wouter j.

hanegraaff

From Imagination to Reality:

An Introduction to Esotericism
and the Occult

* *
*

Let us begin by looking at three puzzling facts. They will be illustrated

here with loose reference to the three traditional “occult sciences” (magic,
astrology, alchemy), but other examples could easily have been chosen.
In different ways, all three of these facts are concerned with the relation
between imagination and reality, or illusion and truth.
Fact No. 1: While scientists are concerned with studying reality, artists
are widely perceived as specialists of the imagination. However, if we
focus on modernist artists in particular, we find that quite a number of
them would disagree profoundly with such an assessment: they are not
satisfied with being reduced to mere specialists in the arts of fantasy, fic-
tion or illusion, but see themselves as bold explorers on a quest for ulti-
mate reality and deeper truths.1 Their mission is not just one of creating
luxury commodities or sophisticated forms of entertainment which allow
their audiences to escape temporarily from the hard realities of everyday
life into imaginary worlds of wonder and beauty. On the contrary, they
see their artistic skills as serious instruments of perception: techniques that
allow artists to discover, or at least intuit, subtle dimensions of reality
that are largely concealed from us because of our exclusive focus on ra-
tionality and the senses. Sometimes these elusive dimensions of reality

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are described as “spiritual”, sometimes as “magical”, or even “occult” (lit.

“hidden”). In all cases, we are dealing with instances of implicit or ex-
plicit resistance to what Max Weber has famously referred to as “disen-
chantment”: the conviction that modern science leaves no room for any
belief in “mysterious and incalculable forces” (geheimnisvolle unberechen-
baren Mächte).2 If such was indeed the case, then art would have to give
up any ambition of addressing reality or revealing truth; it could no
longer claim to teach the public anything about the world in which we
are living. At most, its function would be reduced to providing some
temporary relief from reality. Hilma af Klint is one among many modern
artists who rejected such a line of reasoning and insisted that art is a me-
dium for accessing reality and revealing hidden knowledge to the world.
To give one more example, this is how another great female modernist,
Leonora Carrington, makes fun of the idea that artists are creators, while
suggesting that they are actually in the business of revelation:

Interviewer: What does the word “creativity” mean for you?

Carrington: I have never fully understood what it means to be creative.
It often seems to me that it would mean revealing something. Revealing
in the sense that one would be able to see or hear something: hearing in
the case of words, seeing in the case of images. But to be actually crea-
tive? I know that that word is often used. For instance, if one buys these
deep-frozen vegetables then one also gets a small plastic package – I don’t
know what it contains, but it’s called creative sauce. So you squeeze it
out, you add a bit of mayonnaise, and then you have created something.
Does that catch the meaning of your question?3

Fact No. 2: The history of “the occult” is widely seen as a history of super-
stition and error – a history of nonsense – because so many of its beliefs
and worldviews run counter to the discoveries of modern science. How-
ever, there is no doubt that much of what we tend to dismiss as pure
imagination – in the negative sense of fantasy or illusions without any
basis in how the world really works – was a bedrock reality to anyone
living before the age of Enlightenment. Many of these “errors and super-
stitions” were obvious truths not just to the common people, but to every-
body, including the most intelligent philosophers or scientists and the

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most highly educated elites, and there were perfectly good reasons for
believing in them. From a historian’s point of view, dismissing these
beliefs as benighted nonsense or irrational fancy is therefore not just ar-
rogant in the extreme (how many of us can claim to match the intelligence
of a Nicholas of Cusa, a Guillaume Postel or a Giordano Bruno, not to
mention Isaac Newton in his alchemical explorations?), but a sure recipe
for misunderstanding and misinterpreting not only those who held such
beliefs, but their writings, and ultimately their world. In his impressive
novel The Solitudes (1987), the American writer John Crowley has illus-
trated this point through his protagonist, a historian named Pierce Mof-
fett, who tries to explain Dante’s work to undergraduate students. Having
drawn a map of Dante’s world on the blackboard (with the devil in the
centre of our world, surrounded by the seven levels of hell underneath
the earth’s crust, the seven-storey mountain of purgatory on the earth’s
surface, the sun and the other planets circling our globe, the constellations
of the “fixed stars” on the inside of the giant globe that is our cosmos,
and the angelic hierarchies and God himself residing beyond that globe),
Moffett would finally get to his punchline:

