"As academics we are expected to write and publish, but we are not supposed to waste our time reading". This remark by a colleague - as absurd as it is true - inspired me to start this blog. As an academic in the field of the Humanities I spend much of my time reading, and on this blog you can see how that works. If scholarly writing has any value at all, then the reading that precedes it deserves respect as an integral part of the creative process that leads to knowledge and understanding.
Live Last read · last published · next check
I just finished reading this splendid new book by the Swiss scholar Urs App (I already knew him from a previous book about The Birth of Orientalism ). Finally, somebody has done all the hard historical-philological work that is required to uncover the true foundations of Helena P. Blavatsky’s Theosophy, one of the most influential esoteric movements of the late nineteenth and the twentieth…
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…
I feel it’s time for me to make a statement. Many of my Jewish and Israeli friends have been perfectly wide awake , for as long as I can remember, about the criminal mentality of the far-right government of Netanyahu and his political allies Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. They have been marching through the streets of Israel , have made their voices heard in public, and continue doing so day by day . Many…
The following text was presented as a keynote lecture at the conference Science et ésotérisme: Représentations, Interactions, Usages , FRÉSO, Paris (France) on 12 May 2023. It will be published in French translation in a collective volume edited by Léo Bernard and Tom Fischer, whom I want to thank for their permission to make the original English version (with added footnotes) available online.…
In the beginning an immortal goddess explained reality to a mortal man. Or at least, she tried. She told him to be silent and just listen to her words, and so that’s what he did. All we know about her message comes from a poem that he wrote and that has been a source of deep fascination for intellectuals ever since. It attempts to describe an experience and a blinding insight at the very limit of…
At the invitation of the German Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Civic Education), on 5 September this year I gave the opening lecture for the conference Esoterik und Democratie – Ein Spannungsverhältnis (Esotericism and Democracy: A Tense Relation). As the lecture was meant for a general non-academic German audience, I gave a broad introduction to (the study of)…
Writers from across the globe are showing their solidarity with Salman Rushdie and their support of the freedom to write, by reading selected texts from his work in public and online . I would very much like to join this effort by recording my own reading of a Rushdie passage, for although I’m not a literary writer but an academic one, writing is my life and so I know what it means. But instead of…
As the Ukraine crisis began to unfold, I found myself composing messages on my Facebook page, in an effort to gain a bit of clarity in my own mind while staying in contact with my international network of friends. We are experiencing the biggest international security crisis that I can remember from my own lifetime, and one that resonates in various somewhat complicated ways with other concerns…
As the Corona virus was dominating the media and everybody’s daily lives, many of my friends on Facebook began launching “book challenges” to entertain themselves and the members of their networks. I accepted a challenge to list “10 books that changed your life,” and soon discovered that it was not just great fun to select ten titles and write about them, but that the exercise triggered a process…
In a blogpost three years ago , I responded to a public attack on my work and my scholarly agendas that showed how easy it is for theoretical and methodological debate to degenerate into negative polemics and personal invectives. At that time, my advocacy of empirical-historical methodologies was seen as proof of an “externalist fallacy,” and I was puzzled to see my work misinterpreted as an…
