Abstract
Despite claims of representing an ancient, unchanging wisdom, esoteric movements have often constructed their traditions and adapted to various historical contexts. In view of existing scholarship, we argue that “innovation” can be a useful heuristic tool for understanding the historical changes esoteric traditions undergo. In this chapter we reconceptualize innovation to be the continuous leveraging of past traditions in new contexts. In terms of ideas, we affirm that innovation is a mechanism of negotiation whereby an idea is either produced against, or adapted from, an older set of concepts in order to respond to a present context. We further consider the role of individual choice in innovation, and analyze how knowledge frameworks, such as esotericism, religion, or science, are interconnected to produce innovation.
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Notes
- 1.
We are primarily using the designation “esotericism” rather than the classic scholarly designation “Western esotericism” in this book. The rationale for this is discussed in the section “Innovation and Cross-Cultural Exchanges” further in the introduction.
- 2.
For instance, Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, I: “Essays on the Science of Religion” (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1867), x–xi; Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), 8–18; Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 5–8, 12–13, 25–27, 31–32. More contemporary variants of this belief are analyzed further below.
- 3.
A good example is Kocku von Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
- 4.
There is now a growing body of scholarship on the topic of tradition in esotericism and related currents. See Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm, “Constructing Esotericisms: Sociological, Historical and Critical Approaches to the Invention of Tradition,” in Contemporary Esotericism, eds. Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm (Sheffield and Bristol, CT: Equinox, 2012), 24–48; Andreas Kilcher, ed., Constructing Tradition: Means and Myths of Transmission in Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2010); James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer, eds., The Invention of Sacred Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
- 5.
See Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge, 7–42, Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- 6.
Andreas Kilcher, “Introduction: Constructing Tradition in Western Esotericism,” in Kilcher, Constructing Tradition, ix–xv.
- 7.
On these subjects, important for any discussion of the esoteric traditions, see D.P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1975), Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Philosophia Perennis: Historical Outlines of Western Spirituality in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011); Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy.
- 8.
See Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge.
- 9.
Brian Vickers, “Introduction,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–55.
- 10.
James Webb, The Flight from Reason (London: Macdonald, 1971), 121.
- 11.
See note n. 2.
- 12.
On the construction of esoteric traditions, see note n. 4.
- 13.
There has been no book-length treatment of innovation in esotericism. Gideon Bohak, Yuval Harari, and Shaul Shaked’s edited volume Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011) deals with the topic of magic, focusing mainly on transmission of ideas in this context. Michael A. Williams, Collett Cox, and Martin Jaffee’s edited collection Innovation in Religious Traditions (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 1992) discusses the topic of innovation in religion, but does not address esotericism, and its theoretical approach to the concept of innovation is limited.
- 14.
See, for instance, “Innovation” in the Collins English Dictionary, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/innovation (accessed 20 July 2020), which rates the word frequency as “very common, innovation is one of the 4000 most commonly used words in the Collins dictionary.”
- 15.
A useful Google chart shows that the term’s usage in books between 1940 and 2008 has increased at least five times. “Innovation,” Google Ngram Chart, https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?smoothing=7&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cinnovation%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Binnovation%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BInnovation%3B%2Cc0&year_end=2008&corpus=15&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&content=innovation (accessed 20 July 2020).
- 16.
“Innovation,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/innovation (accessed 20 July 2020).
- 17.
As an example, Jan Fagerberg, David C. Mowery and Richard R. Nelson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) begins with the assumption that innovations worth mentioning are airplanes, automobiles, telecommunications, refrigerators, agriculture, the wheel, the alphabet, and so on.
- 18.
Simon Robb and Elizabeth Bullen, “A Provocation,” in Innovation and Tradition: The Arts, Humanities and the Knowledge Economy, eds. Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen and Simon Robb (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 1–9.
- 19.
Conversely, some ideas specifically geared toward a material outcome may fail to yield the socio-economic impact they were assumed to have, or may have unexpected results.
- 20.
Edward N. Lorenz, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow,” Journal of Atmospheric Science 20 (1963): 130–41.
- 21.
See for instance Takahiro Ezaki et al., “Closer to Critical Resting-State Neural Dynamics in Individuals with Higher Fluid Intelligence,” Communications Biology 3 (2020), M. Rabinovich, A.N. Simmons and P. Varona, “Dynamical Bridge between Brain and Mind,” Trends in Cognitive Science 19 (2015): 453–61, R.F. Port and T. Van Gelder, eds., Exploration in the Dynamics of Cognition: Mind as Motion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
- 22.
Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, x–xi.
- 23.
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 3–23.
- 24.
Michel Foucault, “History, Discourse and Discontinuity,” trans. Anthony M. Nazzaro, Salmagundi 20, Special Issue “Psychological Man: Approaches to an Emergent Social Type” (1972): 225–48. See also Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), xii.
- 25.
Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York: Free Press, 1968), 193–203.
- 26.
Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society, Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1984), xiii-40.
- 27.
See Paul-Francois Tremlett, Levi-Strauss on Religion: The Structuring Mind (London: Equinox, 2008), 73–77.
- 28.