Then he would step back, contemplating this picture, and he would ask,
“Now what’s the first thing we notice about this picture of the universe
here, which is the picture Dante presents us with in his poem?”
Silence, usually.
“Oh, come on,” Pierce would say. “The very first most evident thing
about this picture.”
A timid guess, usually from a girl: “It’s very religiously inspired…”
“No,” Pierce would say, grinning, “no, the very first thing we notice.”
And grabbing up his copy of Dante, still grinning, flourishing it at them:
“It’s not true! It’s not true. There isn’t any hell in the middle of the earth
with the Devil stuck in it. False. Not so. There is not a seven-storey
mountain in the empty southern sea, or an empty southern sea either.”
He regarded his picture again, pointing out its features. His students had
begun to dare to chuckle. “The earth, ladies and gentlemen, is not in the
center of the universe, or even of the solar system. Sun, planets, stars
going around it: not the case. About God outside it all I give no opinion,
but he’s difficult to believe in in exactly this form. I would think.”

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However, no matter how correct all of this might be, Moffett eventually
comes to doubt the validity of the very point he is making. Even granted
that the illusory nature of Dante’s world is indeed the very first thing we
notice (but why is it that his students don’t?), it would certainly be the
very last thing that could possibly be noticed by Dante or anyone else, at
least before Copernicus in the 16th century. In other words, this truth is
completely irrelevant to understanding their world, their ideas or their
life: for all intents and purposes, they were in fact living their lives in a
closed cosmos where the sun was circling around the earth in the centre
and God resided high up above the fixed stars. The nature of this world
defined their very possibilities of thinking and acting. In this world, every-
thing that happened was subject to the influences of the heavenly bodies,
invisible beings were present everywhere, and after death human beings
could hope to escape from this demon-infested globe by travelling up-
wards through the heavenly spheres all the way to the angelic and divine
realities beyond the cosmic sphere. Such a world may be wholly imaginary
to us, but it was the obvious truth for them, and they had no good reasons
to doubt it. If we do not grasp this basic fact, we cannot even begin to
understand such presumably “occult” topics as astrology and its enor-
mous impact in the late medieval and early modern world.
Fact No. 3: If what we see as false or imaginary was undoubtedly true
for them, it so happens, moreover, that many of our own ideas about
“them” turn out to be wholly incorrect. And this statement applies not
just to pre-modern Western culture and its many concepts that nowadays
strike us as weird, esoteric or occult: it applies to esoteric and occult be-
liefs even up to the present day. In other words, our common perceptions
of “esotericism or the occult” are largely imaginary and false; they are
seldom based upon reliable information about the field, its history or its
beliefs and practices, but more commonly reflect a worrying degree of
ignorance among academics and the wider public. If Fact No. 2 may still
inspire feelings of pride and satisfaction about scientific progress and
rational Enlightenment (“They may have sincerely believed all that stuff,
but they were in fact mistaken, and we know better”), Fact No. 3 should
be a cause of profound humility on the part of modern intellectuals
and academics. For instance, it is still quite common to hear established

