Esotericism and the Scientific Imagination

Dear Colleagues,

The editors have asked me to edit a special issue of Religions on the topic of “Esotericism and the Scientific Imagination.”  To give an idea of why the topic has been chosen I offer a short account of the relatively new academic field of Esotericism and a description of the kind of topics that will be considered for inclusion in the issue.

By 1998 the study of western esotericism had reached the point that scholars claimed it provided “the third component of western culture,” which, alongside Greek rationality and biblical faith, played a crucial role in shaping western intellectual and cultural history.[1] The study of esotericism has helped to undermine the kind of dichotomous thinking characteristic of much traditional scholarship dealing with religion and science, religion and magic, and the supposed antithesis between rational thought and irrational superstition. As a hybrid formulation, esoteric ideas, beliefs, and practices as well as esoteric groups, associations, and institutions have historically opened up the mental and social space necessary for the generation of new ideas about the cosmos, the individual, the body, the self, gender, sexuality, politics, and religion and religion’s place in all these varied dimensions of human life and activity. With this in mind, we are asking for proposals dealing with the kind of issues described below.

Scientific ideas have not just fostered secularity and religious decline, as Max Weber famously argued; they have also been used to help people believe in the existence of unseen, heavenly realms and recover imaginative spaces for the supernatural. In a similar way, religious beliefs are not inevitably antagonistic to science, but have shaped scientific theories and practices as we can see in the case of astrology, alchemy, theosophy, spiritualism, and the various strands of esoteric thought that have influenced natural philosophers and theologians across the ages and globe. This did not end with the birth of modern science. Einstein, along with quantum mechanics, showed, for example, that nature behaves in confounding ways: clocks tick more slowly the faster they travel; events that are simultaneous to one observer are not to another; gravity causes time to slow down; space can be bent and distorted by large objects; energy and mass are interchangeable; and, perhaps most bewilderingly of all, quantum mechanics cannot be reconciled with General Relativity, which implies there were two sets of laws and mathematical equations, one for large and another for subatomic particles. Modern physics consequently has brought back those “mysterious incalculable forces” Weber thought banished forever. This has led to an explosion of popular metaphysical speculations dealing with free will, the mind/body problem, the mystery of consciousness, and the possibility of multiple coexisting universes in the work of many artists, writers, philosophers, and speculative scientists, not to mention sci-fi authors and devotees of New Age religions.

We invite all those interested in the topic of “Esotericism and the Scientific Imagination” to submit papers dealing with the way esoteric ideas, theories, and practices have shaped the scientific imagination from the ancient to the modern world in both the East and West. Abstracts should be limited to 300 words.

[1] Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Gnosis and Hermeticism. From Antiquity to Modern Times (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), vii, x. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Empirical Method in the Study of Esotericism,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 7 (1995).

Prof. Allison P. Coudert
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Esotericism
• Hermeticism
• Gnosticism
• Magic