God's Shadow: Occluded Possibilities in the Genealogy of Religion

God's Shadow: Occluded Possibilities in the Genealogy of “Religion” Author(s): Jason Ānanda Josephson Source: History of Religions, Vol. 52, No. 4 (May 2013), pp. 309-339 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669644 . Accessed: 10/06/2013 11:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History of Religions. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 
Jason Ananda Josephson GOD’S SHADOW: OCCLUDED POSSIBILITIES IN THE GENEALOGY OF “RELIGION” He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. (Psalm 91:1) There is already a standard narrative in place about the birth of religious studies as an academic discipline. It is generally imagined by scholars as emerging from the encounter between the trajectory of Enlightenment rationalism and non-European culture. The rise of higher criticism led to the reappraisal of the Christian Bible as a historical document, while simultaneously European travelers were presented with an unanticipated diversity abroad, which challenged their long-standing assumptions about the autonomy of Christian revelation. To make sense of these diverse cultures, Europeans extended to them the essentially Protestant category of “religion.” Comparative religion is represented as a self-conscious reaction to theology from which it differentiates itself in the same moment that it is relying on a Protestant conception of religion itself. It is often regarded as secularizing and Protestant in the same breath. This breath is not seen as a contradiction, since some Protestant and For feedback or suggestions, thanks are due to Denise Buell, Eleanor Goodman, Mary Keller, Eliza Kent, Jeffrey Kripal, Hilary Ledwell, Keith McPartland, Robert Segal, Christian Thorne, Gauri Viswanathan, and Helmut Zander. Ó 2013 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/2013/5204-0001$10.00. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 310 God’s Shadow Catholic (and even Muslim) scholars have wanted to interpret modernity as an essentially Protestant project. For Weber and other Protestant thinkers, this secularizing Protestantism represents a kind of triumph, while for Catholics the Protestant character of modernity represents its failings. Religious studies, in this account, is thus one engine of Protestant disenchantment.1 While scholars such as Michel Despland, Daniel Dubuisson, Tomoko Masuzawa, Arie Molendijk, and Eric Sharpe emphasize different nations as the birthplace of comparative religion (from France to England to the Netherlands), they generally peg the start of the discipline to the mid-nineteenth century and often describe religious studies as predicated on the formation of an academic discipline independent from theology.2 By contrast, Peter Harrison, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt see comparative religion as one component of the Enlightenment itself, emerging from the rise of toleration and the liberation of European rationalism from religious orthodoxy.3 More recently, Guy Stroumsa has tried to push comparative religion even earlier into the Age of Reason, which he places in the sixteenth century.4 Regardless of their chronology, these accounts generally stage religious studies over and against Christian orthodoxy, whether they celebrate or condemn the field’s Protestant character.5 In what follows, I invert much of this narrative and show religious studies as emerging from a very different milieu and in a very different context. I place my renarration of disciplinary formation along with a minority account put forward by Jeffrey Kripal, Steven Wasserstrom, Randall Styers, and Hans Kippenberg. Kripal and Wasserstrom have emphasized the influence of Western esotericism on specific scholars’ work; Styers has demonstrated the importance of “magic” as a contrasting object in the formation of religion as a scholarly category; while Kippenberg has noted that religious studies guarded cultural resources that would have otherwise been disregarded by Enlighten- 1 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 2 Michel Despland, L’ emergence des sciences de la religion (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999); Daniel Dubuisson, L’occident et la religion: Mythes, science et id eologie (Brussels: Complexe, 1998); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Arie Molendijk, The Emergence of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Eric Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (New York: Scribner’s, 1975). 3 Peter Harrison,“Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 4 Guy Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 5 Fitzgerald’s reading of religious studies as liberal ecumenical theology straddles these accounts; see Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 311 ment rationalism.6 But the modes that Kripal and Wasserstrom present as exceptions, I show here to be the ordinary functioning of the discipline. As an antidote to the dominant narrative, I show that the discipline emerged in relation to a Counter-Enlightenment impulse and was connected to a vibrant tradition very different from mainstream Protestantism, namely, Western esotericism. The double of religious studies turns out not to be philology but theosophy. The academic study of religion and the nineteenth-century movements known as Spiritualism and Theosophy are rarely discussed at the same time, much less described as having a common origin. In this article I attempt to demonstrate their shared history in a dialectical opposition posited by Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Voltaire. I begin by very briefly laying out the position of a secular study of religion postulated by the contributors to the Encyclop edie. I then discuss the impact of Spiritualism and CounterEnlightenment discourse on founding figures (both canonical and noncanonical) in the history of the study of religion in the nineteenth century. By demonstrating the way in which religious studies continues to be haunted by the specter of Diderot and the philosophes, I aim to restore religious studies to its larger cultural context. the veil of superstition and the tree of knowledge Superstition without a veil is a deformed thing, for, as it addeth deformity to an ape to be so like a man, so the similitude of superstition to religion makes it all the more deformed. (Francis Bacon, 1625)7 In 1751 Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert commenced the publication of their great work, the Encyclop edie, whose aims Diderot described as the linking together (encha^ınement) of all human knowledge.8 In their first volume, Diderot and d’Alembert provided the reader with their vision of the division of the world, which they represented in the form of a great systematic taxonomy, or grand tree of knowledge (syst eme figur e des connaissances humaines). Significant for our purposes is the location of religion in this sys6 Hans Kippenberg, Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 1997); Jeffrey Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Steven Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 7 Francis Bacon, The Essays (New York: Penguin, 1985), 112. 8 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic, 1984), 194; Denis Diderot, Prospectus de l’Encyclop edie, in Encyclop edie, ou dictionnaire raisonn e des sciences, des arts et des m etiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, 28 vols. (1751–72), 5:635, in ARTFL Encyclop edie Projet, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 312 God’s Shadow tem. While Diderot and d’Alembert were inspired by the map of human learning articulated by Francis Bacon, the philosophes radically altered the place of “religion” in their conceptual hierarchy.9 For Bacon, religion was located in an autonomous sphere of revelation; the philosophes, by contrast, located religion within the realm of reason more generally and philosophy more specifically.10 This structure locates the study of religion in a secular space inside the realm of philosophical or scientific inquiry and outside of ecclesiastic authority. More specifically, the syst eme figur e imagines the study of religion as the focus of a “divine science” or “science of God” (science de Dieu) which has three asymmetrical branches: natural and revealed theology (th eologie naturelle et r ev el ee), on the one hand, and the science of good and evil spirits (science des esprits bien et malfaisans), on the other. This system seems to imagine that one could have parallel disciplines of a scientific study of spirits and comparative theology, which culminate in a greater understanding of God. Yet, in the very moment that these possibilities are created they are being occluded. The science of spirits is interpreted not as a way to better understand God but as a rotten branch of the tree of knowledge. It is a dead end, not worth studying, a superstition.11 The syst eme figur e postulates a binary between a positively valenced rational religion worth studying through the science of theology and a negatively valenced superstition. Thus, while the science of spirits might appear to be a legitimate domain of knowledge, it is instead classified as an irrational approach to a subject that is viewed as essentially rational. For Diderot, the th eosophes (theosophists) embody this alternate and false way of knowing via their connection to the problematic science of spirits. Diderot describes the th eosophes as antiphilosophes, who violently detest philosophy and the “empire of reason” and are instead dedicated to imagination instead of rationality. These mystics pursue the manipulation of the world through magic and search for the “hidden” principles of God and Nature (interestingly enough the same principles pursued by philosophes), but through the wrong mode of “false” mystical union rather than rational speculation.12 Diderot not only rejects the magical manipulation of spirits, but he also discards unio mystica, or the inward-looking experience of God, as a false path. The possibility of a world that is itself fundamentally outside of rational 9 Darnton, Cat Massacre, 191–209. Ibid., 211. 11 Ernst Cassirer (The Philosophy of the Enlightenment [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951], 160–61) argues that “the gravest obstacle” to the Enlightenment conception of truth was “those divergences from truth which do not arise from a mere insufficiency of knowledge but from a perverted direction of knowledge.” 12 Diderot’s entry on th eosophes lists Paracelsus, Valentin Weigel, Robert Fludd, Jakob B€ ohme, Jan-Baptiste van Helmont, and Pierre Poiret as members of the movement; Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclop edie, 16:253–54. See also Jean Fabre, “Diderot et les Theosophes,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale des etudes françaises 13 (1961): 203–22. 