In our July 2025 special issue, Julian Strube and I noted that calls to scrutinize potential connections between esotericism scholarship and the far right had so far been met with pushback.1 Sedgwick’s and Piraino’s response illustrates some of what we noted there.

Sedgwick and Piraino primarily take aim at Strube, but apparently have nothing to say about the facts at the core of his heavily footnoted article.2 Instead, they accuse the author of lacking ‘courtesy’, ‘implying’ things, and of almost ‘smearing’ colleagues.3 It must be stressed that these are not aimed at any concrete arguments Strube actually expressed in his text, but at views that are imputed to him based on advanced exegesis of how many persons are required for a plural ending or the meaning of the term “obscured”. Unfortunately, the bulk of the response thus confirms our observation that critique in this area tends to be evaded rather than engaged with.4

There is no shortage of submissions to Aries. Despite a rejection rate of 75 % over the past three-year period (2023–2025), we now accept more papers per year than we can fit in an annual volume. As a result, the number of advance articles not yet assigned to a print issue has grown. In this issue, readers will find four articles originally released in 2024, on topics ranging from Perennialism in Egypt (Mattias Gori Olesen) to the first German translation of the Gnostic Catholic Mass (Manon Hedenborg White) to conjuring girdles in early-modern magic (Don C. Skemer).

The Romani peoples have consistently been associated with magic and fortune-telling, yet surprisingly little is known about how the association first developed. This article provides a systematic and critical assessment of the earliest known documentary evidence for Romani magical practice, considering all known sources from two formative periods: the middle to late Byzantine period (ca. 1050–1453) and the first decade of the northwest-European diaspora (1417–1427). The article argues that associations with magic first emerged through a process of stereotype transfer and appropriation in the Byzantine context, by which older images of oriental magic practitioners and heretics were transferred to and performed by an emerging ethnic group. In the northwest-European context, palmistry was a popular Romani service but also became a source of rumor and suspicion when interactions broke down. The article argues that the magical exchange has been a central site for the construction of ethnic boundaries between Roma and non-Roma.

The building block approach (BBA) is a metatheoretical framework for studying the complex relationship between human psychology and cognition on the one hand and sociocultural formations and practices on the other. As such the BBA belongs to the wider project of consilience between the sciences and the humanities. The aim is to provide a common language that allows scholars in the humanities and social sciences to bring psychological and neuroscientific research to bear on the study of culturally embedded experiences, practices, and group formations, including those related to religion.

The BBA is premised on the idea that human experience and practice are typically expressed in terms of “complex cultural concepts” (CCCs) embedded in social formations. To explain them, one needs to redescribe the phenomena of interest in behavioral terms and decompose them into components (or building blocks) in order to reconstruct how the phenomena emerged and identify mechanisms that interact to produce them. The process for doing this is referred to as “reverse engineering.”

This approach thus treats “religion” as a complex cultural concept and “religions” as social formations, breaks both down into components (referred to here as decomposing or reverse engineering), and seeks to explain how the components interact and, thus, the mechanism or process whereby (through their interaction) they form religious as well as nonreligious formations.

Reverse engineering is the research strategy at the heart of the BBA. Simply put, reverse engineering entails a series of steps designed to take apart a complex system and analyze its constituent parts to (a) find out how it works and (b) trace how the parts (events, actions, and representations) have been assembled and labeled in specific formations. It thus is the basic strategy for learning more about human experience as it is mediated by CCCs in social formations.

It may be easiest to begin with a common assumption: that being modern means being rational. The modern person has a scientific mindset, a pragmatic attitude, and trusts technology to solve our every problem. “Rationality,” in this common view, is the antithesis of being superstitious, believing in magic and spirits, or relying on quackery and pseudoscience. Rational moderns have left all that behind. Let’s take a closer look at those assumptions.

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.