The Next Generation

Recently I have been making the argument (see here, and cf. my article ‘Textbooks and Introductions to Western Esotericism’, Religion 43:2 [2013]) that the academic study of Western esotericism was upgraded around 1992 from its somewhat primitive starting phase (“Western esotericism 1.0”) to a much more professional program (“Western esotericism 2.0”), and that after twenty years it’s now time for a serious new upgrade to “Western esotericism 3.0”. The original program from the 1970s and 80s was inspired by an often implicit and sometimes explicit critique of the “modern world” that reflected a profound nostalgia for pre-Enlightenment worldviews. Hence esotericism tended to be perceived, in highly positive terms, as an enchanted holistic “form of thought” that was dominated, in the influential terms of Antoine Faivre, by correspondences (rather than instrumental causality), living nature (rather than dead mechanicism), imagination and mediations (rather than abstract reason and materialism), and the potential for spiritual transmutation or interior rebirth (rather than the sober assumption that we are just what we are). Among the important advances of Western esotericism 2.0 was that it broke with this anti-modern background agenda by recognizing a wide variety of post-Enlightenment esotericisms as equally important and worthy of investigation as their pre-Enlightenment ancestors. While Faivre’s definition has remained influential through the 1990s and into the next century, there was henceforth plenty of room for the study of “modernized” or (in my own terms of the mid-1990s) “secularized” forms of esotericism. Nevertheless, this process of bringing the study of esotericism “up to the present” still isn’t entirely complete: as argued by Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm in their important new volume Contemporary Esotericism (2013) there is still a tendency among scholars towards ignoring or marginalizing the popular contemporary scene, along with a tendency of focusing exclusively on historical methods at the expense of the social sciences. They are right that this bias needs to be corrected: after all, if we agree that esotericism as a field of research extends from late antiquity to our own time, then stopping just short of the contemporary scene is simply arbitrary.

Consisting of twenty chapters subdivided into four parts, this 470-page volume covers a wide variety of subjects: from influential and/or controversial currents or topics such as chaos magick, satanism, scientology, deep ecology, entheogenic shamanism, indigo children, Paulo Coelho’s bestsellers, alternative healing, and the new age, to highly relevant but still partly underestimated dimensions of the field such as race, gender, secrecy, politics, the internet, and popular culture. And even that is just a partial sample: it is easy to imagine a sequel covering many additional angles or dimensions, for instance the presence of esotericism or the occult in rock, metal, or avant-garde music, in comics, in role playing or video gaming, in movies, in art, in novels (from high literature to pulp fiction) or poetry, or in popular psychology. The potential seems even more overwhelming if one considers how many new religious movements are grounded in esoteric worldviews, or thinks of additional disciplinary perspectives such as media studies, ritual studies, black studies, cognitive psychology, etcetera. In short, it seems to me that Asprem and Granholm have hit upon a goldmine: the scope of “contemporary esotericism” is almost unlimited.

In terms of my software analogy, the timing of the volume could not have been more perfect: I would argue that it shows how the shift towards “Western Esotericism 3.0” is in fact already taking place, carried by a “next generation” of young scholars with fresh new ideas and unburdened by some of their predecessors’ preoccupations or blind spots (I estimate that most of the contributors to Contemporary Esotericism are in their twenties or thirties). There is a new tone and a new attitude here, and I would agree with Granholm’s suggestion that it reflects what he calls a “post-secular” mindset: ‘the study of Western esotericism itself, and in particular the growing acceptance of it as a legitimate field of inquiry, could be regarded as an expression of post-secular trends. This is the case if the post-secular implies a broadening of academic sentiments regarding what is worthwhile to study in the world of religion, and indeed what can even be accepted under that very label’ (pp. 323-324).In close connection to this, Granholm points out that ‘Popular culture is an arena in which requirements for the “seriousness of belief” and notions of religion as dealing with “ultimate concerns” must be abandoned’ (p. 324) This is a point that can hardly be emphasized enough. Not only do we need to question the crypto-Protestant bias according to which religion or esotericism must ultimately be about “faith” or “beliefs”, so that dimensions such as practice or experience have to be secondary at best; but with respect to esotericism in popular culture more specifically, we also need to think about the possible relevance of such things as play and humor, irreverence and irony, iconoclasm and blasphemy, sentimentality and provocation, or kitch and commercialism, to mention just a few. Will this still leave room for all those extremely serious elements that have traditionally been highlighted as crucial to “esotericism”, such as the pursuit of gnosis or higher knowledge, secrecy and concealment, worldviews of divine enchantment, or initiatory trajectories? I have no answer to these questions (at least, not yet), but perhaps the next generation does.