10 This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 313 comprehension is a threat to the whole philosophical enterprise. Diderot attempts to banish the hermeticism that set the stage for the Enlightenment by rejecting th eosophes as a threat to his system.13 As the taxonomy of the Encyclop edie suggests, the Enlightenment project more broadly posits within itself its own dialectical antithesis, which it understands as a kind of mystical science of spirits. As Kant argues in his critique of Emmanuel Swedenborg’s mystical visions, if even a few spirit tales were true, it would call the whole basis of the natural sciences into question.14 In other places, the movement also suggests its own fault lines and even posits problems, which spirits seem to solve (e.g., Descartes suggested esprits animaux [animal spirits] as a way to explain the interface between mind and body).15 Accordingly, the Enlightenment reveals itself to be constituted and haunted by the specters it works to banish, even as the legacy of its divisions of knowledge continued to inform future scholars. It is perhaps not surprising that the philosophes’ attempt to banish mystical “sciences” failed as much as it apparently succeeded. Accordingly, the figure of the ghost or spirit plays a distinctively modern role in the writings of seminal theorists of the nineteenth century (Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Spencer). Indeed, the very epoch in which Max Weber described the progressive demystification of the supernatural also saw a radical resurgence of belief in ghosts and the widespread popularity of the Theosophical Society and other forms of “public” esotericism. These movements can be interpreted as a kind of internal critique and supplement to modernity, legible especially in rela13 A short sketch for readers unfamiliar with hermeticism (or “hermetism”): While the rediscovery of Greek philosophical texts by Latin Christendom beginning in the fourteenth century is common knowledge, what is less well known is that while Italian scholars were translating the works of Plato, say, they were also recovering the work of a figure believed by many to be the philosopher par excellence, Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes [or Mercury] the Thrice Great). Identified with the Egyptian Thoth, and variously the biblical patriarch Enoch, Hermes was believed to be an Egyptian philosopher predating the Greek philosophical tradition, but who had also predicted the coming of Christ. Interest in Hermes Trismegistus began to grow in Western Europe, particularly following 1460, when Marsilio Ficino began work on a Latin translation of a set of Neoplatonic texts attributed to Hermes, known as the Corpus hermeticum. Buttressed by independent textual sources, including an alchemical work known as the Tabula smaragdina (emerald tablet) and a handful of references to Hermes Trismegistus in the writings of the Church Fathers, Hermeticists embraced the idea of Hermes as the spokesman for a proto-Christian monotheistic knowledge (or prisca sapentia) that was believed to be the common inheritance of all mankind before the polluting influence of idolatry. Moreover, the Renaissance attempts to reconstruct this philosophy drew heavily on Greek and Arabic alchemical, medical, theological, and magical works, which were often presented as part of a single system. 14 Immanuel Kant, Tr€ aume eines Geistersehers, erl€ autert durch Tr€ aume der Metaphysik [Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics] (K€ onigsberg: Kanter, 1766). Kant ultimately articulated the opposition in these terms: “Liberation from superstition [Aberglauben] is called Enlightenment”; Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Klemme Heiner and Giordanetti Piero (Hamburg: Meiner, 2006), 175. 15 Rene Descartes, Les passions de l’^ ame (Paris, 1728), 51–52. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 314 God’s Shadow tionship to contemporary practices and debates about imperialism, as well as scientific and religious authority. These movements embodied dissatisfaction with the perceived consequences of the Enlightenment while benefiting from many of its basic assumptions. They attempted to occupy the position of “science” and to assert the universality of their particular interpretive systems, at the same moment that they strove to subvert the symbols of the established order. These movements worked to pierce the veil of superstition, and in some cases to demythologize the myths of the Enlightenment. Instead of “empires of reason,” they worked to establish a rational “science of spirits.”16 Ghosts emerge here as signs of a secularized modernity.17 Beliefs about the possibility of contact with dead spirits were not new in the nineteenth century. There were plenty of earlier precedents in the works Emanuel Swedenborg and others. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, there was a resurgence of interest in the possibility of communicating with the dead. In part this was inspired by the popularity of the Fox Sisters (1848–88) and by other movements that focused on interactions with spirits, but also by changing ideas of the nature of biological life.18 This interest had its origins in a post-Enlightenment attitude toward the departed that no longer fit ghosts into the neat place provided by ecclesiastical authorities. Spirits therefore emerge as a new possibility in the secular West, not as atavistic survival, but as a product of modernity, which was then projected back into the past in various forms (e.g., Gothic novels). In this way, ghosts are modern. They represent the present haunting the past. Modernity was haunted in other ways as well. Despite the vibrant religious life of the nineteenth century, in the eyes of many organized religion was in danger, wounded from its conflict with science, challenged by reason and skepticism, and in the eyes of some, in the process of vanishing. Near the end of the century, Friedrich Nietzsche would put these words in the mouth of a madman: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! . . . The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? . . . What then are these churches now if not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”19 Nietzsche not only pronounces the death of God but also conjures its divine specter, whose shadow marks the signs of God’s absent presence extending over the whole of modernity. 16 Allan Kardec, for example, actively inverted Diderot’s reality-appearance dichotomy, asserting the spirit was real while the material world was the illusion: Le livre des esprits (Montreal: Presses Select, 1979). 17 Jean Claude Schmitt, Les revenants: Les vivants et les morts dans la soci et e m edi evale (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). 18 For example, one may think of the Shakers and their widely reported encounter with spirits in the years 1841–45. 19 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 315 Nietzsche was far from alone in this assessment. In the face of a dead God and world full of spirits, some turned toward the alternate mode of knowing rejected by Diderot and the philosophes. In this context, the term th eosophie resurfaced to describe different attempts to overcome the perceived failings of the Enlightenment. While Helena Blavatsky and her followers ultimately came to dominate the term theosophy, the period also gave birth to other thinkers who used the term to describe their projects.20 Beyond the use of the term, there was a broader occult or esoteric undercurrent that relied on many of the tropes that Diderot had rejected. Common to these various groups and individuals was a drive to recover a hidden God, which was often combined with the new wave of spirit phenomena. The groups that made up this movement presented themselves as “occult sciences.” In so doing, they activated post-Enlightenment scientific authority together with a return of the Enlightenment sense of the divine as the pinnacle of a scientific or philosophical endeavor. While the Enlightenment is often accused of radical anthropocentrism, it was anthropocentric mysticism that imagined itself to be the Enlightenment’s antidote. Yet, these groups recast their version of science as a kind of return of the repressed. They called on the absent uncanny Unheimlich that haunts modernity and that therefore can be rediscovered through a recovery of the Heimlich (secret, concealed, hidden).21 Thus their terminology is not surprising, as “occult” comes from the classical Latin occultus, meaning “secret, hidden, or concealed.” The nineteenth-century surge of interest in spirits and the occult gave birth to a range of movements known as Spiritualism (est. 1848), Spiritism (est. 1857), and then, later, when synthesized with previous forms of Western Esotericism and Orientalism, the Theosophical Society (est. 1875) and the Order of the Golden Dawn (est. 1887). For these movements, the existence of spirits had two contrasting but sometimes complementary functions. First, they provided a kind of “necrovitalist” critique of the limits of the Enlightenment by presenting a world paradoxically and vibrantly alive with the souls of the dead. While one persistent Counter-Enlightenment impulse had been formulated as an epistemological critique, another form taken by the CounterEnlightenment was as a challenge to the perceived completeness of materialism and the universal dominion of science in the face of spirit phenomena.22 Second, and more important, the Spiritualist seance functioned as a religious 20 Before 1875, the term theosophy was generally associated with B€ohme; Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, trans. Christine Rhone (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), 20–29; see also Jean-Pierre Laurant, L’ esot erisme chr etien en France au XIXe si ecle (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1992), 55. 21 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin, 2003). 22 This claim is made explicit in H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries, 2 vols. (New York: Bouton, 1877), 1:x–xi. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 316 God’s Shadow laboratory that seemed capable of providing an empirical route for the modernization of religion. It was believed by many Spiritualists that the rupture between religion and science could be repaired through these spirit-based demonstrations of the powers of the soul. behind the veil: the anthropologist, the magician, and the philologist Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. (Éliphas Levi, 1854)23 Religious studies arose precisely in this cultural context where spirits and the occult were lively objects of inquiry even as the fledgling discipline defined itself in contrast to Spiritualism and theosophy. The conventional historiography would view these movements as completely separate. It turns out they are not so easy to tell apart. In this section, I begin to map out the messy intermediate terrain between two spheres that consider themselves different but nevertheless exhibit the same basic habits of thought. Scratch the surface and we quickly find a preoccupation with Spiritualism among foundational scholars of religious studies. William James (1842– 1910) and Andrew Lang (1844–1912) attempted scientific investigations of Spiritualist phenomena. Spiritualism is also addressed, if ultimately criticized, in the work of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), and James Frazer (1854–1941), among others.24 In each case, these thinkers appropriated certain aspects of the con23 Éliphas Levi, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual, trans. Arthur Edward Waite (London: Redway, 1896), 3. 24 Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des G€ ottlichen und sein Verh€ altnis zum Rationalen (Munich: Beck, 2004), 31n; Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion, and Other Essays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), 50; Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex, Culture, and Myth (London: Hart-Davis, 1963), 261; James George Frazer, Selected Letters of Sir J. G. Frazer. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 351–52. For a discussion of Durkheim and his followers’ relationship to Spiritualism, see Ivan Strenski, “Durkhein, Judaism, and the Afterlife,” in Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today, ed. Thomas Idinopulos and Brian Wilson (Leiden: Brill, 2002). This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 317 temporary Spiritualist undercurrent, while simultaneously distancing themselves from active Spiritualism. Nowhere is this clearer than in the writings of the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917). A closer look at Tylor’s work illuminates the depth of his preoccupation with managing the significance of spirits and the claims of Spiritualists. the haunted anthropologist Tylor, considered one of the founders of the anthropological study of religion, is most famous for promoting the concept of animism as the foundation of “primitive” religion. Tylor’s minimalist definition of religion, that religion is belief in “spiritual beings,” continues to be influential today.25 Against his contemporaries, who compared the thinking of “savages” to madness, Tylor advanced the notion that a kind of natural religion is everywhere established rationally. The Tylorian primitive, like an Enlightenment philosopher, engages in an essentially empiricist study of the world around him, positing explanations for his experiences according to the kinds of forces he understands. Religion for Tylor is thus protoscience, in which the “primitive’s” experiences with death and dreams give birth to an idea of spirits or ghosts, which are then believed to pervade the natural world (i.e., animism). This belief in spirits serves as the foundation for religion. This is almost precisely the definition of religion described by the Spiritualists themselves, who also believed that spirits were and should be the foundation for religion. Tylor argued that over time the rude animism of the savages is ultimately replaced by polytheism and then finally the most rational system of all— monotheism—emerges. Again, in Tylor’s evolutionary teleology, we arrive at a Voltaire-esque rational Supreme Being as the ultimate fruit of human cognition and at a rational religion that looks like Tylor’s minimalistic Quaker faith.26 Tylor also explained why humans, despite our their inherent empiricism and rationality, are were not all believers in a rational Supreme Being. To do so, he invokes the concepts of superstition and survivals. Tylor argues that in direct contrast to a positive and progressive religion, humans also retain certain holdovers from previous religions.27 According to a false etymology originally proposed by Cicero (106–43 BCE), Tylor calls these survivals or remnants “super- 25 Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1891), 1:424–25. In parallel, many American Spiritualists appropriated the Quakers into their lineage; see Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 27 I follow Segal, not Kippenberg in interpreting Tylor’s concept of “survival” as a negative term; see Robert A. Segal, “Tylor: A Test Case of Kippenberg’s Thesis,” in Religion im kulturellen Diskurs: Festschrift f€ ur Hans G. Kippenberg, ed. Brigitte Luchesi and Kocku von Stuckrad (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004). 26 This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 318 God’s Shadow stitions.” These false “superstitions,” which ought to vanish through successive stages in human cultural evolution, obscure or occlude the essentially rational nature of religion. Indeed, in a move reminiscent of the Enlightenment project, Tylor argues that the goal of ethnography is precisely “to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction.”28 The Spiritualism of his day, therefore, occupies an important position in Tylor’s system. Insofar as religion is essentially belief in spiritual beings and insofar as Spiritualism seems to be the “animism” Tylor posits at the origin of religion, Spiritualism is both the quintessential religion and the quintessential superstition. This is more striking, because as Robert Segal observes, for Tylor primitive spiritualism was materialist in that “primitives” did not have a concept of immateriality.29 Accordingly, spirits impacted the physical world. For Tylor, the problem with modern religion is that it has shifted religion into an immaterial or ethical realm. However, nineteenth-century Spiritualism, as a science of spirits with material impact (and hence explainable according to quasimechanistic models such as animal magnetism), would therefore seem to be a return to a pre-dematerialized religion. It would then appear to be the ideal form of a survival and Tylor treats it as such. But in order to make Spiritualism into a proper superstition and thus survival, Tylor has to obscure Spiritualism’s position and history as a reaction to the Enlightenment itself. He has to dismiss its contemporary origins and instead insist that it is a holdover from an ancient and savage past, and he does so repeatedly in Primitive Culture.30 Of course, he is not alone in this. Many Spiritualists validated their project by similarly imagining continuity between contemporary Spiritualism and earlier epochs in human history. Perhaps more surprising is Tylor’s attendance at seances. According to notes unpublished during his lifetime, in November 1872, Tylor went to a series of Spiritualist events, attempting to ascertain the truth of the phenomena.31 Tylor ultimately concluded that there “may be a psychic force” involved, but he remained skeptical of the existence of spirits as independent entities. Tylor seems to have believed in the possibility of a kind of vitalism, even as he rejects Spiritualism itself as a superstitious survival. Indeed the same anthropological data was reinterpreted by Tylor’s heir, Andrew Lang, who ultimately argued that primitive beliefs in spirits were not based on falsehoods, but instead represented true insights into the spiritual world and the powers of the human 28 29 Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:253. Robert A. Segal, “Tylor’s Anthropomorphic Theory of Religion,” Religion 25 (1995): 23– 30. 30 See, e.g., Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:424–26. Tylor’s account is reproduced in George Stocking Jr., “Animism in Theory and Practice: E. B. Tylor’s Unpublished ‘Notes on ‘Spiritualism,’” Man 6 (1971): 88–104. 31 This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 319 mind. In that sense, Lang identified a latent aspect of Tylor’s program and explicitly deployed it as a critique of materialism.32 the magician A further Counter-Enlightenment impulse is also explicit in the writings of other scholars from the period, here illustrated by two thinkers in the study of religion: Friedrich Max M€ uller, the canonical founder of the discipline of the scientific study of religion (Religionswissenschaft); and Éliphas Levi, absent from our field’s historiography but famous in his period as a black magician and for popularizing the term occultism (occultisme). I am not suggesting that we need to recoup Levi as a central thinker in the field, but juxtaposing both figures is productive. Éliphas Levi (1810–75) was born in Paris as Alphonse Louis Constant, the son of a shoemaker. Constant attended seminary in preparation for entering the Catholic priesthood. Departing before ordination to get married, he wrote a series of Counter-Enlightenment works criticizing the dominance of rationalism from a Catholic position.33 But starting in the early 1850s, Constant reinvented himself under the Hebraic name Éliphas Levi and began writing occult works that synthesized the tarot, Christian kabbalah, a belief in spirits, and what were then known as “Eastern Mysteries.” Levi became one of the most famous “magicians” in Europe and was one of the most important influences on Blavatsky in her foundation of the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky cites (and also plagiarizes) Levi’s writings extensively in her first book, Isis Unveiled (1879).34 The Theosophical press would ultimately reprint Levi’s writings, and he was also a significant figure for the British occult movements.35 He also actively used the term th eosophie in a positive sense in his work, although he preferred the term he coined and popularized, occultism, to describe his own efforts.36 32 Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion (New York: Longmans, 1909); see Roger Luckhurst, “Knowledge, Belief and the Supernatural at the Imperial Margin,” in The Victorian Supernatural, ed. Nicola Bown (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 206–7. 33 Éliphas Levi [as Abbe Constant], Des moeurs et des doctrines du rationalisme en France (Paris: Debecourt, 1839); Éliphas Levi, La m ere de Dieu: E´pop ee religieuse et humanitaire (Paris: Gosselin, 1844). 34 For the charge of plagiarism, see William Coleman, “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings,” in A Modern Priestess of Isis, ed. Vsevolod Solov’ev (New York: Arno, 1976). 35 The British occultist Aleister Crowley (The Confessions of Aleister Crowley [London: Arkana, 1989], 190) claimed to be a reincarnation of Levi (despite a small problem with birth and death dates). James Joyce was also influenced by Levi’s writings on magic; see Craig Carver, “James Joyce and the Theory of Magic,” James Joyce Quarterly 15 (1978): 201–14. 36 For Levi’s use of th eosophie, see Éliphas Levi, Histoire de la magie (Paris: Bailliere, 1860), 142. For a discussion of Levi’s contribution to esoteric terminology, see Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 34. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 320 God’s Shadow Throughout his writings on magic, Levi set out to invert the program of the Enlightenment. Ironically, in so doing, Levi deploys a definition of superstition that would have appealed to Tylor, writing, “Superstitions are religious forms surviving the loss of ideas. Some truth no longer known or a truth which has changed its aspect is the origin and explanation of all of them. Their name, from the Latin superstes, signifies that which survives; they are the dead remnants of old knowledge or opinion.”37 While for Tylor the role of superstitions as survivals is precisely the reason they need to be banished, Levi takes this in the opposite direction, arguing that superstitions represent lost knowledge that needs to be rediscovered.38 Accordingly, Levi seeks to “recover” superstitions, as intentionally occluded knowledge that can be unveiled (d evoil e) by the true magical initiate.39 This unveiling process works through a programmatic comparison of religions and mythologies, viewing all religions as expressions of a perennial or occult philosophy ( philosophia perennis, philosophia occulta), glossed as “transcendental magic.” While there had been previous attempts to discover Egyptian mysteries or an Orientalized “Eastern” spirituality, Levi was one of the first major thinkers to make the comparative analysis of “world religions” in general the proper business of a magician—a program that would be picked up in Theosophical circles. In this Levi was basically building on the insights of Renaissance hermeticism, now expanded to the full world of comparative religion. Magic, therefore, for Levi functions as method for the recovery of esoteric parallels in mythological source material. This process of recovery, Levi assures his reader, is not only transcendental magic, but also transcendental science. He wants to advocate his own kind of Religionswissenschaft. At the same time, he frames it as an esoteric path: once initiated into his transcendental science/ magic, one learns to see other hidden truths, including the “occult and sacred alphabet” embodied in different cultural symbols. As we shall see, Levi’s goals and modus operandi with respect to ancient languages are remarkably similar uller. to that propounded by M€ Initially, Levi described his project as a reaction to a previous generation of scholarship that had attempted to expose the world’s mythologies as a product of primitive miscomprehension of the natural world.40 He rejected 37 Éliphas Levi, The History of Magic, trans. Arthur Edward Waite (York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1969), 138. 38 Levi follows Cornelius Agrippa in of recovering folk rituals as forms of lost magic. But while Agrippa nevertheless distinguished between “superstition” and lost true “religion,” Levi positively revalences the term superstition; see Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres, ed. V. Perrone Compagni (New York: Brill, 1992), esp. 409. 