Recent developmental psychology has emphasized the importance of the “alignment” of mental states in human communication; see for instance M. Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
- 29.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
- 30.
See, for example, Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary and Jana Sawicki, eds., A Companion to Foucault (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 411, 531.
- 31.
We note that what fundamentally distinguishes frameworks is not necessarily their historical duration, but institutionalization and group support.
- 32.
Edward Albert Shils, Tradition (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 214.
- 33.
These included the pursuit of poverty, which was implicitly critical of the lavish lifestyle and riches of the Church, or the portrayal of Francis by Bonaventure and others as an angel and prophet set in an apocalyptic context, ideas that resonated with the heretic views of Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202); on the former topic, see for instance Brian Hamilton, “The Politics of Poverty: A Contribution to a Franciscan Political Theology,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 35, no. 1 (2015): 29–44 (which notes, like other scholars, the similarity of the early Franciscans with contemporary heretical movements such as the Waldensians); on the latter topic, see Regis J. Armstrong, J. Wayne Hellmann and William J. Short, “General Introduction,” in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, eds. Regis J. Armstrong, J. Wayne Hellmann and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 2001), 11–21.
- 34.
On this topic, see David Burr, Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2001).
- 35.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Western Esoteric Traditions: a Historical Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 13–14.
- 36.
Goodrick-Clarke, Western Esoteric Traditions, 14.
- 37.
On this topic, the best place to start is Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Esotericism,” in The Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, eds. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Roelof van den Broek, Antoine Faivre and Jean-Pierre Brach (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 336–40.
- 38.
Peter Ellard, The Sacred Cosmos: Theological, Philosophical, and Scientific Conversations in the Twelfth Century School of Chartres (Chicago, IL: University of Scranton Press, 2007).
- 39.
See, for example, Lucinda Martin, “Jacob Boehme and the Anthropology of German Pietism,” in An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception, eds. Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei (New York: Routledge, 2014), 120–41.
- 40.
Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 10–15.
- 41.
Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols (New York, NY: Columbia University Press and Macmillan, 1923–1958).
- 42.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 62–76.
- 43.
Historian Frances Yates has proposed the famous Yates thesis, according to which the Hermetic tradition has brought about the advent of early modern science. See Frances Yates, “The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science,” in Art, Science and History in the Renaissance, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 255–74, or her more famous Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
- 44.
For instance, Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 88–116, includes Platonic Renaissance philosophy as a factor in the rise of modern science. William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe have argued for the role of (practical) alchemy in the transformations that led to modern science; for instance, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). In the 1990s, William Eamon showed the influence of natural magic and books of secrets on the formation of a scientific culture (Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), while Brian P. Copenhaver, William B. Ashworth Jr., and William Eamon argued for the importance of esoteric currents in different aspects of the “Scientific Revolution”; see their contributions in David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- 45.
Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon and Jackson P. Herschbell (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Studies, 2003).
- 46.
Unless, of course, we are talking about temporally distanced cultures, in which case only the “present” culture would experience a change. The concept of “cultural entanglement” was first proposed by R. T. Alexander, “Afterword: Toward an Archaeological Theory of Culture Contact,” in Studies in Culture Contact, ed. J.G. Cusick (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press), 476–95.
- 47.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Roland Barthes: Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977[1968]), 146.
- 48.
Henry Corbin, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ’Arabi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997[1969]), Pierre A. Riffard, L’Ésoterisme (Paris: R. Laffont, 1990).
- 49.
Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism, 6–8.
- 50.
Kocku von Stuckrad, “Western Esotericism: Towards an Integrative Model of Interpretation,” Religion 35 (2005): 83.
- 51.
Marco Pasi, “Oriental Kabbalah and the Parting of East and West in the Early Theosophical Society,” in Kabbalah and Modernity. Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations, eds. Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 153, 155–56.
- 52.
Henrik Bogdan and Gordan Djurdjevic, “Introduction: Occultism in a Global Perspective,” in Occultism in a Global Perspective, eds. Henrik Bogdan and Gordan Djurdjevic (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 5.
- 53.
Kenneth Granholm, “Locating the West: Problematizing the ‘Western’ in Western Esotericism and Occultism,” in Occultism in a Global Perspective, eds. Henrik Bogdan and Gordan Djurdjevic (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 17–36.
- 54.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “The Globalization of Esotericism,” Correspondences 3, no. 1 (2015): 55– 91.
- 55.
Michael Bergunder, “Experiments with Theosophical Truth: Gandhi, Esotericism, and Global Religious History,” in Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society, eds. Tim Rudbøg and Erik Reenberg Sand (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 347–50. The paper is a slightly updated version of Michael Bergunder, “Experiments with Theosophical Truth: Gandhi, Esotericism, and Global Religious History,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 2 (2014): 1–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lft095.
- 56.
Olav Hammer, “Tradition and Innovation,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion, eds. Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 735.
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Hedesan, G.D., Rudbøg, T. (2021). Introduction: Reconceptualizing Innovation and Its Role in Esotericism. In: Hedesan, G.D., Rudbøg, T. (eds) Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67906-4_1
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