Matriarchy as an Historical Myth: Johann Jakob Bachofen

According to a persistent prejudice about the nineteenth century, the idea of evolution was evidence of an unbroken belief in the progress of civilization. This false assumption can still be found today, although already in 1936 Margret T. Hodgen had shown that evolutionism emerged in a “period of doubt” (Hodgen 1936, 9 – 35). She based her argument on the fact, still underrated today, that Edward Burnett Tylor, arguably one of the strongest representatives of evolutionism, had particular interest in the “survival” of earlier stages of civilization. In 1966, John W. Burrow picked up this thread. In contrast to the evolutionism of the eighteenth century, which indeed was characterized by an unshakable belief in the law of progress, the nineteenth century revealed a self-reflective and broken attitude toward progress; the existence of the non-rational as an integral part of progressive civilization was clearly recognized by the intellectual discourse of the period (1966, 2).

This insight is helpful if we want to understand Johann Jakob Bachofen’s construction of a development from matriarchy to patriarchy and the huge impact that this construction had on subsequent generations (see the excellent and thorough analysis of Davies 2010). Or, as Lionell Gossman notes in his study of “unseasonable ideas” in nineteenth-century Basle in general, and regarding Bachofen, Jacob Burckhardt, and Friedrich Nietzsche in particular:

Bachofen (1815–1887), a well-situated jurist from Basle, was convinced that the current patriarchal order was preceded by a matriarchal one. Strangely enough, he came to this thesis through the examination of the symbolism of ancient tombs. Fascinated by the newly discovered wall paintings in a columbarium of the Villa Pamfili in Rome—which he visited in 1842—Bachofen had the idea that these tomb paintings were evidence of the oldest cult of humankind, and he believed it was his duty to decipher these cults. A good example of his way of academic reasoning is the interpretation he gave to the picture of Ocnus the rope plaiter. Ocnus, being punished by pursuing futile works in the underworld, appears in the funerary images as being free and relaxed (Bachofen 1984, 53–74). Originally, the penitent and his rope-plaiting represented the working of the natural powers, while the accompanying donkey that eats up the rope stood for the inherent destructive principle. The Roman tomb paintings, wrote Bachofen, turned this symbol of an “unwept creation” into an image of salvation, thus expressing liberation from the meaningless cycle of nature.

In his description of a culture dominated by material understandings of natural symbols Bachofen followed Plutarch, who claimed that the creating male principle was giving form, while the receiving female principle was the material for this form (Gossman 2000, 171– 200). Bachofen’s study, published as Das Mutterrecht, with its enigmatic subtitle Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur (1861; “Maternal law: A study of gynaecocracy in the ancient world with reference to its religious and juridical nature”), was based on a ridiculously small foundation of evidence from ancient sources (Wesel 1980)—Herodotus’ report on the Lycians from Asia Minor and Aeschylus’ Oresteia. His main argument, entirely lacking evidence, was that ancient mother goddesses represented a matriarchal juridical system.

Herodotus (1.173) tells us that the Lycians transmitted the right of citizenship and property through the line from mother to daughter (matrilinearity), rather than from father to son (patrilinearity). Anthropologists conceded that Bachofen was right that this was a unique order of social structure; however, such an order only very rarely led to the formation of local female communities, and never to the formation of a matriarchal system (gynaecocracy in Greek). In most cases, these women lived in the social communities of their husbands and were governed by male rule (Kippenberg 1984, xxv–xxxvi).

Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Bachofen’s second witness, tells the story of Clytemnestra who, together with her lover Aegisthus, kills her husband Agamemnon after his return from Troy. Their son Orestes, sent abroad by Clytemnestra, returns as an adult to take revenge for the murder of his father. Together with his sister Electra, he kills his mother and her lover. Subsequently, the Erinyes haunt and torture him in his flight until he is taken to Athens to stand trial for killing his mother. The issue in court was whether the son was more closely linked to the father or to the mother. Only because Athena, who chaired the sitting, voted for Orestes, he was finally released. For Bachofen, this result demonstrated the victory of paternal law over maternal law in ancient Attica, which brought the previous age of matriarchy to an end (Wesel 1980, 58–59).

