Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism (review)

The field of Western esoteric studies, Arthur Versluis declares in this brief survey, is still in its infancy. One of the central scholarly tasks is to define what constitutes esotericism, and to ascertain how various often seemingly disparate activities or movements might be meaningfully gathered under this rubric. Versluis's approach is, in his own description, historicist, tracing various esoteric traditions through time from antiquity to the twenty-first century. This is not, however, strictly speaking a historical study of esoteric movements. Relatively little effort is made to situate subjects in their particular periods and to relate them to the larger social and cultural context of those times. Instead, the main goal of the book is to describe the beliefs and, to a much lesser extent, the practices of various groups and individuals, and to clarify how they might be categorized as esoteric. Thus the overall approach is quite different from most recent studies of magic, which have eschewed generalized definitions and looked instead to see how magic was defined, either by its practitioners or, more often, by its opponents in particular periods. The scholar of esotericism must proceed differently, however, because until very recently "esoteric" was never a category used by practitioners to self-identify, nor was it ever a primary category through which authorities classified or condemned.

Given that "esoteric" is more or less an exclusively academic category, it is obviously incumbent on scholars to define what the category entails and explain why certain subjects fit within it. Versluis is clear and systematic on these points. He defines esotericism as pertaining broadly to inner or spiritual knowledge held by a limited group. He establishes a structure in which this knowledge can be either cosmological, concerning secrets about the nature of the universe, or metaphysical, pertaining to human being, knowledge, or identity, most often in relation to some sort of divine. This gnosis can be attained in two ways, either by a via positiva in which the practitioner utilizes systems of external rituals, symbols, and signs to obtain and understand secret knowledge, or a via negativa of internal contemplation based on the negation of external concepts and perceptions. The cosmological goal of esotericism Versluis associates with magic, insofar as practitioners of magic seek to attain secret knowledge of the universe and its operations, typically in order to be able to manipulate or control them in some way. The metaphysical goal he associates with mysticism. These categories also overlap; given that most esoteric traditions see the macrocosm and microcosm reflecting one another, there are areas in which cosmological "magical" practices can provide inner illumination and vice versa.

An immediate question raised by this system is whether all magical and all mystical practices are automatically esoteric, that is, premised on the attainment of some secret knowledge limited to a few. Versluis implies this is so. Certainly mysticism has never been a widespread or particularly mainstream aspect ofWestern religions, and many mystics have written of attaining a type of knowledge of the divine that would be unacceptable for the masses. Yet there are mystics who stress that whatever knowledge they attain via their mystical experiences conforms entirely to revealed truth, available and accessible to all believers. Notions of gnosis in magic apply very well to elite forms of learned magic, practitioners of which definitely see themselves as part of a closed tradition possessing knowledge that must be kept out of common circulation. Yet Versluis also includes in his discussions common magical practices, or "folk magic" as he typically terms it, whether in the Middle Ages or modern times. Such practices can, certainly, entail secret knowledge known only to a few, probably more so in the modern period, when many folkways are preserved only by small segments within various communities. But in the premodern period, when belief in and recourse to magic was much more widespread, was someone who used a common charm known to their entire village to ward off the evil eye really engaging in an...