39 See also Éliphas Levi, Le grand arcane; ou, L’occultisme d evoil e (Paris: Chamuel, 1898). 40 Specifically, Levi was responding to Constantin François de Volney and Charles François Dupuis: Éliphas Levi, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie, 2 vols. (Paris: Baillere, 1861), 1:99. For This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 321 this smug reductionism because it seemingly dismissed all religion as nothing more than primitive superstition. In contrast, Levi positions his occult science and Christianity as natural allies.41 Instead of an antagonism between religion and magic, the opposition he describes is between a disenchanting materialism and a spiritual vision of the cosmos. Occultism, in this account, is less an alternative to the established churches than an attempt to reinforce religion in the face of enlightenment skepticism. Moreover, religious studies, at least in Levi’s hands (and, as we will see later, in M€uller’s), is an explicit denial of secularism. The work that made Levi’s reputation, Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1855–56), put his particular brand of religious studies-cum-magic into practice. Put succinctly, Dogme et rituel is a work of comparative magic, drawing on Jewish, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Indian, and Chinese materials. Its inspiration can be seen in Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia (1531–33), which charted out the same basic blueprint, by combining hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and the kabbalah. Dogme et rituel, however, sublates the antagonisms between religion and science to produce a new position—described as either “occult science” or “transcendental science”—which it identifies in part as a return to a previously lost position of divine knowledge. Each volume of Dogme et rituel is divided into twenty-two chapters. Although never explicitly stated, the rationale behind this structure can be found in the tarot, a stylized deck of playing cards divided into four suits and twenty-two trumps known as major arcana. Although today associated with fortune-telling, when it first appeared in fourteenth-century Europe, the tarot was understood merely as a card game. In 1781, the Swiss scholar Antoine Court de Gebelin (1719–84) argued that the tarot had originated in Egypt as an encoded form of the Book of Thoth. As such, he suggested, it was actually an occult instrument.42 Building on de Gebelin’s claims, Levi seems to have furthered the transformation of the tarot into a central piece of occult paraphernalia.43 Each chapter of Dogme et rituel corresponds to one of the major arcana of the tarot. The cards thus provide a key for unlocking a symbolic level to the text. This formal structure distinguishes the work from conventional academic scholarship, but it also illustrates Levi’s emphasis on polysemy and the power of analogy. As Levi argues “Analogy is the key of all secrets of Nature.”44 Following a Paracelsian semiotics (scientia signata), Levi argues more on Volnet and Dupuis, see Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 28–40. 41 See, e.g., Levi, Transcendental Magic, 3, 4, 23. 42 Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis, and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996). 43 The other important figure in this regard is Jean-Baptiste Alliette, known as “Etteilla.” 44 Levi, Transcendental Magic, 167. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 322 God’s Shadow that God has encoded a system of signs in both the natural world and various mythologies and that by decoding these divine “signatures,” we can see that analogical relations are not accidental but part of a divine revelation.45 As he restates in terms evocative of Christian Neoplatonism, “the splendor of the supreme reason of the Logos, of that word which enlightens every man coming into the word, has been no more wanting to the children of Zoroaster than to the faithful sheep of St. Peter . . . the universal revelation . . . [is] completed by the wise analogies of faith.”46 The divine Logos has been given in veiled terms to all people’s symbolism, and therefore for Levi comes from God.47 The mythologies of various cultures, therefore, can be read on a metaphorical level as recording a set of veiled descriptions of both the natural world and the forms of the mind of God (which for Levi are of course linked). Accordingly, when the tarot cards are arranged in order, Levi claims, the tarot reveals itself to be a narrative work encoded by the Egyptian prophet Hermes Trismegistus and the key itself to unlocking other symbolic systems.48 Moreover, each of the major arcana is connected to a Hebrew letter, such that through combination and recombination in the right sequence the cards can be made to reveal kabbalistic truths.49 The tarot is in effect the true Bible of the magi hidden in plain sight.50 In part, Levi regarded the tarot as a set of archetypes, which represent cross-cultural mythic universals, in this somewhat anticipating Carl Jung.51 But more importantly it is “the universal key to the initiations of the Logos” and according to Levi, the tarot is what Guillaume Postel meant by the “Key of Things Kept Secret from the Foundation of the World.”52 The tarot’s polysemy traces fundamental connections that allow us to decode God’s revelation to different religions. While this kind of claim would be out of the reach of a contemporary scholar of religion, we uller’s own theological commitments shortly. will see its resonance with M€ In a later work, La clef des grands myst eres, Levi deploys his hermetic hermeneutics to get at what he considers to be the essence of religion—mankind’s engagement with the “mysterious” or with all that lies beyond human 45 Ibid. In the account by Paracelsus, various resemblances between objects (e.g., walnuts and the shape of the brain) were not accidents, but were “signatures” God had hidden in the world to guide man to knowledge. 46 Ibid., 258. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 43. 49 Ibid., 95–96. Levi also describes the tarot as simultaneously hermetic, kabbalistic, magical, and theosophical (278). 50 Levi, Transcendental Magic, 349. 51 See C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 38. 52 Levi, Transcendental Magic, 40, 359. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 323 knowledge.53 He argues that “on the brink of mystery, the spirit of man is seized with vertigo. Mystery is the abyss, which ceaselessly attracts our unquiet curiosity by the terror of its depth.”54 The idea that religion is directed toward the unknown or unknowable, is one also grappled with later by both M€uller and later Herbert Spencer.55 For Levi, however, this mystery originates in the inability of human beings to grasp the infinite, which he argues is by definition incomprehensible.56 Put differently, religion will never vanish in the face of science because human language is fundamentally limited or finite and therefore cannot capture the infinite.57 Accordingly, human reason, “may twist and coil its spirals ever-ascending” toward the absolute, but it will never eliminate its own foundations which lie beyond its bounds in the “absurd.”58 In order to represent the incomprehensible we must resort to symbolic language, which is in itself necessarily paradoxical. As he argues, “We have said that there is no religion without mysteries; let us add that there are no mysteries without symbols. The symbol, being the formula or the expression of the mystery, only expresses its unknown depth by paradoxical images borrowed from the known. The symbolic form, having for its object to characterize what is above scientific reason, should necessarily find itself without that reason.”59 Symbolic language is directed toward the infinite or the unknown and appears as a paradoxical or absurd combination of known terms implying hidden depths. Science can only be expressed in limited language, so other means are needed to unlock the symbolic. Human nature, moreover, is “religious” and rooted in a striving to reach beyond itself and capture/express the inexpressible.60 All cultures produce symbolic forms, which might at first seem to be completely incomprehensible. But these can be deciphered, if never rendered fully rational, through the juxtaposition of different cultures’ revelations. We do not inhabit truly different cultural worlds, because according to Levi’s version of a Neoplatonic the53 Éliphas Levi, The Key of the Mysteries, trans. Aleister Crowley (1861; London: Rider, 1969), 14. 54 Éliphas Levi, La clef des grands myst eres suivant H enoch, Abraham, Herm es Trism egiste et Salomon. (Paris: Alcan, 1897), i. 55 Friedrich Max M€uller, Natural Religion; the Gifford lectures delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1888 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1898), 57–58; Herbert Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions (New York: Appleton, 1886), 827–28. 56 Levi, Key, 9. 57 Ibid., 66: “it will never find in the language of the finite the complete expression of the infinite.” 58 Ibid., 9, 16. In the term absurd, Levi evokes a kind of Kierkegaardian fideism. While for Kierkegaard, this represents the necessity of a leap of faith on the part of the believer, Levi wants to argue that this credo is effectively an anthropological fact that lies behind all attempts to capture the infinite in human language. 59 Levi, Key, 16. 60 Levi, La clef, 2. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 324 God’s Shadow ory of language, the symbols that represent humanity reaching toward absolute or infinite forms are also the divine (or infinite) God revealing himself to humanity.61 This longing for the infinite comes not from human nature but from God and represents the bond between human and divine.62 Restated, in the myths of different religions, Levi sees metaphorical love letters exchanged between God and mankind. Given his Christian theological commitments, it should be no surprise that for Levi the ultimate symbol is the paradox of the Trinity and that “God is necessarily the most unknown of all beings because He is only defined by negative experience; He is all that we are not, He is the infinite as opposed to the finite by hypothesis.”63 God presents the active embodiment of the infinite who stands beyond all symbolic forms. He argues that “the greatest mystery of the infinite is the existence of Him for whom alone all is without mystery.”64 Recast, God is the supreme mystery, and, Levi argues, God presents both the infinite and the possibility of a bridge between finite and infinite.65 The magician, according to Levi, realizes his full human potential: “When realizing God as the infinite in man, man says unto himself: I am the finite God.”66 The magician becomes the ultimate conduit between man and God.67 Despite his emphasis on a proper relationship to God, some of Levi’s notoriety came from his intentional deployment of satanic imagery, which he justified by stating, “The devil is God, as understood by the wicked.”68 In that sense, the diabolical is revealed to be the true essence of the divine when penetrated by the gaze of the magical initiate. True unity with the transcendent is approached through precisely the ritual activities rejected by the Church. For in addition to advocating his magical science, Levi argues that he is the true Catholic who has been initiated into a divine, scientific-magical religion handed down directly from God in a type of apostolic succession, which has been consistently suppressed by the Church.69 In a provocative later book, La science des esprits (1865), Levi tries to recover the divine science abandoned in the philosophes’ Enlightenment project. He strives to rehabilitate both magic and divination as approaches to the divine. In recovering the science of the spirits, Levi distances himself from 61 Levi, Key, 24. Levi, Le grand arcane, 94. 