Although Bachofen’s work was immediately criticized for its methodological shortcomings and eccentric claims, it exerted an enormous influence. This impact was often more indirect than direct, especially because Bachofen was regularly used without being explicitly quoted. The major reason for Bachofen’s success may be that his culture-critical interpretation struck a right chord in the nineteenth century, such as in the following sentences:

In his interpretation, Bachofen is in line with the British evolutionists. They, too, were convinced that the early stages of human evolution were not simply assimilated into higher stages, but that they re-asserted themselves. Another similarity is Bachofen’s implicit evaluation of progress; natural symbols and maternal law express human relations with nature that rational, ‘male,’ nature-controlling progress can suppress but not eliminate. Ancient myth had become the mirror of the repressed features of Bachofen’s own time.

Bachofen coded the matriarchal culture of antiquity in the discourse of the day. In the assumed freedom from despotism he saw the ideal of a future juridical order (Bachofen 1984, 228–229). Just as symbol and concept are dependent on each other, matriarchal and patriarchal systems need each other as a correcting force. Freedom from despotism—this characteristic of maternal law—will and should be re-established at the end of juridical progress. Bachofen’s thinking follows the same logic as in the case of the natural symbols: just as the natural symbol remains present, even if it is interpreted differently, the maternal law claims its influence. History does not obey dialectics. The defeated retains its honor (Bäumler 1965, 337). This is reminiscent of the talk of ‘the third’ in cultural studies, but Bachofen did not make that step 150 years ago. For him, it was self-evident that the female had to be defeated by the male. By projecting his own generation’s ‘battle of the sexes’ onto the early stages of human evolution, he codified the antagonism between male and female (Wagner-Hasel 1992, 295–373; Lanwerd 1993, 72–109; Borgeaud 1999).

Bachofen’s historical imagination exerted unexpected influence. Even Marxist theoreticians were taken with it, although of course Bachofen was not at all interested in political work for women’s rights. But Friedrich Engels celebrated him in his 1884 essay Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats (“The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State”) as the discoverer of pre-bourgeois family structures. “The history of the family dates to 1861, the publication of Bachofen’s ‘Mutterrecht,’” Engels wrote (Engels 1970 [1884], 12); but he was critical about Bachofen deducing the family orders from religion rather than from real-life conditions (ibid., 40; see Davies 2010, 64–66). The assumption of Friedrich Engels and other Marxists that we can speak of a universal matriarchy was still influential in the thinking of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School (Dörr 2007, 142; see his entire chapter on “Myth and the Dialectic of Enlightenment,” 104–184; Davies 2010, 49–106 and 397– 414).

The link to the Frankfurt School already indicates that Bachofen’s full impact became visible in the first decades of the twentieth century among German intellectuals. The circle of the Munich Kosmiker played a significant role in this (Dörr 2007, passim; Davies 2010, 163–216). For one of them, Ludwig Klages, Bachofen was the discoverer of a primordial state of consciousness (Klages 1930, 238). The “rationally thinking ‘bearer of world history’” was preceded by “a humankind that was thinking in symbols […] whose entire worldviews, including all manners and concepts of law, were totally different from those of the historical human being” (Klages 1937, 177–178). With this interpretation Klages served an anti-Intellectualism that surrendered Bachofen to national-socialist ideology (Davies 2010, 351– 388).