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scientists describe alchemy as a superstitious and wholly irrational pseudo-

science, or suggest that Isaac Newton’s well-documented alchemical re-
searches must be attributed to some lapse of judgement or even temporary
insanity. Such assessments are grounded in blissful ignorance of current
standard knowledge in the history of science; the fact is that Newton had
perfectly sound scientific reasons for his explorations, because what we
now see as alchemy (often described at the time as “chemistry” or “chym-
istry”, while what we now call chemistry was sometimes called “alchemy”)
was a quite normal part of natural philosophy and scientific research, up
to the end of the 17th century. In short, the realities of alchemy as a histor-
ical phenomenon differ dramatically from the picture of alchemy that still
dominates the popular imagination. And the same is true for almost all
the ideas, traditions and personalities that are currently being studied
under the broad label of “Western esotericism”. Thanks to their post-
Enlightenment status as “rejected knowledge” they have been neglected
by the academy until quite recently, resulting in what I do not hesitate to
call the largest field of unexplored territory in the entire field of the hu-
manities. One may still come across academics who profess to be proud
of not knowing anything about such “occult” topics and of having no
interest whatsoever in learning about them. It is only in the last couple
of decades that such attitudes of deliberate obscurantism with respect to
large parts of our common cultural heritage have finally begun to give
way to serious critical scholarship.
In sum, then, we might speak of at least three senses in which one-
sided or false perceptions must be balanced or corrected by more nuanced
and correct descriptions:

Artists as creators of imaginary worlds Artists as conveyors of knowledge/truth

The occult as pre-modern nonsense The occult as pre-modern truth
Ignorant nonsense about the occult Reliable knowledge about the occult

If we closely consider these three points and think them through, we are
bound to conclude that the study of Western esotericism and the occult
has potentially explosive implications for our common ways of thinking.
In the words of John Crowley, “there is more than one history of the

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world,” and a history that takes these points seriously will look very dif-
ferent from what we encounter in the standard textbooks.
If we begin the story of Western esotericism in antiquity, Plato may be
a convenient starting point. Most of us have learned to see him as a found-
ing father of philosophy, representing the phenomenon of Greek ration-
alism on which our very culture is based. Particularly important in that
context is the critical method known as “Socratic dialogue”. The problem
with this picture of Plato is that it is incomplete. For instance, if we con-
sider one of his most famous dialogues, the Phaedrus, we find that the
central parts about the nature of love (eros) and the soul’s quest for perfect
beauty have very little to do with philosophical reasoning in our sense of
the word. Socrates hardly engages in a critical dialogue here, but delivers
a speech ex cathedra while in a state of divine inspiration (mania or “divine
madness”), and he makes his points by using mythical imagery instead of
rational discourse. In short, this is not a philosophical dialogue according
to our modern rationalist canon, but a profoundly religious discourse
about the attainment of perfect knowledge, described as a direct “mysti-
cal” perception of ineffable realities that transcend the domain of verbal
expression and conceptual thought. This dimension of Plato’s work has
been largely suppressed in standard accounts of philosophy since the 18th
century, but is crucial to the emergence of what we now call Western
esotericism.
In late antiquity, Platonism was widely seen as a religious worldview
focused on the attainment of a superior knowledge (often referred to as
gnosis in modern research) through which man could be liberated from
his entanglement in the world of matter and the senses. Similar perspec-
tives can be found in the currents known as Gnosticism and Hermeticism;
but again, traditional pictures of those phenomena are often rather mis-
leading. Gnosticism has long been perceived as a dualistic counter-religion
opposed to the Christian church, and this picture, based upon patristic
polemics against “the gnosis falsely so called”, has dominated scholarly
research through most of the 20th century. However, the sources provide
little support for the idea of a monolithic “gnostic heresy” pitted against
a similarly monolithic “Christian orthodoxy”; rather, in the centuries
before Constantine the Great, Christianity itself was an extremely hetero-

