Politics and the Study of [Western] Esotericism

On 2 July 2009, I gave a “President’s Opening Address” at the opening of the 2^nd Biannual Conference of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) in Strasbourg, France. [1] It never got published, but I made it available on my Academia.edu page, where it can still be found under “talks.” I believe that the argument in this lecture remains highly relevant today, and may even be more relevant than ever, because the return to power of far-right ideologies that worried me so deeply at the time (as you can see from the text below) has obviously continued year after year and is now impossible for anyone to miss. During the 1990s, it was still common and intuitive to think of far-right esotericism as a topic of mere “historical interest,” because the liberal-democratic consensus seemed quite secure and few of us imagined that it might start to crumble during our lifetimes. Yet here we are. Especially after the trauma of 9/11 (not to mention the rise of social media since the 2010s), popular feelings of resistance to the effects of neoliberal globalization made it possible for far-right ideologies to return to the political mainstream. Of course, this couldn't fail to be reflected also in the developing field of esotericism research. 

What follows is a literal reproduction of my lecture from 2009, including the footnotes that I added when I put it online. I have made no changes to the text, except for adding updates to those footnotes (and adding a few new footnotes as well) which are placed within square brackets and marked as Add 2025. This makes it possible for my readers to see exactly what I was thinking in 2009 and how I look at these topics from my current perspective sixteen years later. I’m happy to see that I still agree entirely with everything I said at the time! But I can now also see my own speech as a kind of historical document that provides a glimpse of how things were looking (to me, at least) at an earlier moment in time – two years before the financial crisis delivered an enormous shock to the neoliberal-global consensus from which it never really recovered, thus accelerating the process of political change that brought us to our present situation. One of the biggest temptations of political discourse is to become so obsessed by the present that we forget the “look and feel” of how the world appeared to all of us even in the relatively recent past. So this is a small exercise in revisiting that recent past from the perspective of the present.

Ladies and gentlemen,

As president of the ESSWE it is a pleasure for me to welcome you to this second biannual conference of our society, which is taking place this year in a city that has played a central role in the development towards European union after the second world war. Given this special location, and its symbolic significance as a nodal point in the complex web of European political relations, I would like to use the occasion to say a few introductory words today about the political dimensions of the study of esotericism, particularly in the present European context. It is a topic that has been on my mind for years, and I believe the time is ripe to put it on the agenda of our society.

 

As is well known, the wish to work towards greater European union after World War II was motivated by the widely-felt wish to prevent any future repetition of the catastrophe caused by right-wing totalitarianism and militarism. It is therefore ironic, and certainly worrying, that many Europeans in recent years have begun to experience the European Community itself as a distant and impersonal system of domination and control that disempowers voters and in fact undermines democracy. In my own country, which had long been known for its traditions of tolerance and a pragmatic approach to the tensions caused by cultural, ethnic and religious plurality, this sense of disempowerment is now resulting in a new attractiveness of far right-wing populist movements which promise their voters that they will restore “power to the people” by taking it away from the political elites, and go on to promise that they will re-instate “law and order” so as to repair what they see as the damage done by the left and its soft and too tolerant politics. In this context, representatives of ethnic and religious minorities are now routinely being scapegoated and treated as second-rate citizens, whose very presence is felt to be intolerable, and whose right to have beliefs and practices different from those of the native population is called into question. [2]

History does not repeat itself, but patterns of intolerance do. Unfortunately, drawing historical parallels between the current situation and the kind of cultural and political climate which ultimately gave birth to fascism and anti-Semitic ideologies in Europe in the first half of the 20^th century, under conditions of economic crisis, remains largely taboo, at least in the Dutch media and public debate with which I am best familiar. [3]

 

Now you will be wondering: what does all this have to do with the study of esotericism? Quite a lot, in fact.

To begin with the most obvious parallel: our society, the ESSWE, is itself a kind of European union of scholars of esotericism. As President of this Society, I can only hope that ours is felt to be representative of its members and their wishes. 