Bachofen was of particular importance for the newly established discipline of psychology (Davies 2010, 217– 242). “The influences of Bachofen’s ideas reached psychiatric circles through various channels, and his influence on dynamic psychiatry has been immense” (Ellenberger 1970, 222). There are many striking parallels between Freud and Bachofen, while Alfred Adler was influenced by Bachofen indirectly (Ellenberger 1970, 222–223). Carl Gustav Jung used Bachofen’s work directly, for instance in his perhaps most important early work Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912, translated as Symbols of Transformation), which also marked his break with Sigmund Freud; but he did not make his dependence on Bachofen explicit in this book (Davies 2010, 240–242). Jung’s “teaching is filled with concepts that may at least partly be ascribed to Bachofen’s influence, such as those of the Anima and Animus, the ‘old wise man,’ and the ‘magna mater’” (Ellenberger 1970, 223). We can assume that Jung knew Bachofen’s theory through his acquaintance with the Munich Kosmiker and his connection to Basle (Noll 1994, 169–176; on Jung’s Basle connection see Gossman 2000, 53). Jung was part of what Georg Dörr calls a “Basle mythology;” this consisted of Bachofen, Nietzsche, some members of the Kosmiker group, and also the classical philologist Karl Kerényi. In 1945, Kerényi published the essay “Bachofen und die Zukunft des Humanismus—mit einem Intermezzo über Nietzsche und Ariadne” (“Bachofen and the future of humanism—with an intermezzo on Nietzsche and Ariadne”), in which he not only constructed a “male Nietzsche” and a “female Bachofen,” but also the ideal of a “new Bachofen” who would integrate the female and the male. This ideal future scholar, Kerényi proclaimed, was Carl Gustav Jung (see Dörr 2007, 46–48). The future humanist “will give his reverence not only to Apollo [i.e. Nietzsche] and Dionysus [i.e. Bachofen], but also to Asclepius [i.e. Jung]” (Kerényi 1945, 39, quoted from Dörr 2007, 47).

Interestingly enough, Jung projected Bachofen’s historical construction onto the realm of the human soul, using Ernst Haeckel’s theory of recapitulation. As we saw above, Haeckel attempted to combine the ideas of Lamarck and Goethe with Darwin’s evolutionary model. He came up with a ‘biogenetic law’—held as untenable today—that he formulated simply as ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’ Ontogeny is the growth (size change) and development (shape change) of an individual organism; phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species. Haeckel, and Jung with him, thought that the development of advanced species passes through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species. For Jung, the great religious-historical process of maternal law being overcome by paternal law finds its repetition in the conflict between the powers of the (male) animus and the (female) anima (on this theory see Ellenberger 1970, 708–710).

In Jung’s work, it is easy to see how religious-historical data are turned into unchangeable symbols inside the human psyche. As ‘archetypes’ they are fully detached from historical contexts; in this thinking, Jung was on the same line as Eliade and other scholars of the Eranos circle. What we see in this process is a psychologization of the sacred and the sacralization of the psyche. The conceptualization of the female divine was (and is) a mirror of social conditions and discourses of the day.

Archaeologists and Classicists Discover the Great Goddess

The theory of matriarchy did not originate with Bachofen. It had already been presented by the Jesuit scholar Joseph François Lafitau (1681–1746), who spent five years among the Iroquois, where he heard from Father Julien Garnier about the matriarchal customs of the Algonquin, Huron, and Iroquois. Lafitau compared this system with that of the Lycians and other ancient civilizations and concluded that gynaecocracy was a widespread phenomenon in the ancient Mediterranean and Asia Minor (see Ellenberger 1970, 219). But the first to put forward the thesis of an all-encompassing primordial mother goddess was Eduard Gerhard (1795–1865; see Hutton 1999, 35 – 36). In a lecture at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin, he argued in 1849 that “not only for Dia-Dione, Eileithyia and Theia, Themis and Artemis, Tyche and Praxidike, Chryse and Basileia, but also for Demeter and Cora, Aphrodite and Hestia, Hera and Athena” it can reasonably be argued that

Gerhard’s idea of a matriarchal monotheism was later picked up by other scholars, including the classicist Jane E. Harrison (1850–1928), who acknowledged that “[t]he fundamental unity of all the Greek goddesses was, I think, first observed by Gerhard” (Harrison 1991 [1903], 263 note 1; see Brunotte 2013, 132–133).

