Past issues of Correspondences have sought to envision non-Western “esoteric” categories, but it remains an open question as to whether esotericism is a generic mode of thought, as opposed to a construction within intellectual history. I demonstrate some difficulties with identifying an esoteric category in modern Japanese culture, suggesting that the problem is one of discursive boundaries within the humanities. Accordingly, I examine boundary work by one of Japan’s founding religious scholars. It appears that Anesaki Masaharu engaged in two types (...) of boundary-making: disputation of the type of authority being used by religious groups, and criticism of concealment within the academic context. Comparing the latter behavior to Western esotericism, I find that it matches up most closely to a different concept of esotericism than that commonly used in this field. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce the ContERN special issue on ethnographies of the esoteric. While the study of esotericism has been dominated by historical-philological scholarship, recent years have seen an increase in anthropological approaches to contemporary esotericism. We argue that this development provides the field not only with new tools, but also fresh perspectives on long-standing theoretical challenges. What are the implications of situating esotericism in particular ethnographic fieldsites? How does anthropological theory reflect on deep-rooted assumptions in the field? We (...) address these questions using examples from the articles in the present special issue as well as other recent ethnographies of esoteric subject matter. (shrink)

Scholars agree that the imagination is central to esoteric practice. While the esoteric vis imaginativa is usually attributed to the influx of Neoplatonism in the Italian Renaissance, this article argues that many of its key properties were already in place in medieval scholasticism. Two aspects of the history of the imagination are discussed. First, it is argued that esoteric practice is rooted in a broader kataphatic trend within Christian spirituality that explodes in the popular devotion literature of the later Middle (...) Ages. By looking at the role of Bonaventure’s “cognitive theology” in the popularization of gospel meditations and kataphatic devotional prayer, it is argued that there is a direct link between the scholastic reconsideration of the imaginative faculty and the development of esoteric practices inspired by Christian devotional literature. Secondly, it is argued that the Aristotelian inner sense tradition of the scholastics left a lasting impression on later esoteric conceptualizations of the imaginative faculty. Examples suggesting evidence for both these two claims are discussed. The article proposes to view esoteric practices as an integral part of a broader kataphatic stream in European religious history, separated out by a set of disjunctive strategies rooted in the policing of “orthopraxy” by ecclesiastical authorities. (shrink)