Esotericism generally flaunts itself in drab interiors, home to dull lodgers – where there’s nothing alarming in sight. Academics, equipped with a desiccated body of rules and insipid formulae, but lagging behind as usual, have started to take an interest in their very own Weltanschauung, which now they ceaselessly reproduce in vitro, turning it into an endless series of products for publication, which can also be conveniently bled dry at the customary international congresses. Once dead, the corpse of their Weltanschauung is disemboweled in the most aseptic way imaginable and given a first-class funeral service. But no, it may not rest in peace – it is shaken and rattled again and again until people are convinced that it has resumed dancing. In that script though, there are gaping holes between suspicion and alibi. The suspicion: these people are fully-fledged esoterics. Their alibi: a doctorate or professorship. The crime scene: academic reviews and publications, in which sterile science fetishists relegate the juices of life actually inherent to their worldview to the unconscious, just as if the human body was no more than a breeding ground for malfunctions. Every now and then one suspects having been exiled to a physician’s waiting room.

"'Let's face it,' Bill [Breeze] proffered, after an embarassed silence, 'the future of Thelema belongs to academics. We're the past.'" [Allen Greenfield, 27.9.2006, http://tausirhasirim.livejournal.com/46617.html.] There’s nothing more that esotericism aspires to than to be taken seriously, seen as pure of body as well as pure of any somatophobic thought as exemplified by racism, anti-Semitism and antidemocratic resentment (as in e.g. Thelema). Only the Will not to create a wrong impression prevails, and therefore the irrational is mystified and exempt from reflection.

But exactly because the academic esoterics’ artificiality leads them to outbid each other in conveying a correct attitude, they create a lethal image of neglect, into which they retire when ever reflecting on themselves. They want to emerge from the underground of the Occident and reach the shores of the conscious, while in truth employing mechanisms of suppressing it. Their method: to deploy ideology, to fall back on obscurantism, irrationality, sophistry and excuses and to display general ineptness as a means for adapting to the corpse of esotericism. That now stumbles on stage shrouded in aphorisms, momentous announcements and banalities disguised as wisdom, as if intent on carving the mot du jour or a summary of the proceedings in stone, into its tombstone. The pseudo-scientific respect of esoteric academia expresses itself in relationships of a mutual dependency, which only allows for weak opponents. As soon as there is any indication of danger, namely, the exposure of the academics as adherents of the esoteric Weltanschauung, any previous exchange of niceties immediately stops and the Other is ignored. Everything is subject to a one-sided codification of inferiority complexes, undecipherable safe for its foundation on its own internal logic. That which cannot be subjugated is regarded as insignificant and nothing, which deserves to be analysed. To deal with such leftovers, or indeed a delegated self, would mean turning towards alternatives in contemplation.

"Mockery is our greatest enemy." [Hermann Joseph Metzger, 'EOL-Mitteilungsblatt' No. 10, Zurich 1955, p. 4; and 'Oriflamme' No. 137, Zurich 1973, p. 1566. Text for Easter 1950. Likewise in a letter to Eugen Grosche of 21.5.1951.] Too strong an effort. Too painful. Too shameful, because somewhere, sometime one had gotten by any chance involved with strange insignia, long ribbons and black frocks fluttering in solemn acts of initiation, while weird knocking sounds were heard, and assignments and missions were pronounced whose purpose remains hidden ? Creativity and original thought are eliminated, because they are 'inefficient' – not controllable, that is.

At the same time as New Age is spreading in academia, the internet grows into an integral part of the mainstream. While academia remains bound to reactionary mechanisms relying on prestige and money, the internet breaks the monopolisation of knowledge and allows junk-postmodernism to flow into the living rooms. This context seems to serve as an invitation to behaviour according to one of the principles of psychoanalysis i.e. instead of focussing one’s attention, one allows it to take in anything floating around in that new cloud, where the value of knowledge is subject to constant change.