63 Levi, La clef, 22. 64 Levi, Key, 9. 65 Ibid., 15. 66 Levi, Transcendental Magic, 80. 67 Levi argues the magician can learn to manipulate divine forces, which he describes according to a magnetic vitalism or occult pneumatology. 68 Levi, Transcendental Magic, 92. 69 Levi repeats this claim in several places, but for examples see Transcendental Magic, 184, 227, 303. 62 This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 325 contemporary Spiritualism. On the one hand, he wants to recoup the Spiritualist recognition of the spirits of the dead, but on the other hand, he works to attack Spiritualism as the vulgar invasion of unqualified investigators. He directs an invective against all forms of spiritual mediumship that do not partake in the true “communion” with an infinite being, or, in other words, God.70 The true science of spirits is revealed to be a kind of esoteric Christianity. Surprisingly, a similar kind of esoteric Christianity will be revealed as the uller’s comparative project as well. hidden core of M€ In sum, Levi’s project demonstrates that comparative religion was the basic business of a magician. It shows that the study of world mythology could be rooted in an attempt to enchant Europe rather than disenchant the globe. It is also hints at the kind of theological commitments engendered by the search for a hidden unity behind the world’s religions. It shows too that religious studies appears as the natural outgrowth not of Protestantism but rather of a kind of Christian mysticism or Western esotericism. the philologist uller (1823–1900) was born in Dessau and studied philology Friedrich Max M€ in Leipzig, Berlin, and Paris, before moving to England, where he was appointed Taylorian Professor of Modern European Languages at Oxford in 1854 (the same year Levi published his magical manifesto). Today M€uller is probably most famous for overseeing the publication of Sacred Books of the East and for arguing that mythology is a “disease of language.” His importance to the field of religious studies is clear in the historiography, and he is generally portrayed as a rationalist figure, fundamental to the secularizing trend of the discipline.71 He would seem to be a bad candidate for a CounterEnlightenment narrative, yet in many ways his project approximated that of the magician. uller’s main work on comparative theology was an attempt to Like Levi, M€ arrive at a common philosophy located behind the diversity of the world’s mythological systems. Recognizing that previous scholars had rejected much that did not fit into their worldview as superstitions, M€uller attempted to recover the lost wisdom of the East as a way to supplement something missing from the contemporary European world.72 M€uller was not as programmatic 70 Éliphas Levi, La science des esprits (Paris: Bailliere, 1865), 52, 161–62. See, e.g., Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, 207–8; Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 67–68. 72 M€ uller attacks materialism explicitly in an attempt to revalorize a lost subjectivity as an explanatory mechanism and postulates instead a complementarity between a subjective spirit and objective matter; Friedrich Max M€uller, Three Introductory Lectures on the Science of Thought, (Chicago: Open Court, 1888). 71 This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 326 God’s Shadow as Levi in recovering “superstitions.” Instead he believed that while each religion had its own grains of truth, one must separate these truths from the chaff uller saw the essence of religion as a transcendent reach for of superstition. M€ an “infinite” beyond rationality. In that, Levi would have been in agreement. In his construction of an academic “science of religion,” M€uller worked to fulfill an Enlightenment-inspired mission to produce a rational and empirical field of study. He worked to exclude theology and the legacy of its absence can be seen in the whole field. In its methodology, the science of religion seems at first pass to also rule out the possibility of the divine. M€uller’s project, however, reveals its esoteric Christian substructure in a series of Gifford lectures he gave late in his life (1888–92). These lectures have been largely overlooked perhaps because they do not fit the image of M€uller as the archsecuuller’s esotericism has been suppressed by larist or archtextualist. As a result, M€ omission from the normative accounts of the formation of the discipline. What happens when we highlight this aspect of his thought? The final set of lectures uller delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1892 offer the ideal entry M€ point. Having already given lectures in preceding years on “Natural Religion,” “Physical Religion,” and “Anthropological Religion,” M€uller dedicated his final lectures to the topic of “Theosophy.”73 In M€uller’s own estimation these lectures are the “key” to the whole series of Gifford talks, representing the final culmination of both physical and anthological religion and therefore the essence of his approach to comparative religion (Theosophy, viii–ix).74 These fifteen lectures can be divided roughly into three unequal sections. The first section, lectures one through four, charts M€uller’s vision for the study of comparative religion, describing the importance of the burgeoning discipline and the techniques at its disposal. This form of scholarship is described as philological and based on the comparison of textual religions, but the conuller would have trouble accounting for the theological ventional reading of M€ register of his language and its evocation of a kind of prisca theologia, or urtheology, behind the religions of the world.75 M€ uller writes, “I confess that my 73 The original title of the lectures was “Psychological Religion,” for which M€uller later chose “Theosophy”; see Friedrich Max M€uller, Theosophy, or, Psychological Religion; the Gifford lectures delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1892 (New York: Longmans, 1893), xvi; this work is cited parenthetically by page number in the text. This makes sense if one notes that M€uller is using “psychological” the way our contemporaries might use “spiritual” today as a description of an internal or personal relationship to the divine articulated in the form of mystical experience. In arguing for this as the heart of religion, M€uller could be seen as anticipating the approach made famous in a later set of Gifford lectures by William James in 1902: The Varieties of Religious Experience; Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901– 1902 (New York: Modern Library, 1902). 74 In particular, M€uller describes his culminating lectures on the “Logos,” “Alexandrian Christianity,” “Dionysius the Areopagite,” and “Christian Theosophy” as the most important. 75 For religious studies as text-based philology, see M€uller, Theosophy, esp. 27–28. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 327 heart beats with joy whenever I meet with such [explicitly theological] utterances in the Sacred Books of the East. A sudden brightness seems to spread over the darkest valleys of the earth. We learn that no human soul was ever quite forgotten, and that there are no clouds of superstition through which the rays of eternal truth cannot pierce. Such moments are the best rewards to the student of the religions of the world—they are the moments of true revelation, revealing the fact that God has not forsaken any of his children” (23). The metaphor here is one of superstitions as dark clouds periodically pierced by the light of divine truth. The role of the scholar of religion is to engage in a search for fragments of God’s revelation, which illuminate the sacred texts of different religions. Rather than being a secularizing enterprise, Religionswissenschaft provides proof of a kind of theological monism despite apparent religious pluralism.76 The parallels to Levi’s project are plain. Like the magician, M€uller is basing the study of religion on the foundational position of Renaissance hermeticism, which asserted that behind a diversity of “paganisms” could be found uller’s most famous phrase—“He who knows signs of God’s universal truth. M€ one [religion], knows none”—now appears less as a call for scholastic breadth than a religious mission itself.77 Indeed, elsewhere he quotes Augustine’s discussion of the Gentile prophecies of Hermes Trismegistus and then adds the gloss “Every religion, even the most imperfect and degraded, has something that ought to be sacred for us, for there is in all religions a secret yearning after the true, though unknown God.”78 In sum, M€uller seems to position comparative religion as a form of classical Christian hermeticism. uller, like Levi, charts an explicitly Christian project, which emerges M€ from his assumption that while all religions have a measure of truth, they do not have an equal measure of truth. Hence M€uller can argue that comparative religion proves Christianity to be “infinitely superior to all other religions,” and it should have nothing to fear from the newfound discipline. This should not be a surprise because while other religions seem to have semioccluded the divine light, the very meaning of religion is so interwoven with Christian theology that it would appear that Christianity alone had access to the full plenitude of divine revelation (Theosophy, 24).79 uller’s account of the discipline concludes with a description of three M€ registers or types of natural religion, each of which is focused on the percep- 76 M€ uller (Theosophy, 25), however, argued for a Deist reading of miracle as rooted in a rational sense of wonder. 77 Friedrich Max M€uller, Lectures on the Science of Religion (New York: Scribner, 1872), 11. 78 Friedrich Max M€uller, Selected Essays on Language, Mythology and Religion (New York: Longmans, 1881), 1:23. 79 uller also sees comparative religion as a way to defend Christianity from the “supercilious M€ treatment” that it has received at the hands of historians and philosophers and other skeptics (ibid., 448). This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 328 God’s Shadow tion of the Infinite in a different mode.80 First he describes physical religion, which is directed toward the belief in the invisible as the power behind the visible. Its determinate characteristic is the “discovery of the Infinite in nature,” uller describes as essentially an evolutionary progression beginning which M€ with the belief in the gods of nature and culminating in the recognition of an infinite monotheistic divinity (Theosophy, 89). He contrasts this physical religion with anthropological religion, which he describes as founded on the “disuller means to describe how various covery of the Infinite in man.” By this M€ “nations” have come to their belief in the immortality of the soul (89).81 In essence, these two forms of religion chart the apprehension of the infinite in man and the world. Having discussed these forms of religion in previous lecture series, M€uller dedicates his 1892 lectures to demonstrating how these two infinities relate to each other. He does so by describing a third type of religion, “real religion,” as emerging from the combination of physical and anthropological religion. “Real religion” arises from the realization that these two orders of infinity— God and the Immortal soul—are commensurate (90). That is, instead of two infinities there is but one, or in other words, it is the identification of the uller floats various possibilities for chrishuman soul with the divine (93). M€ tening this third form of religion. In the running are the terms Theosophic, Psychic, or Mystic. Each has its problems: “Theosophic conveys the idea of speculations on the hidden nature of God; Psychic reminds us of trances, visions and ghosts; Mystic leaves the impression of something vague, nebulous, and secret” (91). His solution is to call this highest and most advanced form of religion “Psychological Religion” or “Theosophy,” which he defines as “all attempts at discovering the true relation between the soul and God” (91).82 While the reader might be tempted to overlook the normative claim uller goes on to describe this Theosophy in positivbuilt into this statement, M€ ist terms as the “knowledge of the unity of the Divine and the Human” (93). As becomes increasingly clear over the course of these lectures, M€uller is not describing this form of religion in dispassionate or anthropological terms. Instead he is arguing for the Theosophical discovery of the relationship between human and God as a true insight into the structure of creation, and simultaneously the evolutionarily highest point of religion. As he will argue, 80 In an earlier set of lectures, M€uller referred to what he called “three phases” of religion— physical, anthropological, and psychological; see Friedrich Max M€uller, Physical Religion: The Gifford Lectures—Delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1890 (New York: Longmans, 1891), 5–7. 