Superpower

 

Julian Strube, who is presently working on his Ph.D. at Heidelberg University, recently published a revised version of his M.A. thesis under the title Vril: Eine okkulte Urkraft in Theosophie und esoterischem Neonazismus (Vril: An Occult Ur-Power in Theosophy and Esoteric Neonazism). It is an extremely well-documented and well-written piece of reception history that holds valuable lessons not just for readers who might be tempted to believe in the popular mythology of “Nazi occultism” but, in fact, for anybody interested in the relation between myth and history. The amazing story of Vril begins with The Coming Race, a novel published in 1871 by the Victorian author Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). This pioneering piece of science fiction writing describes a subterranean world inhabited by a superhuman race, the Vril-ya, whose superior technology is based upon a mysterious natural force of unlimited potency. This primal super-power known as Vril became a topic of fascination for many readers who suspected, or believed, that Bulwer-Lytton – the author of Zanoni (1842), the most famous occult novel of the nineteenth century – was in fact a Rosicrucian “initiate” revealing true mysteries of the occult under the guise of fiction. The mnemohistorical fiction of Bulwer-Lytton as a kind of occultist avant-la-lettre seems to have originated in the milieu around John Yarker and the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, and its influence can be traced up even to recent works of scholarship such as Joscelyn Godwin’s The Theosophical Enlightenment (1994). Strube makes clear in precise detail that it has no historical foundation. He continues by describing how the Vril mythology travelled through time and got embellished with ever new and ever more fantastic elements, by theosophists such as H.P. Blavatsky and William Scott-Elliot to the founder of Anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner and, most importantly in view of later developments, two pamphlets published in 1930 by an organization known as the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft “Das kommende Deutschland” (“The Future Germany”: pp. 98ff). In the final years of the Weimar Republic, these enthusiasts imbued with popular esoteric lore and somewhat influenced by völkisch-nationalist and ariosophical ideas believed they were on the verge of great things: “The Vril power has been re-discovered, the emerald tablets of the great Hermes Trismegistus radiate in the green-blue light of the approaching dawn of uranidian nature-control” (p. 103).

And then, after World War II, the Vril-mythology was disseminated among a mass audience due to Louis Pauwels’ and Jacques Bergier’s bestseller Le matin des magiciens (“The Morning of the Magicians”, 1960), which introduced the idea of a secret “Vril Society”, largely inspired by an article of the German rocket scientist Willy Ley (131ff): “Pseudo-Science in Naziland”, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1947, and apparently inspired in turn by those 1930 pamphlets of the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft “Das kommende Deutschland”. Building further on a whole series of French and English authors who, already during the 1930s and 1940s, had published sensationalist books about Hitler as an “adept” and Master of a magical Order, or a medium possessed by demonic forces, Le matin des magiciens laid the foundations for countless conspiracy theories about “Nazi occultism” that have flourished in popular literature and on the Internet ever since. In this remarkably popular genre, the fictional “Vril Society” came to be associated with Rudolf von Sebottendorff’s “Thule Society”, which was now interpreted as a sinister occultist organization that used Hitler as a medium and was searching for the supreme Superpower of Vril believed to be hidden somewhere in the Orient. Eventually, one finds this Nazism-occultism mythology even in mainstream movies such as Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones series, the Hellboy series, or computer animation games such as Wolfenstein. In the final parts of his book, Strube does a very good job documenting and analyzing the dissemination and further transformation of these ideas in the context of contemporary far right and neonazi subcultures. One thing the book did for me was making it somewhat more understandable why German academics and intellectuals tend to associate Esoterik so strongly with fascism and antisemitism: the reasons for this connection are complex – among other things, it has much to do with the influence of the Frankfurt School – but Strube’s discussions made me realize that the Esotericism-Nazism link in the wake of Pauwels/Bergier may also have a higher profile in Germany than in most other European countries simply because there is so much popular stuff around that highlights that connection. If so, the irony is that if German intellectuals reject Esoterik as tainted with dangerous political connotations, they may in fact be doing so because they are buying too uncritically into the claims of occultist mythology.

My only regret about Strube’s work is that it remains entirely on the level of descriptive historiography: he traces the reception history of Vril mythology from Bulwer-Lytton to the present, but makes no attempt to reflect a bit more about the theoretical implications of this strange story, or the lessons that may be drawn from it. The Vril story does, however, provide us with much food for thought. Personally, for instance, I would see it as a perfect object lesson about the socio-political implications of Jan Assmann’s opposition of history versus mnemohistory. As I have pointed out in another context, it is a worrying fact that attractive stories about what is supposed to have happened although it never did (i.e. artificially constructed collective memories about the past) may often have a much greater impact on people’s thinking and behaviour than the carefully documented and much more reliable descriptions that can be offered by professional historians. All the more reason for historians to keep trying. By wielding the sharp weapon of critical historiography, with an excellent command of the primary sources, Strube succeeds in deconstructing a whole series of popular mnemohistorical fictions: for anybody who has read his analysis carefully, it will henceforth be hard if not impossible to keep entertaining the possibility that Bulwer-Lytton was an “initiate”, Vril might be a really existing occult superpower, the Nazis were closet occultists, Hitler was an “adept”, and so on. Moreover, I would argue, the very fact that such demystification is possible and convincing should serve to deconstruct yet another myth: the popular poststructural argument, or cliché, that history writing is no more than narrative making, and historians are incapable of establishing “what really happened”. Of course they can. Granted the obvious fact that no historian can reproduce exactly wie es eigentlich gewesen, anybody with even a minimal respect for empirical evidence and rational argument will have to admit that Strube’s account of how the Vril and Nazi-occultism mythology emerged and developed is superior in every respect to the pseudo-historical claims of its supporters. If we give in to the lazy conclusion (more common in popularized versions, I hasten to add, than in the work of the theoretical founding fathers, who are usually more subtle) that the accounts of professional historians are never more than “just an opinion”, because their claims of “knowledge” are in fact just claims of power, we will eventually find ourselves without protection against the powerful seductions of mythmaking in the interest of political goals. In other words: without realizing it, we will have joined the ranks of the believers in Vril.