In her new study of the life and work of Harrison, Ulrike Brunotte points out that Harrison’s ‘discovery’ of a pre-Greek religion of the goddess—which was connected to Asia Minor, Africa, the ‘Orient,’ and ‘primitive religion’—was part of a larger discourse around 1900 (Brunotte 2013, 127; see also Schlesier 1994, 177–183). It is particularly in the chapter “The Making of a Goddess” in her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) that Harrison developed the thesis of a primordial veneration of the goddess that was destroyed by gender wars and the subjugation of autochthonous religions by patriarchal tribes that intruded on the Peloponnese from the North (Brunotte 2013, 128–134). Harrison’s contribution to this discourse was distinctive:

The discourse that Harrison responded to was determined by James G. Frazer and later particularly by archaeologists. Sir Arthur Evans’ excavations on Knossos were a revelation for many English scholars, including Harrison. Evans concluded that the entire island of Crete must have venerated a Great Goddess; this goddess, as he pointed out later, was identical with all other goddesses and even with the Mother of God (Evans 1921–1935, vol. 1, 45 – 52). In 1903, Sir Edmund Chambers claimed that pre-historical Europe knew a Great Earth Mother and venerated her in two aspects of ‘creatrix’ and goddess of destruction. This goddess later became known under many different names (Chambers 1903, vol. 1, 264). As recently as 1989, the Lithuanian-American archeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994) clung to this narrative in her book Language of the Goddess, the academic authority of which influenced many practitioners in pagan and feminist milieus (Gimbutas 2001 [1989]). The story of archaeological construction of the Mother Goddess is well known and fundamentally critiqued by recent scholarship (see particularly Röder, Hummel, and Kunz 2001).

The same is true for the discussion in Egyptology. Here it was Margaret Murray (1863–1963) who in her book The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) sketched the powerful image of a continuous European paganism that centered on the Goddess (Hutton 1999, 194–201).

Charles G. Leland and Robert Graves: Popularizing the Idea of the Goddess

Thanks to archaeologists and historians of religion, the idea that people in Europe, especially women, had been followers of the Great Goddess throughout the centuries was extremely popular in the period around 1900. In addition to the academic discussion that had already had an impact on the formation of historical understanding, we also find a number of authors writing for a broad audience and thus popularizing the idea of the Great Goddess. Although they were acquainted with major parts of the academic debate, these authors mixed the genres of communication and blended academic argument with poetry, personal accounts, and novelistic writing. In doing so, they reached many more readers and thus stabilized the attribution of historical meaning to a higher extent than academic writing alone could have done. For our purposes here, Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) and Robert Graves (1895–1985) are of special importance.

Discursive Materializations in (the Study of) Paganism and Esotericism

Graves’ influence on contemporary pagan discourse has been direct and indirect. One important reason for the impact of the historical construction that he and others propagated is the fact that academics accepted this narrative uncritically. For instance, in 1999 Dionysious Psilopoulos argued that “[t]he influence of the occult has been undervalued in Graves’s prose and poetry” (Psilopoulos 1999, 159). While it is correct to state the importance of reconstructing occultism’s influences on this line of thought—the present book is a contribution to that reconstruction—it is highly doubtful whether the existence of an age-old “esoteric-occult tradition” has been “proven” by scholars such as Richard Reitzenstein, Edwin Hatch, Gerald Massey, G.R.S. Mead, and Carl Gustav Jung (ibid.); from an historical point of view it is untenable to conclude with Psilopoulos that “we must acknowledge the existence of an uninterrupted esoteric-occult tradition through the ages, and we must give credence to occultists’ claim of an uninterrupted pre-Christian lineage” (ibid., 159–160). With this claim, the author moves far beyond Leon Surette’s argument that the roots of literary modernism are to be found in occult discourses (Surette 1993), and it is in this extension where the argument derails. Rather than being a proof of the continuous existence of the esoteric-occult tradition, Psilopoulos’ article is evidence of the discursive unity of academic theories and religious practice. This unity is stronger in the study of paganism and esotericism than in other fields of academic research (except perhaps Christian theology), which has to do with the history of these discourses themselves. Let us have a closer look at these entanglements.