Secondly, and more importantly, as scholars we are professionally committed to the study of currents and beliefs, which have very frequently been seen as heretical, subversive and dangerous, and have therefore been subject to censorship and political suppression, both by religious and by secular institutions. [4] Scholars in our field therefore have particularly good reasons for insisting on the value of religious tolerance, calling attention to the positive and creative dimensions of religious plurality in the space of European culture, and emphasizing the importance of a nuanced and well-informed approach to religious minorities whose beliefs and practices are too often simplified and distorted in mainstream and popular media presentations. Religious polemics have a logic of their own, which we are particularly well placed to analyze: [5] by studying the dynamics of polemicism (and its counterpart apologeticism) in the context of European history of religion, I believe we can learn lessons with a relevance that goes well beyond esotericism alone.

Thirdly, it is well known that esotericists, particularly since the 18^th century, have frequently been active themselves in political theorizing and even political practice, and their perspectives mirror and reflect the more general European political developments of their time. During the 19^th century (and contrary to popular assumptions), esotericists were often strongly engaged in progressive causes linked to secularization, modernization, democratization, and social emancipation, experimenting with, and sometimes pioneering, perspectives that would now be seen as leaning mostly towards the left. [6] During the 20^th century, on the other hand, many esoteric authors began to react against secularization and the modern world, often developing conservative, traditionalist and elitist worldviews; and in a number of important cases, such authors went all the way towards trying to lend metaphysical legitimacy to forms of fascism, national socialism, and anti-Semitism. Of course this is only one dimension of modern and contemporary esotericism, much of which is far from any such orientations; but it is certainly a very important one. One of our tasks as scholars is to study the complex relations between esotericism and politics thoroughly, critically, and with attention to nuance and detail. Among our own membership, important pioneering work in this regard has been done by well-known specialists such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke [7] and Hans Thomas Hakl, [8] to mention only two; and across the Atlantic, one might think of recent work by colleagues such as, for example, Arthur Versluis [9] or Hugh B. Urban. [10] It is good news that our American counterpart, the Association for the Study of Esotericism, has decided to devote its next biannual conference precisely to esotericism and politics. [10a]

         However, fourthly, precisely such research appears to carry specific risks for scholars in our field; and to this final point I would like to give some special attention. Since the Second World War, it has often been suggested both by influential public intellectuals [11] and the popular media that esotericism or the occult is, somehow, intrinsically fascist; and in some countries (Germany in particular, but to a lesser extent, France as well) this association has become almost an automatic reflex among intellectuals. [11a] The idea that the mythical and “irrational” dimensions of esotericism somehow make it implicitly fascist has tainted the field as a whole, and has long been an important factor in preventing it from being recognized as a normal field of academic research. On a personal level too, it has not been unusual for scholars of esotericism to find themselves suspected of fascist leanings for no other reason than the fact that they have chosen to specialize in such a “suspect” domain. I myself first became aware of this dynamics at the time I defended my dissertation on the New Age movement. [12] Although it was not even available yet in print, a rather well-known Dutch journalist felt he did not need to wait and read it, and used it as the occasion for an article about New Age and its supposed connection with fascism, under the utterly bizarre title “Wodan is not recognized”… [13] This case was silly enough to make it possible for me to merely smile about it; but not all my colleagues have been so fortunate, and their own experiences have sometimes been far from amusing. Some of the best scholars in the study of esotericism, many of them members of our society, have, at some point in their career, made the painful experience of seeing themselves listed or “exposed” as an apologist of the far right or as a crypto-fascist. [13a] And it is predictable that those whose research has focused specifically on the links between fascism and esotericism have been particularly vulnerable in that regard. 