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geneous phenomenon ranging from more or less “gnosticising” tendencies

to perspectives that were closer to what we would see as “orthodox” today.
As for Hermeticism (the name refers to its mythical author, seen as an
ancient semi-divine sage and known as Hermes Trismegistus, or Thrice-
Great Hermes), classicists with a focus on Greek philosophy have long
seen it as representing the phenomenon of a “decline of reason” and an
embarrassing infatuation with occult superstitions in the Greco-Roman
world. In fact, however, the hermetic texts are using philosophical termi-
nology to describe a profoundly religious form of ascent from material
and bodily realities to the spiritual realms of divine light. In all these
cases, our perception of the source materials and their contents has long
been distorted by the ideological biases of modern philosophical rational-
ism and Christian theology.
The situation does not look much better when we come to the so-called
“occult sciences” of astrology, alchemy and natural magic. When academ-
ics and intellectuals think of astrology today, they still tend to associate
it with such things as popular newspaper horoscopes, silly superstitions
and gullibility in general: how can a rational person think that his or her
future is written in the stars? (A classic statement of this attitude was
made by Theodor W. Adorno in 1952–53, reprinted in The Stars Down to
Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture, 1994.) But when we read
a deep specialist of ancient astrology such as David Pingree, we get a very
different picture, for he explains that it was in fact

the supreme attempt made in antiquity to create in a rigorous form a

causal model of the kosmos, one in which the eternally repeating rota-
tions of the celestial bodies, together with their varying but periodically
recurring interrelationships, produce all changes in the sublunar world
of the four elements that, whether primary, secondary, or tertiary effects,
constitute the generation and decay of material bodies and the modifica-
tions of the parts or functions of the rational and irrational souls of men,
animals and plants. In other words, ancient Greek astrology in its strict-
est interpretation was the most comprehensive scientific theory of an-
tiquity, providing through the application of the mathematical models
appropriate to it predictions of all changes that take place in the world
of cause and effect …4

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Astrology had entered a period of decline by the end of the Roman Em-
pire, for theological rather than scientific reasons (looking up to the stars
for guidance was seen as pagan idolatry, and a universal system of causal
determinism clashed with Christianity’s emphasis on free will), but it was
recovered from Islamic sources during the late medieval period and be-
came a key dimension of early modern worldviews until the age of En-
lightenment, when it went into decline again. Its popular revival after
World War II is grounded largely in C. G. Jung’s novel psychological
interpretations, and hence one must be careful in projecting current under-
standings of astrology back onto earlier periods of history.
Alchemy is widely perceived as a pseudo-science dominated by dream-
ers and charlatans, and the attempt to find the philosophers’ stone and
turn base metals into gold has often been lampooned as an example par
excellence of naive superstition, irrationality, or sheer stupidity. In fact,
alchemists were engaged in perfectly serious laboratory experiments
backed up by standard approaches in natural philosophy. Aristotle’s the-
ory of four elements (earth, water, air, fire) implied that, in theory at least,
all natural substances could be “transmuted” into one another, and so the
alchemists were trying to test the theory. During the long period from
late antiquity up to the 18th century, the domains of science/natural phil-
osophy and religion were not yet seen as sharply separate, and hence it is
not surprising that the basic alchemical process of turning “lower” sub-
stances into a “superior” state (gold) could also be seen as relevant to
salvational processes through which the alchemist himself could be “re-
born” as a spiritual being. Such parallels were already drawn by one of
the earliest alchemists, Zosimos of Panopolis; and in later periods, to give
just one example, we sometimes see Christ depicted as the true philoso-
phers’ stone through whose action human beings are redeemed and puri-
fied from their sinful condition. Alchemical transmutation “from base
metals to gold” just happened to be a natural metaphor for describing
processes of spiritual transmutation, and such religious interpretations
flourished particularly during the 16th and 17th centuries; but this does not
mean – as often claimed by Jungians after World War II – that spiritual
rather than material transmutation was the true goal of alchemy as a
historical phenomenon. On the contrary, laboratory alchemy was an

