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Peter Burke, the social history of knowledge, and “agnotology”– notes on a...
It’s been a busy spring so far, and unfortunately not much time for keeping this blog running. In an attempt to get started again I will give a brief report on Professor Peter Burke’s visit to...
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Counterjihadist Templar Terrorism? Some reflections on the terrorist from...
This is not a political blog, but sometimes something happens that gives an urgent feeling to express oneself. The horrible events in Oslo and at Utøya Friday 22 July were of this sort. I happened to...
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Fiction, Templars, and Terrorism
Heresy Corner has a good post on the Templar theme in Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto. It particularly discusses the author’s ambiguous claim that the whole thing is to be read as “fictional”...
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Terror in the Mind of Who? A response to Mark Juergensmeyer on Breivik’s...
The question of whether or not, or in what sense, the 22/7 Oslo terrorist Anders Behring Breivik is a “Christian”, and to what extent his Christianity had anything to do with his motivations to kill,...
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Bad science is normal (pseudoscience is neither)
I have an unhealthy interest in what some like to call the “pseudosciences”. Having spent quite a bit of time trying to understand this category from historical, sociological, and philosophical...
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European Identity Politics and the Memory of Paganism – a conference panel in...
Last December I was approached by Markha Valenta, a colleague in the history department of the UvA and an occasional contributor to the OpenDemocracy project, asking if I wanted to organize a panel for...
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Update: Paganism and European Identity Politics at “Regimes of Religious...
The conference on “Regimes of Religious Pluralism” is now only a week away. The final programme has just been released, and you can check it in pdf here: Regimes of Religious Pluralism Conference...
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Circus Breivik
It is time for the circus of the century, when the trial against Anders Behring Breivik starts in Oslo this week. His defence is scheduled to begin on Tuesday (April 17), and even though the court has...
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Nazi-occultism on the ContERN website
Next up in the cyberproceedings from the Contemporary Esotericism conference is a paper by Eva Kingsepp on Nazi/SS occultism, the changing perceptions of it in “official memory culture”, and its...
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Faking it
Bad science is normal. Outright fabrication and fraud is luckily less normal, but much more wide-spread than it ought to be. Results may be fabricated entirely to support desired conclusions;...
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The (all too) secret history of Vril
It is astonishing how much of modern occultism is dependent on works of fiction. The machinations of secret societies, the malicious rituals of satanic cults, and the magicians’ adventures on the...
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Open-access publishing and Western esotericism: Greeting Correspondences Vol....
The first issue of a new peer-reviewed journal for the study of Western esotericism has just been released. There aren’t too many of those around to begin with, so Correspondences is (as announced...
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The Magus of Silicon Valley – multiple afterlives of a conference paper
Transhumanism and religion proves a popular topic. I started exploring some aspects of the transhumanist movement from the perspective of a scholar of religion and esotericism earlier this year, in...
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On choosing between alternative futures (and the solution to a luxury dilemma)
2013 has been a very busy year on my end, characterised by several relocations, the opening and closing of projects and the managing of very different possible futures. By the end of the year I will...
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Correspondences third issue and statement on publishing strategy
Those who follow esotericism scholarship online will already know that Correspondences Vol. 2.2 has now been published, and is available for download at the journal’s website. It’s a healthy third...
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The Socialist Roots of Occultism
We’ve grown accustomed to exciting titles that announce “the occult roots” of anything from Nazism to electronic music. While there’s certainly a lot of attention-grabbing hyperbole in such claims, it...
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