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 m...