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important part of science/natural philosophy even at the height of the

so-called scientific revolution, something shown with particular clarity
by the famous cases of Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle.
Magic, finally, is a particularly complicated topic. In the wake of the
Enlightenment it has come to be seen as a universal category pitted
against “religion” and “science”; but from a historical point of view, this
famous magic–religion–science triad (pioneered by Edward Burnett Tylor
and James Frazer since the end of the 19th century) is a distorting mirror
that leads to gross simplifications. “Magic” can have very different mean-
ings in different historical contexts. One dominant meaning is derived
directly from Jewish and Christian polemics against pagan idolatry, in the
wake of the First and Second Commandments. According to this under-
standing, it stands for contact with evil demons, who are none other than
the old pagan deities who are still trying to deceive human beings, for
example by posing as angels of light and promising them power in return
for obedience and worship. The great wave of witchcraft persecutions in
early modern Europe was grounded in such an understanding of “de-
monic magic”. Its theoretical counterpart was the concept of magia natu-
ralis (natural magic), which emerged during the later Middle Ages in an
attempt to demonstrate that many wondrous and miraculous phenomena
attributed to demons by the common people could in fact be explained
in purely natural terms. In other words, the concept of natural magic was
an attempt to withdraw the study of nature from theological control by
arguing that it had nothing to do with demonic intervention. One im-
portant part of magia naturalis was the study of so-called “occult qualities”
(qualitates occultae). This term stood for mysterious forces in nature such
as magnetism or the influence of the moon on the tides, which could not
be accounted for in terms of Aristotelian science (hence the term “occult”,
which literally means “hidden”). Eventually the notion came to include
“invisible forces” of all kinds, such as the influences radiating from the
stars, the powers attributed to the human imagination or the evil eye. In
principle, magia naturalis attempted to explain such phenomena in natural
scientific terms, but in these attempts scholars were giving credence to the
reality of “occult forces” that were seen by others as supernatural and most
likely demonic. From the latter perspective, the sciences of the Hellenistic

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world were a Trojan horse through which the demonic influence of pagan-
ism was once again allowed entrance into Christian culture. Hence,
magic has always remained a deeply ambiguous category, hovering be-
tween demonism and natural science.
If Platonic, Gnostic, and Hermetic forms of religion were concerned
with spiritual salvation, the so-called “occult sciences” of astrology, al-
chemy and natural magic were concerned rather with studying the natu-
ral world. However, even from the very short sketch given on the previous
pages, it should be clear that the domains of “nature” and “spirit” could
not be kept strictly separate: in order to navigate one’s way towards the
spiritual world, one needed to be familiar with the laws and dynamics of
nature (hence, for example, the Hermetic writings insist that one cannot
attain gnosis unless one has mastered natural philosophy first) and, con-
versely, the dynamics of natural law must ultimately support a salva-
tional “upward” movement through which the fallen world of finite
creatures could find the way back to its divine origin. In spite of their
enormous variety, all forms of Western esotericism are indebted to this
principle of an intimate interrelatedness of nature and spirit.
By the end of the 15th century, most of the ancient source materials
pertaining to Platonic and Hermetic religiosity and the natural sciences/
philosophies of the Hellenistic world had been recovered and made avail-
able in Latin translation; and the invention of printing made it possible
to disseminate these materials on an unprecedented scale. The idea of a
prisca theologia (ancient theology) or philosophia perennis (perennial phil-
osophy) suggested that all the relevant traditions had originated in some
mysterious ancient Oriental source: perhaps the true science and wisdom
had first been revealed by God to Zoroaster (Zarathustra) in Persia, per-
haps to Hermes Trismegistus in Egypt, or perhaps to Moses among the
Hebrews. Based upon the latter assumption, which seemed to be sup-
ported by a range of patristic authorities, Christian humanists developed
a fascination with the newly-discovered Jewish traditions known as Kab-
balah. According to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and many later “Chris-
tian kabbalists”, this secret doctrine revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai in
fact contained the entirety of Christian doctrine.
As a result, what we see emerging from the end of the 15th century and