During the second half of the twentieth century, European and North American intellectuals became increasingly skeptical of the master narratives that seemed to legitimize the superiority of modern Europe and to link European values to a Christian cultural heritage (see Perkins 2004). They insisted on the ambivalence, multiplicity, and the social and religious plurality of European culture. This critique of a superior unity of ‘the West’ can only be understood if we take into account the discursive changes that I address in this book. People were looking for alternative models of interpreting European history, models that seemed more fit to explain the plurality and ambiguity of European values and identities. They turned to the seemingly marginalized parts of European culture and paid special attention to aspects of European identity that seemed to represent its ‘shadow.’

These scholars were looking for a new vocabulary with which to analyze European cultural history. One of the terms that has gained currency since the 1990s is the concept of ‘Western esotericism’ (see von Stuckrad 2010a, 43–64; Hanegraaff 2012, 334–362). Although closely linked to older concepts that had been part of scholarly debate for a long time (mysticism, Gnosis, occultism, Hermeticism, etc.), the term ‘esotericism’ seemed to provide a basis for interpreting ‘Western’ culture that was more neutral—or even positive—with reference to the ambivalences, ‘undercurrents,’ and ‘margins’ of ‘the West.’ The attraction of this new vocabulary is part of a change of episteme—a changing agreement regarding what can be true about Europe and North America.

If we want to understand the origins of such a discursive change, it seems that the influences of the American counter-culture of the 1960s and the ‘New Age movement’ are significant (see also Kaiser 2011). This remains true, even if it can be argued that the major elements of New Age discourse originate in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious and philosophical thought. The 1960s and 1970s can be seen as a cultural turntable that disseminated these ideas in a wider context. Many religious beliefs and practices that we witness in North America and western Europe today can be interpreted as popularized forms of NEW AGE. It is not surprising that scholarly instruments of analysis likewise reveal the influence of re-entanglement of discourse strands. The popularity of concepts such as ‘esotericism,’ ‘paganism,’ or ‘occultism’ are both the result and further stabilization of the new discursive knot. Ronald Hutton pointed out a similar dynamic when it comes to the inclusion and exclusion of Druids in contemporary pagan milieus; the history of the construction of Druidism since the sixteenth century is at the same time a history of cultural developments in Europe, with the imagination of the Victorian period determining the discourse even today (Hutton 2013, 36).

The discursive changes that we see operative in culture and scholarship are visible in an application of analytical terms that are taken from the object level of analysis. Emic terms—even those that used to have very strong evaluative connotations—can be turned into etic categories. In fact, this process deconstructs the very distinction between emic and etic. What makes these terms ‘etic’ is the simple fact that scholars use them; thus, calling something ‘etic’ is perhaps not more than a rhetorical device to give an emic term scholarly power and blessing. This dynamic can also work the other way round, with so-called etic concepts being turned into emic ones; examples include ‘paganism,’ ‘pantheism,’ ‘animism,’ and even ‘heathendom. ’ The concept of the ‘Great Goddess’ is another case in point: is it an etic or an emic term? When did it change from being an etic term (i.e., used by scholars) to becoming an emic one as well (i.e., used by practitioners)? Or consider the term ‘synchronicity,’ discussed in Chapter 2 above. Is Jung’s use of it an etic or an emic one? And if astrologers take over the concept from Jung and Pauli, does it automatically change into an emic concept then? And does it make a difference if those astrologers are themselves versed in quantum physics or depth psychology? With these questions, I do not deny the analytical difference between ‘object language’ and ‘analytical language;’ but I doubt that the polarity of emic and etic clarifies this differentiation, as it tends to underestimate the fact that the very difference between emic and etic is constantly renegotiated and dependent on power relations and discursive constellations.

