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Catholicism and esotericism seem to have hostile relations but in fact the opposite is true. In both traditions, we find stigmata, revelations, visions, “magic”, spiritualistic contacts... We explore which are the theological and sociological concepts which make this possible. The porous transfer zone between “orthodox” theology and “heretical” ideas is central. For example, the legitimating structure of “scripture and tradition” allowed for the integration of religious practices that did not originate in Christianity or justified revelations apart from the Bible. This kept groups within the church which in Protestantism were often “eparated” – and thus hardly noticed by researchers. This means for religious studies to revise the strongly Protestant boundary-work to determine the demarcation lines of a Christian “orthodoxy” and thereby to redefine the role of spiritualistic theologies. Catholicism is characterized here by a border landscape in which esoteric ideas were flexibly adapted – and in which one often renounced the definition of a precise, eliminatory boundary line.
The main subjects of analysis in the present book are the stages of initiation in the grand scheme of Theosophical evolution. Mühlematter shows that the stages of initiation were the blueprint for Annie Besant's pedagogy, which she implemented in
The main subjects of analysis in the present book are the stages of initiation in the grand scheme of Theosophical evolution. These initiatory steps are connected to an idea of evolutionary self-development by means of a set of virtues that are relative to the individual’s position on the path of evolution. The central thesis is that these stages were translated from the “Hindu” tradition to the “Theosophical” tradition through multifaceted “hybridization processes” in which several Indian members of the Theosophical Society partook. Starting with Annie Besant’s early Theosophy, the stages of initiation are traced through Blavatsky’s work to Manilal Dvivedi and T. Subba Row...
The historiographers of religious studies have written the history of this discipline primarily as a rationalization of ideological, most prominently theological and phenomenological ideas: first through the establishment of comparative, philological and sociological methods and secondly through the demand for intentional neutrality. This interpretation caused important roots in occult-esoteric traditions to be repressed. This process of “purification” (Latour) is not to be equated with the origin of the academic studies. De facto, the elimination of idealistic theories took time and only happened later. One example concerning the early entanglement is Tibetology, where many researchers ...