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into the 16th is a potent mixture of newly discovered ancient texts and
traditions (Platonic, Hermetic, kabbalistic, magical, astrological, alchem-
ical) that seemed to open up entirely new perspectives on the true nature
of religion and the world. Essentially, this phenomenon derived from the
willingness of Christian intellectuals to learn from ancient “pagan” au-
thors as well as from the traditions of the Jews. We should be careful not
to interpret this attitude of openness too quickly as “religious tolerance”,
let alone relativism or a hidden sympathy for pagan or Jewish thought,
for almost all the central authors believed firmly in the superiority of
Christian doctrine. They merely assumed that part of that doctrine, at
least, had already been made available to the gentiles and the Jews even
before the birth of Christ and now that this fact had been discovered, so
they argued, there was really no excuse left for Jews or pagans to persist
in their stubborn refusal to accept the truth of the gospel!
The history of Western esotericism since the Renaissance is one of
continuous innovations and reinterpretations on the basis of a well-
established corpus of “traditional knowledge”. A particularly important
line of creative renewal emerged from the medical/alchemical writings
of Paracelsus (1493/94–1541) and his followers, as well as from the lineage
of Lutheran theosophy associated with Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), which
continued into the early 19th century. A new element which gained prom-
inence from the early 17th century on was the concept of “secret societies”
by means of which the ancient wisdom was believed to be transmitted
from generation to generation: the idea popped up in the first of the
so-called “Rosicrucian Manifestos”, known as the Fama Fraternitatis,
and it became a manifest reality in the phenomenon of Freemasonry.
Early Masonic organisations may have existed already around 1600, and
although English Freemasonry would insist on a rationalist humanitarian
perspective from the early 18th century, this seems to have been a delib-
erate departure from the alchemical and related interests that were still
part of the Craft during the 17th century. Be that as it may, esoteric world-
views grounded in ancient and Renaissance forms of speculation became
essential to the high-degree Freemasonry that flourished in Germany and
especially in France during the latter parts of the 18th century. The Templar
legend – according to which the ancient wisdom has been transmitted

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from ancient Pythagorean mysteries through the Essenes to the Knights

Templar and from there to Freemasonry – is part of this same constella-
tion of beliefs, and when the Abbé Barruel accused such secret societies
of having caused the French Revolution he fired the opening shot in a
long series of conspiracy theories that have flourished to the present day.
Again, we see here how fundamental the dialectics of imagination and
reality are to the history of Western esotericism: both the idea of a Rosi-
crucian Brotherhood and that of a secret continuation of the Templar
organisation (after its official dissolution in 1307) began as fictional inven-
tions that eventually turned into historical realities, as enthusiasts began
creating their own Rosicrucian or Templar organisations while claiming
that these descended from ancient secret lineages. This process of “invent-
ing sacred traditions” – as James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer have termed
it – has in fact been central to much of Western esotericism since the 17th
and certainly since the 18th century. As the increasing separation of church
and state in democratic societies made it impossible for mainstream
Christianity to prohibit and suppress minority religions, countless new
esoteric organisations claiming a long historical pedigree have come into
existence. In the contemporary context, we even see the phenomenon of
new esoteric or occult groups that explicitly emphasise their status as
“invented religions”.5
The 18th century was a watershed in the history of Western religion and
society, and hence of esotericism as well. Five major new developments
in the wake of the Enlightenment have thoroughly transformed the very
nature of esoteric beliefs and worldviews, resulting in an “occult milieu”
that looks very different from anything one could have encountered in
pre-modern times. First, while esoteric worldviews before the Enlighten-
ment were largely based on concepts of invisible correspondences and
chains of occult causality, models grounded in instrumental causality (that
is to say, in demonstrable chains of cause-and-effect more congenial to
modern science) became increasingly influential from the 19th century.
Secondly, as Western intellectuals and the broader public became more
familiar with the religions of the Far East, especially Hinduism and
Buddhism, esoteric movements began to assimilate oriental concepts into
their own worldviews, and they began to think of the origins of occult