Grand Theories, Feeble Foundations

When I heard that Dennis McKenna had published a book about his life and that of his brother Terence (deceased in 2000), I ordered it immediately. Terence became famous during the 1980s and 1990s as the most articulate and charismatic "public intellectual" of the psychedelic counterculture - movies of his talks and interviews are spread all over the internet - and I find him particularly interesting as a hyper-radical hippie esotericist steeped in alchemical and other "hermetic" lore (read entirely through the lenses of "Eranos scholars" such as Jung and Eliade) as well as the largely unacknowledged source of 2012 millenarianism (for those who are interested in that story: see my article "'And End History. And go to the Stars': Terence McKenna and 2012").
While McKenna's work was all about the "re-enchantment of the world", The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence McKenna has had a profoundly disenchanting effect on me. Intentionally or not (probably not) Dennis exposes the public image of Terence McKenna as little more than a myth and replaces it by a far less attractive picture of the actual person. There is no doubt that his older brother possessed a sharp mind, a delightful "gift of gab", and a great sense of humour; but apparently he was also an extremely egoistic narcissist with little regard for anyone except himself. As Dennis puts it, Terence "seemed not to have an empathetic bone in his body" (95, cf. 86), got angry when someone disagreed with him or challenged his ideas (25), and was incapable of forgiving people (93): "once you got on his shit list, you stayed there; there was no going back" (94). Interestingly, given her current association with right-wing values, he turns out to have been a fan of Ayn Rand's writings, which "validated, for him, his anti-authoritarian stance as well as his belief that it was perfectly OK to be totally selfish" (95).

The McKenna legend revolves essentially around the radical experiences of "the brotherhood" (expanded with a few friends) at a settlement called La Chorrera deep in the Colombian Amazon forest, in 1971: "In some respects, everything in life before we arrived at La Chorrera was a prelude to the events that engulfed us there; and everything afterward has been a reflection of them" (241). Having ingested an extremely potent mixture of psychedelic substances, the brotherhood sincerely believed that, as the first human beings in history, they had found the secret of the philosophers' stone and had opened the way for the entire human race to escape from history and "go to the stars"... Dennis now claims that most of the radical ideas that were central to this Colombian adventure were actually his own rather than Terence's (248; and see also p. 149 about the seminal role assigned to a friend, John Parker), and he reserves the starring role for himself rather than his brother; but apart from this, his rather dry account adds disappointingly little to the brilliantly written descriptions in Terence's True Hallucinations (1993). But even more disappointing is Dennis's inability or unwillingness, even decades afterwards, to draw the obvious conclusion that what happened to them at La Chorrera may subjectively have been very impressive to them at the time, but can quite easily be explained as a monumental psychedelic delusion supported by wild theories that (as Dennis admits himself) may "sound like scientific jargon, but ... are nonsense" (255). I see no good reason to make such a big deal of it all, but Dennis seems determined not to apply Occam's Razor: surely he makes quite some sceptical noises throughout these chapters, but one has the impression that in his heart he still wants to believe that somehow, in some sense, it was all true.
Of course it is hard to let go of an obsession to which one has devoted most of one's life, and perhaps all this wavering can be explained, partly at least, out of simple loyalty to his brother's memory. In my article on McKenna (see link, above) I expressed my respect for Terence's unflinching acceptance of what is known as "the Watkins objection". In their book The Invisible Landscape (1975), grounded in the La Chorrera experience, the two brothers had developed their famous "timewave theory", according to which, among other things, a radical "concrescence" would take place in 2012. When a young mathematician, Matthew Watkins, explained to him that the mathematical foundations of the theory were unsound, Terence apparently accepted the argument and endorsed the publication of Watkins' "Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination". As I have discovered since publishing my article, the reality may have been slightly less heroic. According to Dennis, the refutation of his theory affected Terence deeply and shook his confidence (456-457); but more importantly, when Samten Dorje asked him point blank, in 1997, whether he actually believed in the Timewave theory, apparently the answer ("with a twinkle and a smile") was "No. But it pays the bills" (see Dorje, Did Terence McKenna believe his own theory?). One is forced to conclude from Dennis's biography that this was probably the truth of the matter. Terence had "inherited his father's talent, or flaw, for never letting facts get in the way of a good story" (23), and during the last decade of his life he seems to have depended financially on public appearances before audiences that simply expected him to deliver inspiring talks about the "end of time" in 2012. What to do under such circumstances? Perhaps one might say that, by the end of his life, Terence McKenna found himself trapped by his own theory.
At the end of the day, the story of The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss is a sad one: it tells us about fervent hopes and great expectations never fulfilled, grand but feeble theories that inevitably suffer shipwreck on the hard rocks of reality, and two brothers who throughout their life, each in their own way, refuse or are perhaps unable to recognize that truth. Dennis, who pursued a scientific career and became a respected ethnopharmacologist, never seems to have resolved the conflict between myth and science. As for Terence, who rejected science altogether (282): he was finally swallowed whole by the myth of his own making.

Science in virtual reality

 

Like many Dutch academics, I resisted the idea of buying Diederik Stapel’s book Ontsporing (Derailment), in which he analyzes his descent into systematic scientific deception. I didn’t like the idea of him making money by describing his own fraudulent practices, and I was fully prepared for a narcissistic product filled with subtle or less subtle attempts at self-justification. But the book has surprised me. In the words of Beatrijs Ritsema (who published one of the most thoughtful reviews so far) it breathes an atmosphere of “immeasurable loneliness”, and comes across as an honest attempt at soul-searching, filled with apparently sincere expressions of deep regret and shame. Stapel knows that his actions are inexcusable, and makes no attempt to let himself off the hook: the book has mea culpa written all over it. As some reviewers have noted, it is also an almost desperate plea for some human compassion (see the passage involving J.S. Bach’s Embarme Dich on pp. 268-269), although not for absolution; and outraged as I remain by how Stapel made a mockery of even the most elementary standards of scientific integrity, I do think he has been punished enough. His life is destroyed and he has lost everything: his title, his job, his income, his reputation, his future, and everyone’s respect. He has become a target of near-universal contempt and can no longer show his face in public without inviting ridicule: professor magna cum fraude. His very name has become a synonym of fraud (the expression “een stapeltje doen” – staplerizing – has already entered the Dutch language) and he will go down into history as a liar of the worst kind. Last but not least, for the rest of his life he will have to deal with the guilt of having betrayed and severely damaged everyone around him: his colleagues, his Ph.D. students, and most of all his wife and two young daughters (who have shown impressive love, loyalty, and courage in sticking up for their husband and father in spite of everything).

Although some newspaper reviews would make one think otherwise, there is no room for Schadenfreude in the Stapel affair, only for sadness and embarrassment. But what, if anything, can we learn from it? Although Stapel describes his “derailment” in quite some detail, his attempts at explaining it remain tentative, hesitant, and superficial: when all is said and done, he seems as puzzled and mystified by his own behaviour as everyone else. Hence, at the heart of this book we do not find any clear thesis or conclusion but, instead, a very large question mark.

To get a bit closer to an explanation, it may be useful to read Onsporing in tandem (like I did) with another recent book written by a psychologist, a Belgian this time. Paul Verhaeghe’s Identiteit contains one of the most convincing recent analyses of the currently dominant neoliberal ideology and its inherent pathologies. If one reads Verhaeghe’s analysis of the neoliberal or corporate university (Identiteit, pp. 126-132) next to Stapel’s description of how the academy is working today (Ontsporing, pp. 127-145), one realizes that the Stapel affair is a perfect illustration of Verhaeghe’s argument. If Verhaeghe is a doctor who diagnoses an illness, Stapel’s role is that of the symptom. The patient, of course, is our current university system.

It seems to me that two points are essential in explaining Stapel’s derailment. Firstly: having become a successful professor of social psychology, Stapel seems to have loved the game more than its objective, the means more than the end. It appears that he fell in love with the daily practice of being an academic (teaching, interacting with colleagues, attending conferences, having intellectual discussions with students, supervising research, setting up new research projects, acquiring funds, managing a faculty, and so on) and lost sight of the goal: advancing our knowledge in the domain of social psychology. Many modern academics experience the neoliberal university as a highly stressful, demotivating, and frustrating environment; but judging from his account, Stapel took to it like a fish to water. One gets the impression that what stimulated him was the intellectual excitement of “solving puzzles” and, most of all, the opportunity of playing a central role in a social network of players engaged in the same academic game: a game whose rewards consisted not primarily in the acquisition of knowledge for knowledge’s sake - although nominally this was the case, because support for the game would dwindle fast without that assumption being upheld even by the players themselves - but in the acquisition of social capital (prestige, recognition, applause, power, and so on). In other words: knowledge as a means rather than as an end. For Stapel being a scientist searching for answers became subservient to being an academic professional searching for success.

Secondly, Stapel seems to have loved his theories more than the empirical reality to which they should refer. If there is one refrain that keeps being repeated throughout his book - I lost count of the number of instances - it is how difficult Stapel appears to have found it to accept the messiness, chaos, complexity, unpredictability, and (in his own words) the disappointing ugliness of social reality, and how strong was his longing for (again, in his own words) beautiful, logical, elegant theories. “Whatever seemed logical was true. That gave a feeling of satisfaction and quiet. Had I been smarter, I would regularly have caused my research to fail. That would have been more realistic, more rational and shrewd. But I couldn’t do it. I had become an addict. I wanted it to be brilliant and clear. The more brilliant, the better. My inventions became ever more and more beautiful, and I began to believe in them more and more. See how beautiful the world was. See how orderly everything was arranged” (p. 175). Stapel is a Platonist of sorts, longing to transcend this transient world of chaos to behold the orderly beauty of eternal ideas. If empirical reality failed to live up to his theories, so much the worse for reality.

So we end up with the picture of a man who preferred the academic game of power and prestige over the search for knowledge, and who fell prey to theorizing at the expense of respect for empirical evidence - that is to say, for reality. As such, Stapel is an extreme symptom not just of the neoliberal university and its inherent logic (as analyzed by Verhaeghe) but, moreover, of its vulnerability to a certain kind of postmodern reasoning. For decades now, we have been told ad nauseam that claims of “knowledge” are in fact just claims of power, and that “reality” can never be more than just an ultimately subjective theoretical construct (driven by the Wille zur Macht as well). At the time, these philosophical perspectives originated as important correctives to prevailing naiveties concerning knowledge and reality, and I very much respect the significant core of truth they contain; but anything that is absolutized as the “only” truth thereby turns into an ideology, masquerading (like all ideologies) as “just the way things are”. Combining these two ideologies – neoliberalism and postmodernism – leads to a pathology of which Stapel is the perfect symptom: that of academics who end up confusing their virtual realities with the real world in which all of us are living, to an extent where they begin to doubt whether there is any difference between the two at all. Verhaeghe shows how “the figures” (statistics based on quantitative measurement procedures) are increasingly being confused with “reality” in the neoliberal bureaucracy, in spite of the abundant evidence that nothing lends itself so easily to manipulation as precisely numbers and statistics (especially if one's funding depends on it). That Stapel has been punished for “messing with the data” shows that we have not yet lost touch with what science should be about; but in fact - for reasons explained by Verhaeghe - the management structures of the neoliberal university rely increasingly on precisely such data manipulation (betraying an implicit belief that “as long as it works it doesn't matter whether it's true”). It is time for all of us to be reminded of a perhaps uncomfortable truth: reality exists, it really does!, and it is ultimately qualitative, not quantitative. Yes, this makes it difficult to handle and understand, but who ever said that science should be easy?

Something Rotten

Last year, stunning revelations about the systematic scientific fraud committed by social psychologist Diederik Stapel sent shockwaves through the Dutch academic community. This week, the official committee in charge of examining the case, headed by the ex-president of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences Prof. Dr. Willem Levelt, presented its final report Flawed Science: The Fraudulent Research Practices of Social Psychologist Diederik Stapel. The report can be downloaded here. The affair is certainly the largest and most spectacular case of scientific fraud in Dutch academic history, and places Stapel in the all-time top-10 of academic swindlers; but from a very well-researched book by science journalist Frank van Kolfschooten one has to conclude that it is far from unique.Van Kolfschooten's book (its title could be translated as Derailed Science: About Fraud,

Plagiarism, and Academic Morality) provides a very readable and extremely disconcerting overview of the history of plagiarism, fraud, and other forms of scientific deceit in the history of science and scholarship in the Netherlands, and should give any reader pause for thought. As emphasized by the Levelt committee as well, most worrying about the Stapel affair and other cases of systematic scientific deception is the serious questions they raise about the current state of the academic system. How is it possible that a well-known scholar could get away, for many years, with a large string of publications in which all his hypotheses were always spectacularly confirmed, by experimental data that were widely perceived by colleagues as "too good to be true", but the correctness of which could never be confirmed because their exclusive source was Stapel himself and no one else? How to explain that these results, in spite of their inherent implausibility, kept being accepted by the reviewers of important peer-reviewed journals? It is only due to the courage of three (still anonymous) Ph.D. students working under Stapel, who assumed the role of whistle-blowers at great risk to their own academic career, that the deception was finally discovered. Perhaps the most important passages of van Kolfschooten's book appear in his chapter "In the Publication Bubble", particularly on pp. 115-116. I quote: "A report published by the VSNU (the organization of Dutch universities) published in May 2012 shows that between 2000 and 2010, Dutch scholars have been devoting more of their time to teaching, while more scientific publications were expected of them at the same time. Their research is financed ever less frequently by their own university ("first money stream"), but must be earned through subsidies in competition with other scholars. This requires scholars to write grant applications, and the energy and time needed for this goes at the expense of the research itself [and here we might add that countless scholars are asked to read and assess such applications or sit in committees, obviously at the expense of their research time as well, WJH]. Furthermore, the number of successful applications keeps decreasing. In addition, the workload of professors and lecturers is increased further due to a steady increase in the number of Ph.D. students (the number of dissertations grew from 2360 to 3700 between 2000 and 2010). As a result, the number of Ph.D. students that they must supervise has risen with 40% over the last ten years. Add to this the fact that, in order to allow the number of scientists to grow, the budget for supporting personnel has been reduced. This has increased the work pressure both for scientific and for supporting personnel. Nevertheless, the increase in the number of publications (27%) over the last ten years has been greater than the increase in personnel (22%)" (p. 115-116)".

Such cool figures suggest that someting is seriously rotten in the state of academia. The first thing to be said is that these developments can never be an excuse for plagiarism and fraud. But the next thing to say is that there is reason to ask serious questions about an academic "publish-or-perish" culture that not only allows systematic fraud to pass unnoticed, but even pressures scientists to cut corners where they can, and actively seduces them to privilege quantity over quality. As the general climate of academic research in the neoliberal university is getting ever more unhealthy, one should not be surprised when diseases are the result. Elsewhere in his book, Van Kolfschooten mentions further ingredients of what is already a toxic mixture. Think of the fact that, again and again, academic top managers have tried to cover up cases of fraud and plagiarism, and have been intimidating whistleblowers, because apparently they are more afraid of reputation damage for their institution than concerned about scientific standards and morality. Think of the fact that science is increasingly expected to deliver "products" to a market, rather than to solve problems, ask questions or offer new perspectives (van Kolfschooten, p. 117). Think of the trend of lowering the standards for accepting dissertations in order to cash in as much as possible of the money a university receives for each successful promotion (pp. 117-118). Think of scientific journals refusing articles that are "too technical" because this lowers their impact factor (p. 131), or even demanding that the author add references to articles from the same journal as a condition for acceptance, because this will increase the journal's impact factor (p. 131). Think of psychologists "torturing the data until they confess" and repeating experiments until they finally result in a statistically significant result (p. 253). And of course, think of the perverse phenomenon of "science on demand", where financial sponsors pay scientists to furnish them with the results they like (p. 280). The list is far from complete.
To all this I would add another aspect that is seldom mentioned. Particularly in the humanities, postmodern ideologies have contributed to an "anything goes" mentality that questions and subverts any standards for distinguishing between "true" and "false", suggesting that scholarly debate is never more than a gratuitous exchange of subjective opinions anyway, and that the academy is really not about trying to advance our knowledge but only about professors trying to advance their careers and getting on top in the chase for power and prestige. In the long run, perhaps the most damaging effect of the Stapel affair is that his behaviour confirms and strenghtens popular (and populist) suspicions that this is what science and scholarship is really all about: not knowledge but power. Have we forgotten that it was supposed to be the other way around?

Enochiana

I had barely begun working at the University of Amsterdam in 1999 when I received a recently-completed doctoral thesis by a student in linguistics, Liesbeth van Dijk, who had made a systematic syntactic and morphological analysis of the Enochian language. Her supervisor quite rightly assumed that I might be interested and sent me a copy. The Enochian language, or lingua adamica, originated (or, if one prefers, was revealed) during the late 16th and early 17th centuries through the mediumship of Edward Kelley (1555-1597), at the behest of the Elizabethan magus John Dee (1527-1608/9), and has long been an object of fascination for occultists, not to mention scholars. Van Dijk's technical linguistic analysis is hard or impossible to follow for ordinary mortals, as could be expected, but her conclusions are clear: Enochian appears to have all the characteristics of a natural language, and its syntax is quite consistent and reminiscent of early modern English, but its morphology is far from consistent or systematic. As pointed out to me by her supervisor, the analysis allowed van Dijk to actually correct Dee's original English translation in several respects!

