This is an open peer commentary to the target article, "(Re)defining Esotericism", by Steven Engler and Mark Q. Gardiner, published in Aries 24.2 (2024).

Four years ago, we announced the intention to introduce a new article format in Aries: The target article with open peer commentaries.1 The format has much to offer our field. Target articles are an excellent way to highlight topical issues, while open commentaries and author responses can facilitate dynamic discussions that include a broader range of voices. As the study of esotericism is expanding in terms of disciplinary approaches, geographic and cultural locations, subject matter, and sheer demographics, it is more crucial than ever that this journal provides ways for open, transparent, and inclusive scholarly debate.

This chapter considers a cross-historical selection of cases from the ritual magical traditions and discusses explanations of how such practices may produce subjectively convincing experiences of otherworldly beings on the one hand, and methodological questions of how we might best study them on the other. The chapter argues that our best model is found in the framework of predictive processing, through which magical ritual should be seen as an expectation management technology that manipulates material-environmental, sensory-motor, and ideational/conceptual processes in ways that set the practitioner up for certain kinds of perception-like experiences. The picture emerging is that magical ritual produces (hetero)phenomenologically similar experience narratives through a variety of different techniques, which include elements such as sensory deprivation, hallucinogenic substances, (auto)hypnosis, hypnagogic states, and visualization, but are always grounded in a material-semiotic dimension through which things, gestures, and sensations are imbued with meanings that point towards an otherworldly reality.

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has become an increasingly established part of the international religious studies landscape. In this chapter, we present and discuss the hitherto quite limited presence of CSR in the Swedish religious studies context.

To situate our discussion in a broader perspective, a brief chronology of CSR is warranted. The so-called cognitive revolution first began as a reaction against behaviourism in the 1950s, particularly in linguistics and psychology. The reaction was premised on the notion that the human mind is neither an impenetrable black box, about which nothing meaningful can be said, nor a passive blank slate, upon which culture is written. Instead, humans come equipped with specific capacities that shape how they sense, perceive, feel and ultimately think about the world and about themselves and other people. Moreover, these capacities, or modules, are the products of evolution by natural selection. Through the second half of the twentieth century, this view had repercussions in fields ranging from psychology and linguistics to philosophy and anthropology.

Magic and fortune-telling have been standard elements in stereotypes about Europe’s Romani minorities since the fifteenth century. These stereotypes produced two mutually contradictory images of the Roma: That they possess real occult powers, and that they are frauds. Both images were perpetuated by nineteenth-century ‘gypsylorist’ scholarship, which construed ‘the gypsies’ as Europe’s internal Orientals. This article demonstrates that the most influential gypsylorist author on magic, the folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903), sought to harmonize the two images through a new theory of magical efficacy – building on established work in folklore as well as his own life-long engagement with esotericism.

Leland’s alignment with occultism is a textbook example of the entanglements of esotericism and scholarship in the period. Seeing occultism as a constitutive context for gypsylorist speculation on ‘gypsy magic’ sheds new light on the history of Romani studies and helps explain the perpetuation of anti-gypsy stereotypes in alternative spirituality.

The idea that esotericism is a form of “rejected knowledge” is back in vogue. This idea was also central to the so-called sociology of the occult of the 1970s, a research program that esotericism scholars have largely dismissed. Through a reassessment of this literature I argue that much of the criticism leveled at it missed the mark, and that mining it for theoretical resources can help us refine the field’s own undertheorized rejected knowledge narrative. In particular, the sociology of the occult offers useful tools for theorizing the historicity, substance, social significance, and social organization of esotericism as rejected knowledge.

In this introduction to Religious Dimensions of Conspiracy Theories, the editors explain the rationale for the book and introduce a set of definitions and methodological principles for the study of conspiracy theories and religion. In order to better understand both the continuities and discontinuities between old and new forms of conspiracy theories, especially as they connect with ‘religion’, ‘magic’, and ‘the occult’, the introduction advocates a historical and comparative approach operating in dialogue with disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, media studies, and psychology. It also provides a short introduction to the book’s chapters, which include cases spanning from the 2nd century BCE to the present day and locations as diverse as Zambia, Japan, Italy, and Norway.

This is Richard Noakes’s long-awaited monograph on the relationship between the physical sciences and psychical research in Britain. Focusing largely on the 1870s to the 1930s, the work is the result of several stints of postdoctoral research in the history and philosophy of science conducted at the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds, Sheffield and Exeter. Those who have followed Noakes’s journal publications over the past twenty years will find themselves in familiar territory. Four of the book’s six chapters are partially based on previously published articles, completed with additional research and presented as part of a comprehensive overview.

Religious Dimensions of Conspiracy Theories contributes to the study of conspiracy culture by analysing the religious and esoteric dimensions of conspiracy theories.

The book examines both historical and contemporary examples to explore transnational and transhistorical continuities between religious doctrines, eschatologies, and conspiracy theories. It draws on a broad range of disciplinary insights from historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and religious studies scholars. The book has a global focus and features case studies from North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.

This book will be of great interest to researchers of conspiracy theories, esotericism, extremism, and religion