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wisdom as lying in mysterious countries such as India or Tibet rather than

in Egypt or other countries of the Middle East. Thirdly, the rise of
evolutionist thought during the 19th century (beginning with German
Idealism and Romanticism, and gathering steam due to the influence of
Darwinism) thoroughly transformed the ways in which esoteric currents
looked at the history of the world, and particularly of human conscious-
ness. Fourthly, the emergence of psychology had similarly transformative
effects – as esotericists assimilated new models of the mind into their own
worldviews, this led to a double process of psychologising esotericism and
esotericising psychology, culminating in the work of famous authors such
as C.G. Jung. And finally, the esoteric/occult milieu has been thoroughly
transformed through the emergence of a religious supermarket that allows
spiritual consumers to pick and choose from a wide supply of esoteric or
occult commodities and combine them to fit their personal preferences.
The increasing commercialisation of popular esotericism after World War
II is part of that process.
The decline of the “grand narratives” of Christianity and modernity
towards the end of the 20th century has caused a new degree of openness
towards what used to be minority options in the domain of religion or
spirituality. While traditional models of scientific rationality remain
dominant in many sectors of contemporary society, such as the universi-
ties and the mass media, esoteric or occult ideas and world-models are
increasingly prominent in popular culture. Esoteric beliefs and practices
that used to be taken very seriously by a range of historical movements
and personalities are now recycled as raw materials for the creation of
popular fiction (comics, movies, video games, and so on); but as the re-
sulting new esoteric or occult “imaginary” becomes more widespread and
thereby normalised, particularly among the younger generation, it be-
comes a potent dimension of how people perceive the world around them
and how they choose to live their lives. In such a context, the boundary
between reality and imagination becomes more and more blurry – or,
perhaps more correctly, it becomes more evident how blurry that bound-
ary has always been.

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 Notes and References

stephen kern
Hilma af Klint and Fin-de-Siècle Culture:
Abstraction, Technology, Androgyny, Nihilism

1. Pär Bergman, “Modernolatria” ” et “Simultan-

Simultan-
eità”: Recherches sur deux tendances dans l’avant-
garde littéraire en Italie et en France à la veille de la
première guerre mondiale (Uppsala, 1962), p. 23.
2. Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: A Nar-
rative of My Career Up-to-Date (London, 1950),
p.129.
3. Gertrude Stein, “A Transatlantic Interview
1946”, in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Bonnie
Kime Scott (Bloomington, 1990), p.504.
4. Pascal Rousseau, “Premonitory Abstraction
– Mediumism, Automatic Writing, and Antici-
pation in the Work of Hilma af Klint, in Hilma
af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction, eds. Iris Müller-
Westermann & Jo Widoff (Stockholm, 2013),
p.163. Rousseau notes that another guide is the
female Esther, but she plays a lesser role and only
on the lowly material plane.
5. Her journal entry of 7 November 1906 re-
corded this instruction from Almaliel: “You H.
[Hilma] . . . try to tune your mind into harmony
and pray: ‘O Thou, give me the picture of inner
clarity. Teach me to listen and receive in humil-
ity the glorious message that Thee in Thy dig-
nity deign to send the children of the earth.’ . . .
Amaliel draws a sketch, which H. then paints.
The goal is to represent a seed from which evolu-
tion develops.” Quoted in Åke Fant, “The Case
of the Artist Hilma af Klint”, in The Spiritual in
Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985, ed. Maurice
Tuchman (New York, 1986), pp.156–157.
6. Kazimir Malevich, “Suprematism” [1927],
in Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged Essays,
ed. Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1964), p.95. .

wouter j. hanegraaff
From Imagination to Reality:
An Introduction to Esotericism and the Occult
1. With explicit reference to Kandinsky’s clas- Maurice Tuchman (Los Angeles & The Hague,
sic essay Über das Geistige in der Kunst (1911), this 1986).
insight was placed back on the agenda by a now 2. Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf”, in
equally classic exhibition of the mid-1980s: see Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (1917/19)/Politik
The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Art 1890–1985, ed. als Beruf (1919): Studienausgabe, eds. Wolfgang J.