Academia now brings forth a new cultural-technological gap. The qualities of valid in contrast to dubious contributions are supposedly distinguishable, depending on which side of the gap they are situated. Work on paper is deemed valid, anything digital is ruled untrustworthy. Within its incestuous circle of the ever-same academics and under self-imposed pressure, the esoteric world proceeds to produce more and more self-referential encyclopedia. Contrary to their aim of reaching the mainstream, a lot of esoteric academic groups behave more and more like hermeneutic readers' circles where every single letter of the alphabet, ever used within their heroes' sphere of influence is either endlessly recycled or scientifically reduced to tatters, in order to lend it importance and meaning.

In academic slow motion, the simplest facts are turned upside down, rolled around by academic scarabs – in their leisure time maybe not averse to posing on Egyptianised stage sets where perhaps turbans and pillars are part of the repertoire – reduced to rhetoric DNA, noted, re-noted, read and re-read until the last contemporary can easily parrot the entire lot. People having dealt with the occult only marginally, are retrieved from the depths of oblivion by way of biographies or studies, which come along like official funeral notifications or obituaries. Because personnel is scarce, those suddenly anointed are glorified beyond recognition, portrayed as persons of religious or academic greatness or by administration of the usual sterile recipes mummified as heroes of esotericism – papery witnesses to its failure of being taken seriously. Intellectual standstill, radical conservatism reign. The only sound is the rustling of mutual burials in footnotes, the Science Citation Index, the Impact-Factors. Where there should be questions and openness, there are templates, for which after postmodernity there is nothing left but reconstruction according to the principles of rummage sales. Thus its methods seem to be stuck at the point from where esotericism had taken off into the mainstream by means of early mass media (newspapers, radio, travelogues, novels, pulp): at the turn of the 20th century.

In alternative models, however, the texts esoteric academia pretends to think about, would not only be inter-connected by linkage to a particular author or by quick-freezing their meaning, but rather by breaking away from prejudice, while the persons contemplating them release their relation to the texts. In place of mere knowledge about the esoteric a new narrative of esotericism and its protagonists could be developed. New models of research would not isolate texts as self-referential knowledge, simmering away in a comfortable niche miles away from the mainstream and only accessible to one single discipline. New models could emphasise the importance of understanding one context only by looking into another, excluding the privileging of any of the texts. Finally, the production of knowledge could be taken to new heights. © Peter-R. Koenig, 2012 Two Sources on the left: http://www.williamblakeoto.org, 2007/2008. Vintage sources on the right: "Prana", Zentralorgan für praktischen Okkultismus, Schriftleitung Karl Brandler-Pracht, Dr. Hugo Vollrath Verlag, Leipzig 1909-13.

A shorter German version of this essay appeared as "Lücken im Drehbuch der Esoterik", in GNOSTIKA #50, Sinzheim 2012. This translation was kindly supported by Kristin T. Schnider.

Aura of the O.T.O. The Templar's Reich — The slaves shall serve. Hanns Heinz Ewers — Lanz von Liebenfels — Karl Germer, Arnoldo Krumm-Heller — Martha Kuentzel — Friedrich Lekve — Hermann Joseph Metzger — Christian Bouchet — Paolo Fogagnolo — James Wasserman. Proto-Fascist Elements in the O.T.O. Halo of Flies. Ecstatic Creation of Culture. Use of the Internet: Questions to "Occultists". Playgame of an O.T.O.-Fata Morgana, Statistics, Censorship, Name Dropping. Fetish, Self-Induction, Stigma and Rôleplay. Gaps in the Script of Esotericism: Hypocrisy and Hypercrisis. The McDonaldisation of Occulture. Spermo-Gnostics and the O.T.O. Correct Gnosis. Some secrets of the Ordo Templi Orientis and related organisations. Nosferatu's Baby. Saturn-Gnosis. Fraternitas Saturni: The Art of Loving and Living. Buying a Stairway to Heaven by Kristin T. Schnider. Early History of the O.T.O. Phantoms of the Paradise. Collection of Re-Collections. Lawyers and Historians. What's new? What Will I Give For An Encore When The Serpent Once Has Bitten... ? A reaction on Web.2 and Emails. “May I introduce myself?”, an early interview from 1998. No, I shan't eat from this light.

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