you with a verse that opens his book, which leaves me to ponder the power of the deep and dark which the Gnostics I study also knew:
Come and see: There are chariots of the left in the mystery of the Other Side and chariots of the right in the mystery of the supernal Holiness, and they match one another...(Zohar I.211b).
Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:51:00 +0000
On my way to San Francisco
AAR/SBL are back together and in San Francisco. Off to the meeting in a few minutes. So glad to be able to see friends from AAR that I haven't seen in years.
Fri, 18 Nov 2011 14:45:00 +0000
News about Holy Misogyny
Wow this semester has really gotten away from me. So sorry. A couple of items to bring to your attention. First, the Kindle version of Holy Misogyny is now out HERE. I know that several of my readers were hoping for the e-version, so here it is. I still haven't any response from Barnes & Noble, so if you want it in Nook format, please let Barnes & Noble know. Honestly, this is about you and what you want. These companies are listening to you because things are so much in turmoil in the publishing world right now.
Second, my Tolle Lege talk on Holy Misogyny has been rescheduled for February 21, 7-8:30 pm in the Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library, Rice campus. Sorry that we had to reschedule, but I was very ill and unable to make the Nov 1 presentation.
The Houston Chronicle has just posted a story on our Tolle Lege series HERE. Hope you like it!
Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:00:00 +0000
Get Sparked by the Humanities
For years I have been listening to the critique of the Humanities and watching its erosion. I have noticed a couple of things contributing to its demise. The first, in my opinion, has been the direct result of post-modern thought, which has emptied texts and other cultural productions of authorship and meaning. It takes my breath away when I think of what this single claim (and it is nothing more than a claim that so many have bought into) has done to the Humanities. When credit is no longer given to an author and meaning is derivative only of the reader, why bother studying the culture that produced the text or object? Why bother learning the language that the text was produced in? Why bother spending years training in a field when there can be no expert knowledge of or about the text or object, but only perceptions of those who read it and view it? We are critiquing ourselves out of fields of knowledge.
The second is tied to the first. If there are no expert fields of knowledge, then what are we supposed to do? If the disciplines are perceived to be useless, then we better work across disciplines. So the call for interdisciplinary knowledge arose in the universities and has taken center stage, even to the point that interdisciplinarity has been argued to be the next step. There should be no more departments. We should all work together and eliminate the limitations and constructed boundaries of departmentalized knowledge. We are critiquing ourselves out of departments.
The third is tied to the second. If we aren't experts in a particular field of knowledge anymore, and departments dissolve, then what? What purpose can we have? What use? When I look around, I see a fast scramble now to the sciences and social sciences (whose professors, by the way, have never bought into the postmodern critique and have maintained strongly expert fields of knowledge and disciplinary boundaries). How can the humanities make use of the sciences? Terms like Medical Humanities are becoming the rage. Environmental Humanities. Emerging Humanities. We are critiquing ourselves into the sciences.
Now you might think that my post is about the need for we in the Humanities to resist these things. But this would be a false impression. Critique is good for us, as long as it is constructive. While the Medical Humanities may turn out to be a fascinating field of study, this does not mean in my opinion that traditional Humanities disciplines should receive any less attention. In fact, I think we are doing ourselves a real disservice by not highlighting traditional disciplines too.
I think that we have to look at this for what it is. I think we need to take the discourse back to a healthy constructive place. I think interdisciplinarity is healthy, as long as we have real disciplines that are interacting and sharing knowledge. I think that disciplines and departments are not only necessary, but foundational. You need strong healthy disciplines in order to work across them successfully.
I don't buy into the postmodern argument that has killed the author, authorial intent, or meaning, because I realize (this insight is from the sciences) that humans are embodied, and the things that we produce leave our cognitive imprints, and these imprints are bound to cognitive maps from cultural worlds in which the productions were made. There is no mind, no knowledge, that floats around out there. Knowledge is made in us and we make it from within the webs of knowledge culturally shared by us in very specific locations. I will post more on these ideas in later posts.
For now, what I would like to do is to think about Humanities as a spark. Those of us who became Humanities professors did so because something was sparked in us when we read a poem, saw a vase, studied a text, listened to a piece of music. Something happened to us when we read Plato, or Josephus, or the Gospel of Thomas, or Dante, or Blake, or Shakespeare. What? What sparked you?
For me, whatever it was, and I have yet to name it, was totally absolutely life-changing. When I first read Plato, it was nothing less than an epiphany. When I first started to think, I mean really think about what makes us human, I couldn't stop thinking about it. When my first philosophy professor showed us a film about what a fire storm would be like if a nuclear explosion went off, and he asked us, would you push the button given this circumstance and that circumstance, well I was shaken to the depths of my very being. When my religion professor examined biblical texts without preferential treatment, but as cultural productions that had left the imprint of their societies on them, I was so upset I didn't want to go back into his classroom. Who did he think he was? Obviously I went back, my curiosity winning my private battle of faith. I understand fully why curiosity is framed as demonic by so many faith traditions and is proverbial in our culture (curiosity killed the cat). For all that the sciences had to offer me at the time (I was headed to medical school, and had been in nursing school initially), the call to the Humanities would not leave me alone. I had been changed by the encounter. My life had been transformed by its spark.
Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:19:00 +0000
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