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 notes and references

Mommsen & Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Weber
Gesamtausgabe Vol. I/17 (Tübingen, 1994), p. 9.
3. N.N., A propos Leonora Carrington, mit einem
Essay von Tilman Spengler (Frankfurt a.M., 1995),
p. 37. I have translated the German translation
back into English; the original English is not
available.
4. David Pingree, “Hellenophilia versus the
History of Science”, Isis 83:4 (1992), pp. 554–563.
5. Carole M. Cusack, Invented Religions: Imag-
ination, Fiction and Faith (Surrey & Burlington,
2010); Adam Possamai, Handbook of Hyper-real
Religions (Leiden & Boston, 2012).

helmut zander
Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner
and the Zeitgeist of Historicism around 1900

1. On Rudolf Steiner: H. Zander, Rudolf Stei- 4. H. Zander, Anthroposophie in Deutschland,

ner. Die Biographie (Munich, 2011); Christoph
Lindenberg, Rudolf Steiner. Eine Chronik 1861–
1925 (Stuttgart, 1988). On Hilma af Klint: Ylva
Hillström, “Biography”, in Hilma af Klint: A
Pioneer of Abstraction, eds. Iris Müller-Wester-
mann & Jo Widoff (Stockholm, 2013), pp.278f.
2. On the history of theosophy and anthro-
posophy in Germany: H. Zander, Anthroposophie
in Deutschland. Theosophische Milieus und gesell-
schaftliche Praxis, 1884–1945, 2 Vols. (Göttingen,
2008). On the cultural and historical context:
Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment
(New York, 1994).
3. H. Zander, “Der Generalstabschef Helmuth
von Moltke d. J. und das theosophische Milieu
um Rudolf Steiner”, in Militärgeschichtliche
ärgeschichtliche
rgeschichtliche Zeit-
schrift 62/2003, pp.423–458, esp. pp.450–454.
Vol. 2, pp.1 135–1 140.
5. The debate over historicism has intensified
especially in German historiography in the 1990s.
See O.G. Oexle, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeichen
des Historismus. Studien zu Problemgeschichten der
Moderne (Göttingen, 1996), esp. pp.9–136; –136;
136; An-
nette Wittkau, Historismus. Zur Geschichte des Be-
griffs und des Problems (Göttingen, 1994); Historis-
mus in den Kulturwissenschaften. Geschichtskonzepte,
historische Einschätzungen, Grundlagenprobleme, ed.
O.G. Oexle & J. Rüsen (Köln et al., 1996); Ge-
schichtsdiskurs, Vol. 3: Die Epoche der Historisierung,
ed. W. Küttler et al. (Frankfurt a.M., 1997). On
historicism as a context for theosophy and anthro-
posophy: H. Zander: Anthroposophie in Deutsch-
land, esp. Vol. 1, ch. 7, pp.727–780.

raphael rosenberg
Was There a First Abstract Painter?
af Klint’s Amimetic Images and Kandinsky’s Abstract Art
1. The most comprehensive discussion is in tion (Munich, 2007). The present paper is based
my habilitation thesis: Jenseits der Mimesis (1600– on the first, as yet unpublished part of this
1900). Eine Archäologie
äologie
ologie des ungegenständlichen
ändlichen
ndlichen Bil- thesis.
des (Freiburg i.B., 2003). The second part of this 2. See Arthur W. Dow, Composition (Berkeley,
thesis (images related to discourses on the aes- Calif. et al. 1997).
thetic of effect) and the third (images made by 3. Robert Fludd, Veritatis proscenium (Franco-
chance) are published in Raphael Rosenberg, furti, 1621), pp.5, 11. See Robert Westman, “Na-
Turner – Hugo – Moreau: Entdeckung der Abstrak- ture, Art, and Psyche”, in Occult and Scientific

322