Let me exemplify this process of adaptation with the concept of “altered states of consciousness” (ASC), which is taken directly from NEW AGE and the psychedelic counter-culture of the 1960s. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, a renowned scholar of ‘Western esotericism,’ recently introduced the concept of altered states of consciousness in order to analyze the Hermetic tractates of late antiquity. The concept seems so well known that the author does not even see the need to define it; he simply states that “[i]t is quite common for trance-like altered states to be loosely referred to as ‘sleep’” (2008, 142). Hanegraaff criticizes scholars of an earlier generation (particularly André-Jean Festugière) who rejected the possibility of having revelatory experiences during altered states of consciousness. In an all-inclusive comparison that resembles an Eliadean understanding of ‘shamanic ecstasy’ (which I will discuss in the next chapter), he notes that “the idea that ‘people cannot possibly have had such experiences’, and must therefore have invented them, reflects a peculiar blindness on Festugière’s part—quite on the contrary, people have such experiences so frequently that they have been reported through all periods of history and all over the world” (Hanegraaff 2008, 160; no proof is provided for this general claim). Another example of a popularized NEW AGE vocabulary is the following statement about the experiential dimensions of the Hermetic text: “Admittedly the difference is a very ambiguous one, and perhaps deliberately so, because the text keeps suggesting that the external cosmos paradoxically (or, if one wishes, ‘holographically’) exists inside the visionary’s own mind.” In a footnote Hanegraaff explains that “the association [of holography] with ‘New Age’ should not keep us from perceiving the applicability of this concept in a context such as the present one” (2008, 149, note 76).

With statements like these Hanegraaff lends scholarly authority to the discursive knot of TRANCE, MIND, COSMOS, NEW AGE, PHILOSOPHY, HERMETICISM, GNOSIS, and EXPERIENCE; this knot overlaps in many ways with the entangled discourse strands that have been at work since the nineteenth century. What we see here is the academic stabilization of the attribution of meaning to certain experiences, or, more generally, the legitimization of knowledge claims in the dispositive of academic writing. Recently, Hanegraaff also introduced the term ‘entheogenic esotericism’ (2013), which is another example of the same dynamic; similar to Michael Harner (whom I will introduce in the next chapter), the positive attribution of religious meaning to the use of ayahuasca and other psychoactive plants is discursively stabilized in the genre of academic publication. In a discourse community that comprises practitioners and academic observers, as well as intertextual links to discourses that have been formed earlier, the strict differentiation between emic and etic turns out to be analytically useless.

In a recent review article, Markus Altena Davidsen (2012) asked, “What is Wrong with Pagan Studies?” He argued that ‘pagan studies’ (which is the self-description of many scholars, programmatically contrasting ‘the academic study of paganism’) are dominated by the methodological principles of essentialism, exclusivism, loyalism, and supernaturalism, and he demonstrates that these principles promote normative constructions of ‘pure’ paganism, insider interpretations of the data, and theological speculations about gods, powers, and a special ‘magical consciousness.’ Much of what Davidsen argues also holds true when we look at publications in the field of ‘Western esotericism.’ There can be no doubt that essentialism, exclusivism, loyalism, and supernaturalism are methodological principles that we also encounter in esotericism research. Two examples by leading scholars in the field may suffice.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in his introductory book on The Western Esoteric Traditions (2008), wrote:

Thus, Goodrick-Clarke loyally joins the ontological claims of primary sources in the field of esotericism, which becomes even more apparent when we read that “these perennial characteristics of the esoteric worldview suggest to me that this is an enduring tradition which, though subject to some degree of social legitimacy and cultural coloration, actually reflects an autonomous and essential aspect of the relationship between the mind and the cosmos” (ibid., 13). Hence, the professor of religion reinforces the legitimacy of a discursive entanglement that I have described as one of the most influential constellations in the European religious history of the twentieth century. He even adds the discourse strands of ARCHETYPAL FORMS and ENERGY to his essentialist attribution of meaning: “the historical evidence suggests that esotericism also involves a return to sources, to some archetypal forms of thought and energy which generate a fresh round of cultural and spiritual development. In this regard, esotericism is an essential element of renewal in the historical process” (ibid., 14).