 

For a professional academic organization like ours, this phenomenon is too important to ignore. The popular association between esotericism and fascism is bound to surface again and again, in the popular media and elsewhere, and therefore we as a society for the study of Western esotericism should better think about it seriously. And what is more, I believe the association is far from random. Ultimately, I would argue, it is a reflection of deep structures in European culture which have to do with the complex dialectics of simultaneous attraction and rejection between biblical monotheistic traditions on the one hand, and the “pagan” traditions of Platonism and Hermetism on the other. Unless I am mistaken, this dialectics goes to the very heart of our field of study. [14]

Another reason for us to be concerned about popular associations of esotericism with fascism, finally, is that it constitutes a crucial test case for how serious we are about defending the very foundations of the academic enterprise. Let me explain what I mean with this. As scholars, we are committed to critical methodologies which historically, since the 18^th century, have played a crucial emancipatory role by undermining the political dominance of traditional religious authority and helping create the foundations of modern secular democracies. [15] Apart from sheer brutal force, the exercise of political power typically requires information control and manipulation of knowledge; and from that perspective, the scholarly nuance that comes with critical methodologies is necessarily an unwelcome obstacle. We can see this logic at work in the propaganda machines of any totalitarian system known from history or in our own time; but in less extreme forms, it is a standard temptation for anybody in a position of political power. 

One common technique of information control is that of secrecy and concealment, i.e. preventing the common population from having access to “classified” information: a practice which is deeply problematic from the perspective of critical scholarship, which requires open debate based upon full access to all relevant sources of information. Another technique is dualistic simplification. Sensitive issues need to be simplified so as to create clear and unambiguous boundaries between “good” and “evil,” the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” “us” and “them.” But critical academic scholarship, in sharp contrast, is bound to question such simplifications and call attention rather to complexity, nuance, and ambiguity. It therefore undermines or disrupts the effectiveness of political power. Instead of rhetoric, it requires arguments; instead of rumors or insinuations, it requires evidence; instead of easy generalizations it requires often difficult analyses. In thus taking the hard and difficult road towards knowledge, critical scholarship is necessarily subversive of political power and control. 

 

It is therefore predictable that if scholars of esotericism venture into sensitive political domains – and to a considerable extent, the whole field of esotericism is a sensitive political domain! –, they may find that the weapons of simplification are being turned against themselves, attempts will be made to restrict the free dissemination of information and knowledge, and they may find themselves under attack personally. 

It is easy to find examples in our field. For instance, scholars of new religious movements often see themselves forced to refute anti-cult stereotypes as factually inaccurate, and to replace such stereotypes by much more complex analyses based upon careful study of the evidence. For this, they are often rewarded by being stereotyped themselves: as cult apologists who must surely be on the payroll of Scientology, or naïve inhabitants of the academic ivory tower whose so-called scholarship makes them blind to the evil of the groups they study. The contempt for knowledge and professional expertise reflected in such anti-academic rhetoric is often shocking; and all the more so if one finds it reflected in official government documents and legislation. [16]

Another example brings us back to the theme of esotericism and the extreme right. Scholars studying the relation between politics and esotericism are bound to call attention, for reasons of simple accuracy and respect for historical evidence, to the actual variety of historical fascisms and right-wing ideologies, which have taken very different shapes in different European countries and cultural traditions, and cannot all be tarred by the same brush. But here too, scholars who thus try to lift the debate to a higher academic level by insisting on nuance, complexity and reliable knowledge may sadly find themselves rewarded by being portrayed as apologists for fascism, who are muddying the waters by blurring the sharp boundaries between right and wrong, and are therefore eligible for censorship and exclusion from academic debate. Such cases are most painful when they are inspired by sheer political expediency, for example when academic institutions exclude scholars or scholarly projects simply because they are afraid of what their colleagues, the media, or financial sponsors might say. 

 

This brings me to my conclusion, which is a very simple one: responsible scholarship requires moral and political courage. This is true of scholarship in general, but it is particularly relevant in a domain like the study of esotericism. We are not just in the business of writing nice and safe articles or books about interesting groups and personalities, or advancing our careers in academia. Rather, as scholars we are engaged in an inherently political enterprise, in which we are required to defend “the pursuit of knowledge” against the “the pursuit of power.” [17] Respect for facts and demonstrable evidence, insistence on critical argumentation, and open debate without censorship of opinions are not self-evidently given: on the contrary, they are necessarily problematic and unwelcome from the perspective of power, and therefore must be gained and defended again and again by each new generation of scholars. This struggle is not an easy one, and one cannot play safe. But the goal is worth the effort: that of an open society based upon the free pursuit of knowledge: a society, in fact, in which the very distinction between orthodoxy and heresy has become meaningless. Of course I know that such a society sounds like a utopian ideal. But even though it may never be reached, our task as scholars is to walk the road that leads towards it.

