Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples by Erica Lagalisse (review)

Erica Lagalisse's compact but brilliant The Occult Features of Anarchism involves a series of interlinked arguments about an unacknowledged inheritance of European occult and esoteric thought within modern and contemporary leftist theory. Published by the politically radical PM Press, Occult Features makes its primary (and at times quite critical) address to leftists and anarchists of the West or Global North, but it will be accessible and compelling to a broad readership. This includes scholars of medieval and Renaissance esotericism, who will appreciate the careful intellectual genealogy indicated by the title.

Lagalisse, an anthropologist, has been engaged in years of participant observation within anarchist communities, connected with both Zapatista solidarity and the Occupy movement. She offers two anecdotes that serve to illustrate her motivation in producing this volume. The first recounts an instance of an activist giving away his sympathy for an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, while the second describes a panel series in which leftists condescended to an indigenous activist, due to the synthesis of her politics with "irrational" spirituality (namely, Catholicism). These two anecdotes correspond to the two major impulses of the book. Lagalisse's objectives are: 1) to illustrate the occult and esoteric influence on early anarchist and communist thought, and 2) to better understand the (still rising) phenomenon of all manner of conspiracy theories in a post-Internet media and political landscape. (The possibly opaque connection between these two objectives eventually becomes clear).

While working somewhat outside of her disciplinary purview as a social scientist, Lagalisse deftly accomplishes her historical-discursive task through precise genealogical work. She follows the emergence of the Corpus Hermeticum and its influence on emergent European secret societies, tracing a lineage that includes both scholastic alchemy and the order of the Freemasons, as well as the early utopian social theory of the Enlightenment, and eventually European idealists like Hegel. Her analysis, though Eurocentric by necessity, remains consistently attuned to gender critique and anticolonial politics; in this sense, its clearest forebear is the feminist-materialist genealogy of Silva Federici, whom she cites, and whose Caliban and the Witch argues for the economic function of the medieval witch trials along with the mutually constituting gendered and ecological violences of land enclosure. (The accuracy of Federici's historiography, it should be noted, is a matter of dispute.)¹

All genealogies are, in some sense, narratives, and Lagalisse's story begins with the fifteenth-century "discovery" of the Hermetica. Citing canonical historians such as Frances Yates, she traces the influence of Hermetic concepts of correspondence and microcosm on natural magic and other Renaissance metaphysics (22–23). A rather dizzying network of intellectual correspondences (pun intended) brings together figures like Giordano Bruno, Robert Fludd, Rene Descartes, and even Leibniz; "I offer" (she explains) "these surveys simply to demonstrate that the 'disenchantment' we often hear about in relation to the European Enlightenment is but a tale" (29). Her argument thus resembles an abbreviated, or crystallized, form of the one made by Jaron A. Josephson-Storm in his ambitious The Myth of Disenchantment, although Lagalisse's emphasis on the masculinist quality of the medieval and Renaissance occult, and her understanding of the witch trials as its misogynistic counterpoint, make for an at times more politically trenchant analysis.²

A first chapter on the Hermetic underpinnings of the Enlightenment is followed by two chapters on the similarly occult foundations of the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and other European "revolutionary brotherhoods" (although Lagalisse is firmly skeptical of the "revolution" they had in mind). The following three chapters demonstrate the subsequent influence of these brotherhoods upon the International Workingman's Association (I.W.A.) and upon Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, thus making Lagalisse's case: that major anarchist thinkers like Proudhon and Bakunin, along...