What critics may see as a lack of reflection on the methodological basis of academic research is likewise visible in the work of another leading exponent of the field, the musicologist Joscelyn Godwin. In an interview for the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism in 2011, he remarked:

This self-description of the academic field is a direct materialization of countercultural discourses. While Christian theology has gone through hundreds of years of pluralistic criticism and refinement, many pagans and esotericists (including those who are academics) construct their identity through narratives of exclusion and persecution. This can lead to unexpected revelations. When asked what were “the worst things about having this [Western esotericism] as your specialty,” Godwin responded: “Having to listen to papers or read articles and dissertations that accommodate it to current and fashionable academic trends. But this is my problem. If I was academically trained in philosophy, history, or the study of religions, or if I had bothered to read the authors sanctified by those trends, I might feel less bored and excluded” (ibid.). The result of this lack of theoretical reflection is what I call ‘methodological solipsism,’ which is a characteristic of many publications in the academic study of paganism and esotericism.

One reason for methodological solipsism is the lack of common ground when it comes to disciplinary training. Scholars of esotericism often proudly present their field as interdisciplinary, and indeed, the interdisciplinary potential is one of the most attractive features of the study of esotericism. The problem is, however, that we have not yet arrived at an interdisciplinary study of esotericism; what we see, instead, is a multidisciplinary study of esoteric themes and topics. What is the difference? Interdisciplinarity means that the research results of one discipline are actively exposed to the criticism of another discipline, which leads to new insights and to the refinement of research questions and methods (see Kocka 1987; Joas and Kippenberg 2005). This also means that scholars will have to read and be interested in the approaches of other disciplines, not just accept them as being different. In contrast, multidisciplinarity is the peaceful coexistence of various, at times even conflicting, research methods and results; it is more like “I am OK, you are OK,” and there is no need to really bother about what others have to say. We can call this ‘the encounter group situation.’

Methodological solipsism can also be encountered in Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s work. Regarding his approach, he states clearly that “[t]he study of ‘Western esotericism’ should be firmly grounded, first and foremost, in a straightforward historiographical agenda: that of exploring the many blank spaces on our mental maps and filling them in with color and detail, so that they become integral parts of the wider landscape that we already knew, or thought we knew” (Hanegraaff 2012, 378). This approach is constructed as an antidote to what Hanegraaff calls ‘eclecticism,’ namely the ideological selection of historical data to confirm a polemical narrative of exclusion. But how should ‘anti-eclectical historiography’ look concretely? His book on Esotericism and the Academy does not give an indication of the methodology that underlies its analyses. As Hereward Tilton points out:

Hanegraaff does not refer to the huge intellectual debate that is raging in historiography since the challenges of Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Reinhart Koselleck, and others, or to the new responses that scholars have formulated to cope with these challenges. A more serious engagement with this critical debate would lead to the realization that it is impossible to apply an anti-eclectical historiography; the questions, rather, are: What interests and circumstances drive the selection of historical data (including our own)? How is historical knowledge constructed in social communication? It is these questions that need to be included in serious historical research. Hanegraaff’s argument would be much stronger if he incorporated the methodological considerations of scholars who are reflecting on the social construction of knowledge. Poststructuralist approaches actually provide ammunition for a critical analysis of the complexities of European culture and its historiography (see also Otto 2013).

Even if Hanegraaff, Godwin, and Goodrick-Clarke simply state that post-structuralist and discursive approaches cannot solve the problems of academic research “after the fact” (to use Clifford Geertz’ expression), then the challenges of older paradigms still hold and must be answered, instead of returning to an understanding of historiography and scientific truth that predates the important turns of the twentieth century. There are examples of scholars who are also critical of so-called ‘postmodern’ approaches but who actually take the challenges seriously and respond to them on a high level of reflection. One example is Geertz’s book After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (1995), to which I will return in the next chapter. Another prominent example is the historian Carlo Ginzburg. In his recent book Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive, Ginzburg notes:

If scholars of paganism and esotericism want to leave the niche into which the discursive entanglements of their study have brought them, they will have to join the theoretical discussion that is going on in historiography, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, and the academic study of religion.

In sum, and closing my brief methodological excursus, this chapter has shown the direct discursive impact of academic theorizing on religious practice; it has also shown the mutual dependence and ultimately the inseparability of academic and non-academic as well as emic and etic perspectives. Again, it makes sense to talk of discourse communities if we want to grasp the underlying processes. The next chapter will address another example of such a community, this time linked to SHAMANISM.