 

With these opening remarks, I hope to have given you some food for thought and discussion. I now open the second biannual conference of the ESSWE, and wish you all an excellent time.

 

[1] Strasbourg, July 2. The theme of the 2^nd biannual conference of the ESSWE was Capitals of European Esotericism and Transcultural Dialogue; but I consider it the privilege of a scholarly society’s president to use the occasion of an Opening Address to call attention to topics that he considers to be of general importance for the society.

 

[2] I am, of course, referring to the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV: Party for Freedom) headed by Geert Wilders, which according to present polls might well become one of the largest parties, or even the largest one, in the next Dutch elections. Wilders became known internationally by his movie Fitna, the message of which is essentially that the string of terrorist attacks since 9/11 must be attributed not just to Muslim extremists, but to the very nature of Islam as such; all muslims in the Netherlands should therefore be seen (so the logic goes) as implicitly condoning or lending support to terror unless they renounce their religion. Accordingly, Wilders, in spite of his strong advocacy of “freedom of speech,” would like to prohibit the Quran along with Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  [Add 2025: Wilders’ PVV went on to win 24 seats in the 2010 Dutch elections, against 31 for Mark Rutte’s liberal VVD and 21 for Maxime Verhagen’s Christian-Democratic CDA. After protracted negotiations, this resulted in the highly unstable first Rutte cabinet, with a slim majority coalition of VVD/CDA and the PVV in a role of “confidence and supply.” Wilders withdrew his support on April 21, 2012, leading to the fall of the cabinet. In the elections of 22 November 2023, Wilders’ PVV gained 37 seats and became the largest party in the Netherlands. Eventually, this resulted in the cabinet Schoof, consisting of the PVV, VVD, and the new parties NSC (Nieuw Sociaal Contract) and BBB (BoerBurgerBeweging) from 2 July 2024 to 3 June 2025, when the PVV withdrew over a conflict about immigration reforms. As it turns out, the worries I expressed in 2009 were therefore well-founded].

 

[3] It goes without saying that there are many important differences between the popular antisemitism widespread in Europe during the first decades of the 20^th century and popular anti-Islam sentiments as prevalent today in a country like the Netherlands. However, history has taught us how popular antisemitism can give rise to antisemitism as a virulent political ideology, and the anti-Islamic sentiments which are currently gaining prominence can easily be exploited by right-wing populists to muster support for equally intolerant and dangerous ideologies. If Hitler notoriously came to power with the message (as formulated by Heinrich von Treitschke) Die Juden sind unser Unglück, right-wing populists are now highly successful with the message Die Muslime sind unser Unglück. In my opinion, if drawing such parallels is considered illegitimate, we are giving up the attempt to learn lessons from history.

 

[4] I do not mean to suggest that Western esotericism should be equated with heresy (many heretical movements in the history of Europe are unrelated to esotericism, and much that we study under the heading of “Western esotericism” has never been considered heretical). Nevertheless, particularly the perception of Western esoteric currents as ultimately grounded in (Platonic, Hermetic, or Zoroastrian) “paganism” has often caused them to attacked as anti-Christian heresy, and particularly after the 17^thand 18^th centuries, much of Western esotericism became part of a field of “rejected knowledge” from the perspective of mainstream academic thinking. [Add 2025: this line of argumentation led to a monograph published three years later: Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, Cambridge University Press 2012. In my most recent work I have taken the analysis one step further. I now speak of an “internal Eurocentrism” that, as I argue, became the basic template for the “external-Eurocentric” suppression and extermination of “primitive idolatry and magical superstition” in the colonial age (Esotericism in Western Culture: Counter-Normativity and Rejected Knowledge, Bloomsbury 2025).]