81 Where we today use the word culture, M€uller tends to use the term nation, but we might imagine “nation” as standing in for the German Volk. 82 M€ uller treats “theosophy” and “psychological religion” as synonyms. For sake of consistency in what follows I will use “theosophy,” except in direct quotes. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 329 true religion’s ultimate form can be encapsulated in the Hindu identification of Brahman and Atman, which anticipates Theosophy’s purest expression in the writings of Christian mystics with their unio mystica (95, 311). He will later produce the gloss “Theosophy or Mystic Christianity” to describe the essence of this higher form of religion (474). uller describes the study of religion as functioning not identically to the M€ mystic’s pursuit of God, but nevertheless in terms that explicitly draw on a Christian mystical reading of Hegel. The scholar must learn “to recognize in history the realization of a rational purpose . . . to look upon it as in the truest sense of the word a Divine Drama” (vi).83 Thus the conclusion reached by the study of religion is the same as the conclusion reached by the culmination of religious practice. Through the comparison of religions, one is led toward recovery of each people’s allotted scrap of revelation and to the realization of “the oneness of God and the Soul” (v). In this, one can hear M€uller, Levi, and the Theosophical Society singing from the same hymnal. uller focuses attention on the Hindu Veda in a way that evokes the posiM€ tion occupied by the tarot as the heart of Levi’s system.84 In his lectures, uller explains that the Veda is the beginning of Indian Theosophy, a form of M€ religion that only takes its “fullest realization” in the Ved
anta (95).85 As a significant instance of “natural revelation” it should not surprise the reader that the Veda is a key, if not the central text, for M€uller’s project. He admits that the Veda is difficult and operates on many levels. One needs philological skill to master it. The metaphor he uses to describe this skill is redolent with esoteric imagery: the Veda is described as a work of “seven seals,” each of which must be unlocked by the serious scholar (112).86 In the following lecture, uller expands on this esoteric metaphor, describing the Veda’s unveiling: M€ “Unless we learn to understand this metaphorical or hieroglyphic language of the ancient world, we shall look upon the Upanishads and on most of the Sacred Books of the East as mere childish twaddle; but if we can see through the veil, we shall discover behind it, not indeed, as many imagine profound mysteries or esoteric wisdom, but at all events intelligent and intelligible efforts in an honest search after truth” (142–43). Here M€uller evokes in relationship to Indian sacred texts imagery of “hieroglyphics” and “veils” similar to those used by Levi almost forty years earlier in regard to the equivalent 83 M€ uller relates this to his reading of Hegel. M€ uller (Theosophy, 8, 95) had previously described the Veda as both “natural revelation” and the epitome of “Physical Religion.” 85 Contemporary scholars generally refer to Vedas in the plural, but M€uller instead emphasizes their unitary nature by the singular Veda. 86 M€ uller had described the Veda as a work of “seven seals” earlier; see, e.g., Friedrich Max M€ uller, Lectures on the Science of Language, vol. 2 (London: Longmans, 1885), 450. 84 This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 330 God’s Shadow uller, behind the mask of these ancient materials. The difference is that for M€ texts one finds not “esoteric wisdom” but what is basically rational or at the very least philosophical conceptions. To that end, he is at pains to talk his way around the common claim that the Upanishads are “Rahasya, that is, secret,” which he says is essentially a mistaken conception (329). That said, M€uller is also ultimately committed to proving that these very same works express a kind of universal mysticism. He describes this mysticism as rational because he argues that “the true relation of the two souls, the human soul and the divine, is, or out to be, as clear as the most perfect logical syllogism” (91). The truth behind the Sacred Books of the East is rational because it turns out not to be a profound mystery but a rational and universal truth. Still, it is a truth attested to by magicians and mystics. Put differently, M€uller is treating Hinduism as mystical and rational, but objecting to those who would read it as backward “nonsense” or pure superstition because it too expresses a hidden divine truth. M€ uller’s own rational mysticism therefore turns out to be the proper form of Hindu truth. uller attempts to appropriate the term As is clear from the book’s title, M€ theosophy for his own project of comparative theology.87 In adopting this uller knew that he was picking a fight term to describe the study of religion, M€ with the Theosophical Society. The conflict was not as farfetched as it might at first appear, as the Theosophical Society presented an institutional alternauller’s own discipline of religious studies. Indeed the constitution of tive to M€ the Theosophical Society declared one of the institution’s three official objectives to be “To encourage the study of comparative religion.”88 We can see the Theosophical Society and the academic study of comparative religion as parallel projects existing in the same cultural context. M€uller even corresponded with Henry Olcott (one of the original founders of the Theosophical Society). In the one letter remaining from this exchange (sent to Olcott June 10, 1893), M€ uller betrays both his conflicts with the Theosophical Society and the similarity of their ultimate aims. In response to the Theosophists, M€ uller denies the very existence of an esoteric Buddhism, arguing “Buddhism is the very opposite of esoteric. . . . There was much more of that esoteric teaching in Brahmanism.”89 In this case he seems to be privileging his appropriation of Hindu materials over the Theosophist’s use of Buddhism. 87 As M€ uller informs the reader at the beginning of the edited volume that includes his lectures, “It should be known once for all that one may call oneself a theosophist, without being suspected of believing in spirit-rappings, table-turnings, or any other occult sciences and black arts” (Theosophy, xvi). 88 Objective two appears in the revised constitution of 1896. The earlier version of this objective was “to promote the study of Aryan and other Eastern literatures, religions, philosophies.” 89 Friedrich Max M€uller, The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max M€ uller, 2 vols. (New York: Longmans, 1902), 2:313. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 331 uller argues against the Theosophist’s It is perhaps even more telling that M€ “mahatmas,” suggesting that even if they were real, no “living Pandit” knows more than what is contained in the text. It becomes clear that what is at stake is the value of European philology over native informants (contacted spiritually or in the flesh). Nevertheless, both sides viewed Indian materials as crucial for the “enrichment” of Euro-American religion. But M€ uller charges the Theosophical mission in India with stirring up trouuller informs Olcott that he should encourage the Brahmins “to study ble. M€ their own religion . . . to keep what is good, and discard openly what is effete, antiquated and objectionable,” arguing that “If all religions would do that, we should soon have but one religion”—clearly implying that Theosophy is not that one religion to aim for.90 In order to achieve this unity of religion, which he seems to believe to be a common aim with the Theosophists, M€uller instead advocates the publication of sacred texts, in particular his Sacred Books of the East series.91 uller saw his work in competition with the TheosophLest we doubt that M€ ical Society, there are two telling passages later that make this clear. First, M€ uller states “The more we become familiar with the ancient literature of the East, the less we find of Oriental mysteries, of esoteric wisdom, of Isis veiled or unveiled” (Theosophy, 327). The reference to Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled is uller’s argument that there is no such clear. In particular, this claim is part of M€ thing as esoteric Ved
anta, but more proximately, his point of disagreement with the Theosophical Society is the contention that Yogic practices are a key component of Hinduism (327). As he will argue throughout, to understand a range of traditions viewed as occult—from Pythagorean and Greek mysteries to Freemasonry—one does not need to be initiated into the tradition in question. There are no true secrets reserved only for initiate (328–29). Instead, one merely needs to have access to the tradition’s texts. Indeed when placing his own tradition in the lineage of Christian theosophy, he will be at pains to argue that mystic union with God has nothing secret or mysterious about it (481–82). This was convenient for a man who had no initiations and indeed who had never been to India.92 uller predictably argued that one could gain a full appreciation of HinduM€ ism not through any kind of bodily practices, but merely through an appreciation of Hinduism’s textual corpus. The key to unlocking the seven veils of the 90 Ibid. Later M€ uller seems to have soured on theosophy, and one of his final essays was a critique of Blavatsky and Isis Unveiled; see Friedrich Max M€uller, Last Essays (New York: Longmans, 1901), 79–169. 92 M€ uller gestures at the parallels between the scholar and the mystic when he jokingly calls Sanskrit “the esoteric wisdom of the students of Comparative Mythology” (Theosophy, 328). 91 This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 332 God’s Shadow Veda and indeed the whole history of Indian thought turns out to be both knowledge of Sanskrit and the tools of the philologist that allow one to uncover the buried history (and meaning) of its language. This sounds like a uller recognizes the arcane nature of conventional assertion. But tellingly, M€ the scholar as functionally in parallel with the mystic when he jokingly calls Sanskrit “the esoteric wisdom of the students of Comparative Mythology” (328). Like Levi, M€ uller thinks that the juxtaposition of myths from different cultures, allows one to unseal their hidden meaning. Although intending to uller cannot help but hint at the simidismiss the idea of Hindu esotericism, M€ larities between his own enterprise and that of students of esoteric wisdom. uller there are three moments when Theological Religion came into For M€ fully into being—Ved
