Full Description
Similarities between esoteric and mystical currents in different religious traditions have long interested scholars. This book takes a new look at the relationship between such currents. It advances a discussion that started with the search for religious essences, archetypes, and universals, from William James to Eranos. The universal categories that resulted from that search were later criticized as essentialist constructions, and questioned by deconstructionists. An alternative explanation was advanced by diffusionists: that there were transfers between different traditions. This book presents empirical case studies of such constructions, and of transfers between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the premodern period, and Judaism, Christianity, and Western esotericism in the modern period. It shows that there were indeed transfers that can be clearly documented, and that there were also indeed constructions, often very imaginative. It also shows that there were many casesthat were neither transfers nor constructions, but a mixture of the two.
Contents
1. Introduction: The Esoteric and the Mystical, Transfers and Constructions.- 2. Seekers of Love: The Phenomenology of Emotion in Jewish, Christian, and Sufi Mystical Sources.- 3. Rabbi Salim Shabazi and Sufism: Synthesis or Juxtaposition?.- 4. "And you should also adjure in Arabic:" Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Formulas in the Solomonic Corpus.- 5. Compelling the Other: Esoteric Exorcism as a Reflection of Jewish-Christian Social Tensions in Premodern German Demonic Ritual Magic.- 6. Tlemcen, Algeria: A Would-Be Esoteric Colonial Settlement of the fin de siècle.- 7. Alfarabi as Leo Strauss's Teacher of Platonic Esoteric Writing: Leo Strauss's Rediscovery of Esotericism and its Islamic Origin.- 8. Aleister Crowley and Islam.- 9. The Sufi Shaykh and his Patients: Merging Islam, Psychoanalysis, and Western Esotericism.- 10. Sufism and the Enneagram.- 11. "A Remarkable Resemblance": Comparative Mysticism and the Study of Sufism and Kabbalah.- 12. Heretical Orthodoxy: Eastern and Western Esotericism in Thomas Moore Johnson's "Platonism".- 13. Astrology, Letters and Cosmos: Ferid Vokopola's Syncretism.
