
Contents
Foreword: Bringing Light to the Underground
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Published:September 2012
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Studying Western esotericism is much like applying psychotherapy to the history of thought. Its first requirement is not to be satisfied with surface appearances and not to take for granted what the official narratives tell us, but to be curious about what they prefer not to talk about: the presence of subterranean archives, or memory vaults, where we store away everything we do not want to accept because it differs too much from our ideal image of ourselves and our cherished values. The German language has found a beautiful expression for this, in speaking of the occult as the Untergrund des Abendlandes.1Close These archives of suppressed memories do not exist just metaphorically but quite literally as well. Scholars of Western esotericism spend much of their time—or so one hopes!—reading and analyzing the primary sources of rejected knowledge: volumes that have been gathering dust on library shelves because nobody reads them anymore, books and manuscripts of authors who never made it into the canon of acceptable and respectable academic literature, or dropped out of it at some point in time, and so on. Such research may resemble a hunt for forgotten treasure, and it is true that, buried underneath lots of stuff that has not withstood the test of time, genuine gems wait to be found; with luck, one will come across profound thinkers and texts of high quality that should never have been forgotten and deserve to be recovered for their intrinsic merits alone. This hope for exciting discoveries is familiar to all working historians, but in the case of Western esotericism, more is at stake. There is a structural logic to the Untergrund des Abendlandes: far from being just a random collection of things that have happened to fall by the wayside, it is a reservoir that represents the shadow side of our own official identity, and we need to learn more about it if we wish to understand ourselves.
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