anta Hinduism, Greek Neoplatonism, and Christian Mysticism (423, 526). Each of these represents the flourishing of Aryan thought taken to its ultimate fulfillment.93 It is Christianity that has greater “theosophic wealth” that the others, but its aims turn out to be shared (446– 47): “The key-note of all these aspirations is the same, a growing belief that the human soul comes from God and returns to God, nay that in strict philosophical language it was never torn away from God, that the bridge between man and God was never broken, but was only rendered invisible for a time by the darkness of passions and desires engendered by the senses and the flesh” uller earlier articulated in Hindu terms as the identifi(423). This claim that M€ cation of Brahman and Atman, he now casts as a kind of Christian mystical recognition that the individual soul is part of God’s soul. As M€uller argues, “I hope I have made it clear to you that from the very first the principal object of the Christian religion has been to make the world comprehend the oneness of the objective Deity, call it Jehovah . . . with the subjective Deity, call it self, or mind, or soul, or reason or Logos” (447). By echoing so-called Gnostic conceptions of the divine, this claim clearly would not have been amenable to a number of Christian theologians and hence in the pages that follow, M€uller has to reformulate Christianity not only to have a mystical component, but to have it as its center. To begin, M€ uller focuses chapter twelve on the Christian theological concept of the Logos, which turns out to be both the essence of Christianity and the best description of the relationship between God and man. Beginning the leculler insists that Philo did not get the Logos ture with Philo of Alexandria, M€ from Judaism but rather imported it from Greek thought (380–81). The Logos is fundamentally a Greek concept and hence Greek thought was reaching for the Logos even before the arrival of Christianity (422–23). As we can see, the coincidence of Vedanta, Neoplatonism, and Christian mysticism turns out to be a feature of their reputedly shared Aryan origins. 93 The “Semitic” history of Christianity will be discounted by M€uller. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 333 uller originally meant the “word” understood as The key term Logos for M€ “thought embodied in sound” (381). It therefore described a fundamental truth: “Word and thought, as I hope to have proved in my Science of Thought, are inseparable” (384). In Science of Thought and Science of Language, uller had argued for the identity of speech and thought or what we might call M€ reason and language. The implication is that there are no concepts without language, no meaningless words, and moreover that each word represents a separate concept (385). Furthermore, building on arguments made originally by uller argued that words (or concepts) function at both Leibniz and Locke, M€ the broad level to denote general ideas, understood at the level of the species (or category) rather than the individual exemplar.94 Obviously this is an argument that made the most sense in pre-Saussurean linguistics, and M€uller had made it before. In his lectures on “Theosophy,” M€uller exposes a Neoplatonic metaphysics he omitted elsewhere. Strikingly, M€uller reveals that his philosophy of language is rooted in a Neoplatonic concept of forms: “We must use our words as we have defined them, and species means an idea or an εἶdς, that is an eternal thought of a rational Being. Such a thought must vary in every individual manifestation of it, but it can never change. Unless we admit the eternal existence of these ideas in a rational Mind or in the Primal Cause of all things, we cannot account for our seeing them realised in nature, discovered by human reason, and named by human language” (388). Put differently, meaning exists in the mind of God. According to M€uller, this is both what was meant by the Greek concept of the Logos and is the claim proved by his own philological research. While it was perhaps predictable that Levi was a mystiuller’s position in the historiography it is percal Neoplatonist, coming from M€ haps surprising that he almost shares a theory of language and revelation with the magician. Lest we take this “Primal Cause” language to be merely a metaphor, the lecture then takes a seeming swerve as M€uller stages this Neoplatonic concept of εἶdς in relationship to a biological concept of species. He is interested in ratcheting up rather than down the theology, stating that “The idea that the world was thought and uttered or willed by God, so far from being a cobweb of abstruse philosophy, is one of the most natural and most accurate, nay most true conceptions of the creation of the world, and, let me add at once, of the true origin of species” (Theosophy, 382). Such a stark claim would be out of place in contemporary religious studies, but M€uller is unashamedly placing his theological commitments on the table. As he makes explicit, God’s reason does the work behind evolution (388). In effect, Neoplatonism has the potential to solve the fight between evolutionism and creationism. It is clear 94 Gottfried Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, ed. Jacques Brunschwig (Paris: Flammarion, 1990); John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 402-3. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 334 God’s Shadow uller’s main target is not the religious believer, but the skeptical scienthat M€ tist. Hence he argues: “It is of no use for Physical Science to shut its ears against such speculations [about the forms in the divine Mind] or to call them metaphysical dreams” (388). In sum, the forms are no mere allegory. Having represented Logos in Christian Neoplatonic terms, M€uller is able to cast his own philological research as Christian theology: I am glad to see that my critics have ceased at last to call my Science of Thought a linguistic paradox, and begin to see that what I contended for in that book was known long ago, and that no one ever doubted it. The Logos, the Word, as the thought of God, as the whole body of divine or eternal ideas, which Plato had prophesied, which Aristotle had criticised in vain, which the Neo Platonists re-established, is a truth that forms, or ought to form the foundation of all philosophy. And unless we have fully grasped it, as it was grasped by some of the greatest Fathers of the Church, we shall never be able to understand the Fourth Gospel, we shall never be able to call ourselves true Christians. (521) The Logos turns out to be the heart of both Christianity and M€uller’s own project. This is not all. As he argues, “The Logos, therefore, the thought of God, was the bond that united heaven and earth, and through it God could be addressed once more as the Father, in a truer sense than He had ever been before” (417). The Logos is nothing less than the Word in the mind of God functioning as the bridge between man and the divine. By the time Neoplatonism has Christianized, or according to M€uller’s argument, given birth to Christianity, it seems to have gotten things exactly right, as “the Christian religion . . . owed its victory [over other religions] chiefly, if not entirely, to the recognition of what, as we saw, forms the essential element of all religion, the recognition of the closest connexion between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, between the human soul and God” (454–55). Mystical Christianity, recast as the penultimate religious studies, discovered what was true of all religions and based itself on this truth. Accordingly, in the following lectures, M€ uller will go to some great pains to defend Mystical Christianity from objections, in, although not explicitly framed as such, an impassioned defense of his own project (486–88, 526–38). The final lecture, “Christian Theosophy,” is an attempt to pinpoint the full uller comes to find in his own native fruition of mystic Christianity, which M€ Germany. It is the medieval Dominican mystic and theologian Meister Eckuller argues is the prime exemplar of Christian Theosophy. In parhart, who M€ ticular, the pinnacle is Eckhart’s understanding of the Godhead, which M€uller paraphrases via comparison with Aquinas: “Being without qualities God is to us unknowable and incomprehensible, hidden and dark, till the Godhead is lighted up by its own light the light of self knowledge, by which it becomes subjective and objective, Thinker and Thought, or, as the Christian mystics This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 335 express it Father and Son” (512; see also 511). As M€uller will himself restate, “the highest lesson of Theosophy [is] the perception of the eternal oneness of human and divine nature” (539). In a solar metaphor he continues throughout uller describes the human soul as the light of the Godhead and the the essay, M€ goal of religion to recognize this light and embrace the human union with the uller, this oneness with God is not merely a feature of Christiandivine. For M€ ity, but is the goal strived for by all religions, or at the very least all theosophical religions. This is a point he makes clear when he states that “It was the chief object of these four courses of Lectures to prove that the yearning for union or unity with God, which we saw as the highest goal in other religions, finds its fullest recognition in Christianity. . . . However imperfect the forms may be in which that human yearning for God has found expression in different religions, it has always been the deepest spring of all religion, and the highest summit reached by Natural Religion” (538). In other words, the yearning for God is the deepest origin of all religions. Theosophical religion, or mystical Christianity, is the ultimate expression of these aims because it achieves the divine union toward which all religion is directed. Moreover, as M€uller has argued, one can achieve the realization of this truth through the labors of a historian of religion. Indeed it turns out that this recognition of the oneness of the divine and human souls asserted by philosophers and mystics is also the goal of comparative reliuller concludes, gion. As M€ In this my last course, it has been my chief endeavor to show how [physical and anthropological religion] always strive to meet and do meet in the end in what has been called Theosophy or Psychological Religion, helping us to the perception of the essential unity of the soul with God. Both this striving to meet and the final union have found, I think, their most perfect expression in Christianity . . . as what Master Eckhart called the surrender of our will to the Will of God. . . . And if the true meaning of religion is the highest purpose of religion, you will see how after a toilsome journey the historian of religion arrives in the end at the same summit which the philosopher of religion has chosen from the first as his own. (541–42) We might say the same of the philologist and the magician. Strains of Neoplatonism and hermeticism can be seen in both. Both Levi and M€uller also had as their end goal a kind of Christian mysticism or theosophy, which they read into Eastern and Western religion alike. They both thought that the juxtaposition of different mythologies would cause them to open up and reveal God’s truths. They differed, however, as to the means for unlocking this revelation— the tarot versus Indo-European philology. Moreover, while they both postulated a hidden core behind all religions—the infinite truths of Deus absconditus—for uller the essence of the Divine was reason, while for Levi it was ultimately M€ beyond the grasp of rationality. Nevertheless, both saw religion as a means to approach the infinite. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 336 God’s Shadow conclusion: god’s shadow God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow.—And we—we must still defeat his shadow as well. (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, x108) There is a shadow over the discipline of religious studies. The Encyclop edie’s early definitions of religion have God in them and seek to explain the diversity of world religions according to a causal agency originating in that divinity. After all, the entry on “religion” in the Encyclop edie begins, “The foundation of all religion is that there is a God who has dealings with his creatures and who requires them to worship him.”95 But a monotheistic deity has become increasingly displaced by terms like sacred or transcendent.96 On the one hand, this shift signals the recognition that not all the traditions conventionally grouped under the category “religion” worship a monotheistic divinity. On the other hand, this recent transformation in the meaning of religion suggests both a secularization and radical broadening of the definition. The changing language marks a critical difference. This shift in meaning seems to represent the vanishing of God and words like transcendent, infinite, or sacred are attempts to cover for an absence, to describe a shadow. Yet the very category of “religion” was formulated and organized around a Christian concept of God. In talking and writing about religion, it is imagined that religions have a common hidden essence, which marks them as “religious.” In excluding God from its explanatory apparatus, “religion” remains as a category structured around a hole or fissure. In other words, we find ourselves in a discipline organized around a core that no longer exists. Moreover, in general, this constitutive absence menaces the very modern task of discipline formation and the forms of circumscription it presumes. The language of haunting is particularly appropriate here as it evokes a ghostly presence that is simultaneously the sign of a fundamental absence. Terms like the “transcendent” are supposed to be more cosmopolitan or universal, structuring the definition of religion and indeed defining the field around these terms instead of God was supposed to be more inclusive. For the most part, this vocabulary does not work for other cultures and it does not accurately describe assumed commonalities. Instead this language, imported in many ways from mysticism, is easily transformed into a suppressed Christian triumphalism or the claim, as William Blake put it, that “all religions are 95 “Le fondement de toute religion est qu’il y a un Dieu, qui a des rapports à ses creatures, & qui exige d’elles quelque culte” (L’Encyclop edie 14:78). 96
See, e.g., Jason Ananda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 8–11. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 337 one.” If God is dead, he is still haunting the study of religion, and “the transcendent” is his shadow. Moreover, this absent or abstract God is precisely the deity of the Enlightenment approached by different means. Whether framed phenomenologically or through an interpretation of cultural symbols, insofar as the academic study of religion takes God or the transcendent as its organizing principle, the field functions as a modern mysticism, striving for a hidden center. These mystical undercurrents are also in tension with the discipline’s self-presentation as a secular science, understood in Enlightenment terms as the rational study of an irrational subject. Thus, bringing this occult underground to the surface has generally met with resistance. Even as religious studies has attempted to purge mysticism in its public disciplining process, a specter remains and refuses to vanish. As portions of religious studies have become specialized forms of history, the transcendent shadow has resurfaced in other disciplines in “The Turn to Religion in Postmodern Thought.”97 Jeffrey Kripal and Steven Wasserstrom have well demonstrated the mystical side of twentieth-century religious studies, but mysticism goes further back, to the “origins,” whatever those are, of the discipline. While not every scholar is a mystic, the very terms that have defined the field, that have structured the profession, pull in this direction. The contrary reaction has often been to close down dialogue by arguing that those things marked as “religions” have no common essence and thus to transform the discipline into regional history. It should not be surprising then that many of the most influential members of the field have turned to mystical language in their attempts to produce grand syntheses. Religious studies can be seen as but the crest of the modern esoteric wave. Scholars of nineteenth-century religion have increasingly come to recognize that Spiritualism was the most important transnational movement of the era.98 It is now a matter of revising our narrative of the history of religious studies in the face of this insight. The cultural setting of the disciplinary formation of religious studies has been misread. It was neither antireligious skepticism nor mainstream Protestantism, neither secular disenchantment nor liberal theology. Instead it appears as though occultists, Spiritualists, and scholars of religion were fellow travellers or at least inhabitants of the same conceptual universe. I would like to reconstruct some of this milieu in concrete historical terms. As fellow Oxford professors, it should be no surprise that E. B. Tylor and uller knew each other and corresponded regularly.99 The surprise is Max M€ 97 My colleague Sarah Hammerschlag’s course of the same title was offered at Williams College, fall 2010. 98 See, e.g., Carroll, Spiritualism. 99 See M€ uller, Life and Letters, 1:306, 315. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 338 God’s Shadow that, as I have shown, despite their different positions in the historiography, uller and Eliphas Levi were not far apart intellectually. Socially they were M€ not that far apart either, as both were acquaintances of the English novelist and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–73).100 Further, members of the Theosophical movement equally appropriated the work of Levi and M€uller into their project.101 Henry Olcott, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, connects all three figures. As noted above, he corresponded with M€uller. Although he never met Levi in person, Olcott made it his business in 1884 to track down Levi’s two remaining pupils for discussions of their departed master.102 Furthermore, in a diary entry from October 1888, Olcott recounted that uller, who welcomed him as a fellow Orientalist, not only had he met with M€ uller had introduced him to Tylor. Olcott noted that despite his but also that M€ uller agreed to disagree about the existence of the warm reception, he and M€ hidden masters and other issues.103 Despite M€ uller’s rejection of the Theosophical Society, his work continued to speak to members of the movement. Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky (1878– 1947), a Russian former Theosophist and follower of Gurdjieff, was inspired uller’s lecture on theosophy in the formulation of his own mystical sysby M€ tem. In the text that announced that project as Tertium organum, we return full circle because, like the French philosophes, Ouspensky was inspired by Francis Bacon (particularly Bacon’s Novum organum) to produce what Ouspensky saw as a continuation of Bacon’s grand synthesis of philosophical and mystical knowledge. To do so, Ouspensky believed he was activating the mystical uller’s theosophy and partaking in his quest for the infinite behind aspect of M€ all religions.104 Tertium organum is a classically “romantic” work, but it also implies an alternate genealogy of the study of religion, rooted not merely in the Enlightenment or in Hume’s rationalism, but also in Renaissance recovery and magic. This has implications not only for the field of religious studies but also for narratives about secularism and disenchantment. Living as we do in the perceived shadow of an absent God, models of secularization have been pressed to explain the current so-called religious revival, manifesting as it does now in 100 Bodleian Library holds a set of letters that Bulwer-Lytton and M€uller exchanged during the years 1885–90. Bulwer-Lytton dedicated The Coming Race (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005), xxvi, to M€uller. Bulwer-Lytton’s friendship with Levi is recounted in several places, including in Waite’s introduction to Levi, Transcendental Magic. 101 Blavatky (Isis Unveiled, 2:246–48) also drew on the work of Tylor. 102 Henry Steel Olcott, Old Diary Leaves, 6 vols. (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1904), 3:164–65. 103 Ibid., 4:57–58. 104 P. D. Ouspensky, Tertium organum (New York: Vintage, 1970), 271–72. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Religions 339 the face of scientific modernity.105 On closer analysis, neither the Enlightenment, nor the history of religious studies turn out to fit the received narrative. When we return to the Enlightenment thinkers, they have a messy relationship to religion, to spirits, and to esotericism itself. Meanwhile, Enlightenment rationalism and empiricism seem to be entangled with theological speculation as well. In this sense, the Enlightenment turns out to predate much of the secular rupture that is attributed to producing it. Insofar as the discipline of religious studies is both a fulfillment and a counterreaction to the Enlightenment, it has, therefore, a parallel function to those other revivals. Common to both is a kind of occlusion that functions by suppressing something at the same moment that another aspect of the suppressed is simultaneously being reincorporated. Despite the way in which religious studies represents a recovery of the th eosophes, it has repeatedly distanced itself from the science of spirits.106 A secular study of the science of spirits remains occluded even as a semioccluded occult pervades the underground of the field. This rejection of spirits represents the victory of a kind of conservative ontology that has clearly delimited and disciplined the realm of the possible. Moreover, religious studies is still haunted by the legacy of the Enlightenment in its rejection of “superstition.” Particularly striking from this vantage point is the production of a superstition-religion binary. In defining religion in terms of monolithic essences (transcendent, sacred, etc.), the discipline has historically produced a “remainder” of things that do not count as religion and are therefore outside our realm of inquiry. Much of what was rejected was labeled as superstitions and relegated to the fields of folklore or anthropology. Although some of this has begun to shift, the exclusions built into this structure gave shape to the formation of religion as category both academically and legally and continue to determine the field’s trajectory. While the word superstition has vanished from our conversation within the discipline, its occlusions remain. Williams College 105 For one survey of this theoretical terrain, see Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11–39. On the Enlightenment as the beginning of radical disenchantment, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971); Michel Vovelle, Pi et e baroque et d echristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe si ecle (Paris: Plon, 1973). 106 For this in early Christian studies, see Denise Buell, “The Afterlife Is Not Dead: Spiritualism, Postcolonial Theory, and Early Christian Studies,” Church History 78 (2009): 862–72. This content downloaded from 137.165.250.216 on Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:16:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions