The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category

Autor(en)

Julian Strube

Abstrakt

This case study contributes to ongoing debates about religious comparativism by focusing on the emergence of the notion of “esoteric” as a de facto comparative category since the seventeenth century. Scholars have so far restricted their studies to a preconceived “Western esoteric corpus” that limited our view on the majority of source material. This obfuscated the fact that notions such as “esoteric,” “gnosis,” or “Cabala” have been widely employed historically to discuss subjects ranging from the Arabic and Persianate world via India to East Asia. Since the eighteenth century, “esoteric” language formed an integral part of orientalist scholarship, which explains its omnipresence in (South) Asianist scholarship today. This immediately relates to broader issues of religious comparativism: I argue for the necessity of a decentered historiography to understand the development of categories such as “esotericism” and “religion,” not as a unilateral process of “Western” diffusion and projection but through entangled historical exchanges. Based on the approach of global religious history, I provide preliminary insights into what conditioned and structured these exchanges.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Religionswissenschaft

Journal

Implicit Religion

Band

24

Seiten

353-383

Anzahl der Seiten

31

ISSN

1463-9955

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1558/imre.23260

Publikationsdatum

2023

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

603909 Religionswissenschaft

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Religious studies

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/the-emergence-of-esoteric-as-a-comparative-category(894105b8-f2aa-4a39-9d09-9b0daf34aaf0).html