The Enochian phenomenon might well have slipped into oblivion, had large parts of Dee's diaries not been published, in 1659, by Meric Casaubon (whose father Isaac had famously exploded the myth of the great antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum in 1614). The irony is that Casaubon junior intended to warn the public about the evil arts of necromancy, but unwittingly ended up providing later generations with all the materials they needed to revive it and take it into new directions. The reception history of Dee's/Kelley's Enochian revelations, from Elizabethan to Victorian England and from there up to the present, has now been traced by Egil Asprem in his Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic & Modern Occulture. It is a delightful read. Demonstrating an expert knowledge of the complex Enochian system and a sharp sense of historical criticism, not to mention a healthy dose of common sense, Asprem deconstructs the idea (promoted by some esoterically-inflected scholars) of a secret transmission of Enochiana by magicians with access to Dee's unpublished manuscripts, and continues by tracing the lines of transmission through Casaubon and William Godwin to 19th-century crystallomancy and practical occultism. Via the famous Cipher manuscript at the origin of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Enochian materials came to be incorporated into the rituals of that order, and from there they traveled further to Aleister Crowley, various satanist currents (Anton LaVey's Church of Satan, Michael Aquino's Temple of Set), and the wider networks of contemporary occultism, online and offline.
A particularly interesting aspect of the story concerns what Asprem calls the "authenticity problem". Quite some esotericists have been taking the trouble of going back to the original manuscript sources to study the Enochian revelation at first hand, only to discover considerable discrepancies and contradictions with what the standard occultist literature had been telling them about it. The result looks like a replay of the history of Christianity. Quite like the Protestant Reformers of the 16th century, "purists" insist on the original sources of Dee and Kelley as the only legitimate foundation for Enochian occultism, thereby criticizing what Asprem calls the "perennialist" schools who, quite like the Catholics, insist on the legitimacy of their tradition as it has been handed down, regardless of whether the original sources support it. And furthermore, quite like spiritualist dissenters and other heretics caught between traditionalism and scriptural fundamentalism, there have also been occultists claiming to be the recipient of new Enochian revelations, presumably from the same or similar sources as Dee and Kelley. Thus the Appendix of Asprem's book contains the full text of Dor OS zol ma thil ("The 12 Black Hands and the Falling Seats"), said to be received through spiritual dictation by the Norwegian occultist Runar Karlsen, who considers it to be a work of "both global and galactic implications". Well, maybe so. But if we are to believe that angels are at work here, why are they doing such a poor job at making themselves understood? Karlsen's revelation consists entirely of sentences such as "The torment-snake that is neither good nor bad, sleep comes from. The regrets within 456 becomes, and is the 2nd finding ways" or "In hardening like the earths mercy-like chamber and letting the mute cry invoke the 2828 (NI NI) for the pouring of regret, the feelings of destruction are the fighters named my defaced sons". My only regret about Asprem's book is that while he reprints the text, he makes no attempt to explain what such apparent gibberish is supposed to mean, at least according to Karlsen or other occultists who take it seriously. Perhaps the translation is faulty?? It could be great fun to invite Liesbeth van Dijk to re-visit the Enochian phenomenon and apply a linguistic analysis to Karlsen's text as well. For instance, is the syntax of Dor OS zol ma thil (provided there is any!) still based on early modern English? Or - I'm just guessing - will it turn out to be an Enochian dialect closer to modern Norwegian?

Emotional Obscurity

In a footnote somewhere, I came across a letter of Immanuel Kant (6 april 1774) to J.G. Hamann, "the Magus of the North". Kant asked Hamann for some explanations about a passage in Johann Gottfried Herder, Aelteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts (1774) where Herder talked about a "Hermes figure" and called Hermes "not a person but the first sketch of all human science". From what I know about Hermetic philosophy, this did not make any sense to me, so I got curious and decided to try and find out what it was all about. One thing leading to another, I ended up reading not only the entire text by Herder plus a small biography of the man for background and context, but also two books about Hamann: the well-known short monograph by Isaiah Berlin, The Magus of the North and a more recent study by John R. Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J.G. Hamann. Hamann and Herder are known as central figures of what Berlin calls the "Counter-Enlightenment", a movement of virulent reaction against Enlightenment philosophy. As I found out, a very good characterization of Hamann, by Wilhelm Lütgert, is perfectly applicable to his pupil Herder as well (I'll quote in the original German: just try to translate this sentence into English and you'll find out why...): '[er] vermag nicht und versucht auch nicht, die logischen Bindeglieder zwischen den einzelnen Gedanken hervorzuheben, denn er ist nie durch einen Schluß vom einen zum anderen Gedanken gekommen. Jeder ist eine Beobachtung für sich und stammt nicht aus einem Schluß, sondern aus einer Wahrnehmung. ... Formell treten daher seine Gedanken als Einfälle auf, blitzartig, ohne Zusammenhang untereinander". Even if Herder is perhaps not so extreme as Hamann in this regard, most striking about his Aelteste Urkunde is the exceedingly strange style of writing, full of emotional outbursts and exclamation marks, but refusing deliberately (and consistently) to build up a logical argument or follow some kind of didactic order of presentation: often the text reads like the written transcript of an improvised sermon - Herder did work as a minister during most of his life - that is meant to carry the audience along with a stream of mental images and exclamations rather than trying to convince it by means of a cogent line of argumentation. It is almost as if Herder is trying to hypnotize his readers through the sheer cumulative effect of an endless series of emotion-laden statements and repetitions, perhaps on the assumption that as long as those readers will just keep on reading, they will eventually give up the attempt at logical comprehension and will begin to "get it" by relinquishing control and submitting themselves to the flow of images and impressions.

So what is this text all about? A literal translation of Aelteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts might be "oldest document of the human race", but the German word has connotations that get lost in translation: what he means is some primal (Ur-) divine message or teaching (Kunde) that has been given to humanity at the dawn of history, and of which the biblical book of Genesis is the reflection. Herder spends much time refuting and ridiculing the countless attempts (definitely including those of the theosophers and rosicrucians) at reading some kind of sophisticated rational philosophy, doctrinal theology, natural science, or metaphysical speculation into the Genesis narrative. Instead, he insists, it is the simple but profound reflection of how the natural cycles of light and darkness, day and night, were experienced as expressions of divine power and agency by the people of the ancient orient. Herder's passionate plea for seeing Genesis as the expression of simple but profound religious feelings and sentiments grounded in the observation of natural processes (instead of the complicated but shallow theorizing of rationalists, who are blind to nature but in love with the speculative products of their own minds), may sound unremarkable to us today but was quite unusual in his own day and age and announces the sublime naturalism of the Romantics.
So far so good. Having made his point about the true nature of Genesis, Herder embarks on a search for the ultimate origins of this most ancient divine revelation. It definitely does not come from Moses but must be traced to more ancient oriental sources. And this leads us to the exceedingly strange chapter "Seven Holy Vowels", where he embarks on a particularly obscure chain of reasoning, full of excited exclamations, leading up to the conclusion that the essence of the ancient revelation can be reduced to a sevenfold symbolic figure that he links to "Hermes, Theut, Thot, Thaaut" (all names referring to the same mythical origin) and that somehow lies at the basis of all the ancient natural disciplines, the "seven sciences of Hermes".

