Audio of a talk given by Hawthonn's Phil Legard at The Horse Hospital, 30 May 2019, as part of our event Towards a Critical Magic:
As esotericists we often believe that we have stepped beyond 'mere politics' – that our minds are turned to a higher world, which has little relation to the mundane – despite, paradoxically, believing that our magical actions influence the phenomenal world.
Yet many contemporary scholars of esotericism and religion analyse the currents of occultism, paganism and the New Age as socially constructed phenomena: elaborate mythic structures enforcing certain norms, beliefs and practices, while justifying themselves through appeals to authority, lineage and experience, even science and rationality.
Such historiographic or sociological approaches have been accused by many practitioners of base reductionism, undermining the authority of their particular traditions. Yet, what if practitioners of esotericism were to accept – or at least entertain for a moment – a constructivist, rather than transcendentalist, paradigm?
More from Phil Legard -
xetb.bandcamp.com/album/hawthonn
released September 17, 2019
Hawthonn