 

[5] See e.g. Olav Hammer & Kocku von Stuckrad (eds.), Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and Its Others, Leiden: Brill 2008. On my own notion of a “grand polemical narrative” constitutive of Western esotericism as a field of research, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Forbidden Knowledge: Anti-Esoteric Polemics and Academic Research,” Aries 5:2 (2005), 225-254;  and idem, “The Trouble with Images: Anti-Image Polemics and Western Esotericism,” in: Hammer & von Stuckrad, o.c., 107-136. [Add 2025: these two publications from 2005 and 2009, too, contained embyronic versions of the eventual argument of Esotericism and the Academy (2012).]

 

[6] See e.g. Marco Pasi, “The Modernity of Occultism: Reflections on Some Crucial Aspects,” in: Wouter J. Hanegraaff & Joyce Pijnenburg (eds.), Hermes in the Academy, Amsterdam: Vossiuspers 2009 (forthcoming). [Add 2025: this article got published in the same year 2009. Since then, as the critical study of esotericism developed, many further analyses of esotericism and the political left have been published, for instance by Julian Strube, Sozialismus, Katholizismus und Okkultismus im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts: Die Genealogie der Schriften von Eliphas Lévi, De Gruyter 2016; idem, “Socialist Religion and the Emergence of Occultism: A Genealogical Approach to Socialism and Secularization in 19^th-Century France,” Religion 46:3 (2016), 359-388; or, very recently, Ansgar Martins, “The German Jewish Occult: Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Philosophy of the ‘Irrational’,” Aries 25:2 (2025), 258-303. See also my general remarks in Esotericism in Western Culture, 185-186.]

 

[7] See notably Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s classic The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology, orig. 1985, repr. London / New York: I.B. Tauris 1992. [Add 2025: I did not mention Goodrick-Clarke’s later publications in this domain, notably Hitler’s Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism (New York University Press 1998) and Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York University Press 2002). This is because I found them problematic in several respects, but this ESSWE lecture would not have been the proper occasion for a critical book review. For relevant critical observations that mirror my own, see e.g. Nathan Katz’s review in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67:4 [1999], 890-892).]

 

[8] E.g. Hans Thomas Hakl, Unknown Sources: National Socialism and the Occult, Holmes Publ. Group 2000. [Add 2025: Hakl and his famous “Octagon Library” have recently been the subject of a special issues of Religiographies 2:1 (2023), including inter alia an article by myself focused on Hakl's Eranos book, a biographical overview by Bernd-Christian Otto, and an Introduction by Marco Pasi that addresses well-known controversies about Hakl’s involvement in publishing ventures connected to the far right, an issue that is also discussed by Hakl himself in a large interview on his website (https://www.hthakl-octagon.com/interview/interview-englisch/). Concerning regrettable “lapses in basic source criticism” that turn out be more frequent in Hakl’s publications on Evola than was known at the time, see the excellent very recent analysis by Peter Staudenmaier, “Evola’s Afterlives: Esotericism and Politics in the Posthumous Reception of Julius Evola,” Aries 25:2 (2025), 163-193, here 184.]

 

[9] Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006.

 

[10] Hugh B. Urban, The Secrets of the Kingdom: Religion and Concealment in the Bush Administration, Lanham etc.: Rowman & Littlefield 2007.

 

[10a] [Add 2025: the proceedings of this conference were published as Arthur Versluis, Lee Irwin & Melinda Phillips (eds), Esotericism, Religion, and Politics, Association for the Study of Esotericism / North American Academic Press 2012.]

 

[11] E.g. Theodor Adorno, “Theses against Occultism,” in: The Stars down to Earth and other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, London, New York: Routledge 1994, 128-134 (German orig. 1947); Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism,” The New York Review of Books 42:11 (June 22, 1995), 12-15. [Add 2025: for a recent analysis of Adorno’s theses, see Andreas Kilcher, “Is Occultism as Product of Capitalism?,” in: Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Peter J. Forshaw & Marco Pasi (eds.), Hermes Explains: Thirty Questions about Western Esotericism, Amsterdam University Press 2019, 168-176; and see also my forthcoming chapter “Anti-Esotericism” in Henrik Bogdan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Esotericism, Oxford University Press forthcoming.] 

 

[11a] [Add 2025: One typical example would be the introductory textbook Esoterik, published two years after my lecture by the German professor in history of religion Hartmut Zinser (see my very sharp review in “Textbooks and Introductions to Western Esotericism,” Religion 43:2 [2013], here 193-195). I argue in my more recent work that, historically, this particular polemical discourse can be accounted for in terms of the wide influence and intellectual authority after World War II of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (Esotericism in the Academy, 312-314; Esotericism in Western Culture, 188-189). Nowadays I would describe it even more specifically as a clear example, among many others, of the “internal Eurocentric” discourse concerning Western culture that I criticize in my recent work (see above, note 4). It should go without saying, but must perhaps be pointed out to hasty readers, that the argument has nothing to do with the popular far-right meme of “Cultural Marxism” (its both amusing and alarming story has been told by the major Frankfurt school specialist Martin Jay in his “Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe,” Salmagundi 168/169 [2010-2011], 30-40). On the perhaps surprising “esoteric” dimensions of Critical Theory itself, see the fascinating recent discussion by Ansgar Martins, “The German Jewish Occult: Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Philosophy of the ‘Irrational’,” Aries 25:2 (2025), 258-303.]

 

[12] Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Leiden: Brill 1996 (defended as Ph.D. in 1995).

 

[13] René Zwaap, “Wodan wordt miskend”, De Groene Amsterdammer 15 november 1995 (the opening sentence implied that “Wodan” now finally gets academic recognition due to my study of New Age).

 

[13a] [Add 2025: this trend has unfortunately continued after 2009 and would even seem to be experiencing a revival in recent years. Here I merely mention this fact while refraining from mentioning names, for several reasons. Firstly, this updated publication of an old lecture would not be the place for engaging in polemics against authors or online sources that have more recently become active. Secondly, I won’t give assistance to bad actors by further spreading their defamatory content. Thirdly, the worst offenders simply do not deserve to be taken seriously, in my opinion, especially if they engage in conspiracy narratives built on non sequiturs and the well-known tricks of guilt-by-association. It should go without saying (but again, may nevertheless need to be repeated) that none of this has to do with the legitimate critique of scholars who commit real offenses, such as racist rhetoric or any other ways of spreading hate against groups or individuals. ]

 

[14] I hope to develop this argument in detail in my forthcoming monograph Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (projected for publication in 2010 or 2011). [Add 2025: this obviously happened]

 

[15] For “criticism” as foundational to the Enlightenment project, a classic reference is Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co 1966. A major example of the critical spirit is, of course, Immanuel Kant, with his three Kritiken and his paradigmatic insistance on free intellectual inquiry: sapere aude! (“What is Enlightenment?” [1784], in: Margaret C. Jacob [ed.], The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents, Boston, New York: Bedford/St.Martins 2001, 202-208). Modern biblical criticism was a crucial factor in the decline of the authority of Scripture; and more generally, the rise of historical criticism undermined the authority of traditional accounts of the history of the Church. [Add 2025: see now my distinction between a “good” Enlightenment1 and a “bad” Enlightenment2: Esotericism in Western Culture, 205-207).]

 

[16] I am thinking here of the notorious government report Les sectes en France (Documents d’information de l’Assemblée Nationale no. 2468, 1996), which was based entirely on the perspectives of the anti-cult movement and accounts of ex-members, while systematically disregarding academic specialists (see Massimo Introvigne & J. Gordon Melton [eds.], Pour en finir avec les sects: Le débat sur le rapport de la commission parlementaire, Paris: Dervy 1996).

 

[17] I am aware of the fact that, in the wake of influential intellectuals such as Foucault, Bourdieu and others, the very idea of separating knowledge from power may be seen as questionable. In my opinion, it would indeed be naïve to deny the fact that claims of knowledge are always tied up with claims of power. However, this does not imply that the former can be reduced to the latter, or that there are no facts but only discourses making claims about facts. [Add 2025: in this regard, see now also my discussion “of discourse and reality” in Esotericism in Western Culture, 17-21 “The Discursive Turn.”]