From here on he continues with a long series of chapters on "hermetic" elements in ancient mythology and symbolism. All of it is extremely difficult to follow, not just because of Herder's unsystematic writing style but also because he is in constant discussion with a range of 18th-century authors who have been thoroughly forgotten today. Tracing his "hermetic" figure back ever further to its supposed origins, Herder moves from Egypt to Ethiopia, Greece, and Phoenicia, finally ending up with the "religion and wisdom" of the Sabaeians, the Chaldaeans, and the Zoroastrians. Finally, after almost four-hundred pages, it becomes clear (well, sort of...) that he wants to find a way of distinguishing between true and false gnosis as the origins of all true and false religion: "I believe we have reached the clearest source for everything. When it can be proven that there were religions in Asia that were older than Moses; that all of them were dreaming about the creation of the world; that all of them traced everything from there, even the miraculous; and that they were proud about this as about the most ancient religion, gnosis and wisdom of the world; that they saw - or despised, even cursed - Moses and the books of the Old Testament as younger bastard-children of their Primal Mother; when it can be demonstrated that this sect or sects were spread universally from India to Egypt and were in the highest esteem everywhere; and that everywhere, according to all the sources of the legend, their image was the bodily image of the gnostics, that their wisdom was the gnosis itself - see! then everything becomes clear! Gnosis ... is just the Greek name for what had long existed as Wisdom of the Chaldaeans". So what is Herder's point, really? Simply to say that the transcendent message of Christianity got mixed with the universal "religion of the world" from the very beginning, and that even Genesis has its origin from there. And he continues to make a similar point about the kabbalah in the Jewish context": its sources are "Chaldaean". But whereas many earlier and later authors (such as Jacob Brucker, to whom he refers quite a lot) argued that this very influence of pagan religion was the origin of all heresy, it seems that Herder does not quite want to make up his mind about whether it was a good or a bad thing: he seems to have too much admiration for the original, simple but universal message of "natural religion" to bring himself to see it as a source of evil. And as a result, it remains unclear how his book must be read, and what point he really wants to make. Probably it makes most sense to see the Aelteste Urkunde as an early attempt at comparative mythology and the history of ancient oriental religions, ending with an annoying cliffhanger: "Wait, reader, and have patience! ... the best is yet to come!" But it doesn't come. All we get is a table of contents at the end: no conclusion, and no explanation of why we have been taken through all those 450 pages of erudite, confused and excited prose. Herder keeps exclaiming that "now everything becomes clear", but forgets to explain what it is that needed to be clarified in the first place.

I must admit: my excursus into the discourse of the "counter-Enlightenment" leaves me with very ambiguous feelings so far. What is the point of high-handed rejections of Enlightenment rationalism and its "empty abstractions" if the alternative is just an emphasis on raw emotional expression and a stubborn refusal to be clear about what one wants to say? And it seems to be the same problem with Herder's master Hamann. Betz' study After Enlightenment turns out to be the project of philosopher with fundamentalist Christian convictions who seems to like Hamann mostly because he is so radical in rejecting rationalist thinking. He keeps repeating that Hamann's alternative is "faith", but never really explains what that means, or why we should care. Yes, sure, Hamann is a Christian who doesn't like the Enlightenment - but does he have anything to offer beyond that? I suppose he must have, but Betz doesn't tell us. He just keeps repeating "faith!", as if that explains everything. And to be honest, Isaiah Berlin is not much better. Although he insists on Hamann's importance as "the first out-and-out opponent of the French Enlighenment", he claims to be neither interested in nor competent to discuss Hamann's theology and religious metaphysics (p. xv); and in discussing his thinking nevertheless, Berlin himself is often as incomprehensible as his topic of discussion. I have a sneaking suspicion that half of the time he doesn't have a clue about what Hamann is saying either, but keeps writing anyway. Aargh....
So has all of this been "creative reading" or just a waste of time? I'm not sure. I certainly have a better sense of Hamann and (particularly Herder) than I had before, but I don't feel I "get" them at all. Should I persist until I do? Or should I conclude that in fact there isn't much to be gotten here in the first place?  I'm not one to give up when the going gets difficult, but is there anything at the end of this particular road at all? Honestly, I have no idea... To read or not to read, that's the question.