On February 22, 2023, Dr. Amy Hale and Dr. Christa Shusko present their book Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses, edited by Amy Hale. They discuss some of the latest and pressing topics in the study of (Western) Esotericism and talk about some of the opportunities and challenges of inhabiting this field of study as women and scholars.
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Essays on Women in Western Esotericism. Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses. February 22nd 2023.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Good afternoon, and welcome to our first gnosiology event of the spring term. My name is Giovanna Parmigiani. And I'm the host of this series organized within the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative of the CSRR you are here at Harvard Divinity School.
The series focuses on ways of knowing that are often labeled as non-rational, traditionally referred to as gnosis in Western philosophical and religious traditions, and often understood in contraposition to science. These ways of knowing are becoming more and more influential in contemporary societies, popular culture, and academic research. Going beyond dichotomies such as body and mind, ordinary and extraordinary, reason and experience, and matter and spirit. This series hosts scholars of different disciplines and practitioners interested in exploring and expanding the boundaries of what counts as knowledge today.
Today, I have the honor and pleasure to be here with Dr. Amy Hale and Dr. Christa Shusko. So you can show your faces now. Thank you. Hi, Christa. Hi, Amy. So Amy has a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from UCLA. Her research and writing ranges from contemporary Cornwall to modern pagan and occult subcultures in the United States and in the United Kingdom and modern esoteric and occult artists.
She has addressed topics as diverse as modern druidry, Cornish ethnonationalism, pagan religious tourism, color theory, the occult, and extremist politics in modern paganism. Amy is a writer about the occult, culture, art, women, and Cornwall in various combinations and content director of the Last Tuesday Society. She is also the author of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully. Thank you, Amy, for being here. And sorry for the pronunciation. I'm still struggling with that.
AMY HALE: You won't be the first. You won't be the last. So thank you so much, Giovanna, for having us here.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Wonderful. And welcome, Christa. Christa Shusko has a PhD in religion from Syracuse University, and she has published numerous scholar's scholarly books chapter on 19th and 20th century American esotericism on topics such as Fin de siecle Martian romances and seance spiritualism in the Oneida Community. And she serves as co-chair for the Esotericism Unit of the American Academy of Religion.
Currently pursuing an MA in Digital Humanities at Linnaeus University in Sweden, she has also recently taught courses in religion at the University of Gothenburg and in Digital Humanities at Linnaeus University. Thank you, Christa, for being here with us. Amy, the second time you are in gnosiology. So welcome back. And welcome, Christa.
CHRISTA SHUSKO: Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here for my first time. Hopefully, not my last.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Yeah. I hope so. So I'm very happy to have you with us. And today, we're going to present the edited volume Essays on Women in Western Esotericism, Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses. And these are some of the latest and pressing, I would say, topics in the study of esotericism today. Moreover, if we have time, I would love to take the opportunity to think about the opportunities and challenges of inhabiting this field as women and scholars. So I hope we'll be able to touch on all these topics today.
And I will start from a question to you, Amy, but actually to both of you. Before delving into the strictly academic aspects of this book, I have a background question. From your introduction and from the book as a whole, it emerges, at least from how I approach it, that this book is not written only to fill a scholarly gap. Don't get me wrong. It does fill a scholarly gap, but there's more to it.
And so my first question would be, Amy, why did you decide to read this book? I mean, is there a back story, a personal anecdote, something that really made you think, yes, I want, I need to edit a book on women in Western esotericism and with those specific colleagues?
AMY HALE: Yes. Well, first, I want to really thank the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions for hosting this and for allowing for this really fun and I think important conversation. So Christa was there at the inception of this book. I had been working on Ithell Colquhoun's life for a number of years. And so I'd already had kind of the pump primed for looking at and really considering the lacunae in the scholarship about women in esotericism in general because she had kind of emerged as this lost figure in both surrealism and occult history.
And so I was at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting. I was kind of wandering the book aisles. And I was looking at the most recent offerings on what has been until recently and is still contested as a term, Western esotericism. I was looking through the books, and I saw that there was a pattern that when women were considered in a lot of the scholarly collections in the monographs, that they were either kind of lumped together as a group. So there would be a chapter on women. Whereas men were frequently given richer and more deeper histories and biographies.
And also in a very troubling way to me, that women scholars were not maybe as well represented as they could have been and as I knew them to be because I obviously had friends and colleagues who were women. And I was seeing this and even though I had completely sworn off forever doing another edited collection.
I was upstairs at, I think, it was the programming chair's party. And I saw Christa there. And I said, look, I've got this idea. I said, I think this really needs to happen. And Christa, of course, said it was a brilliant idea. And from there, I started working with a team of really fantastic colleagues. We spoke again at the ASE meeting and started talking about what this might look like.
And so I worked with Christa, and Alison Kader, and Nell Shampoo, and Elizabeth Laurie, and Cathy Gutierrez, really kind of the core team of people who talked about what this collection would look like. But it was also really important to me in putting this together, as you said, that we didn't just focus on women and women's histories, but there is also a story that I wanted to tell and be a little bit more frank about women's scholarship.
And even though the collection does have some scholars who do not identify as women, that that is really the bulk of the scholarship that is featured in the book. And I also, as noted in the introduction and the conclusion, that the fact that a lot of this was put together in 2020. And in the events surrounding the pandemic gives us an opportunity to really look even more deeply at women's challenged relationships with scholarship and with particularly with academic institutions because this volume also reflects a number of scholars who have different or even nonexistent relationships with academic institutions, like myself. I'm a freelance scholar now. So I'd like to think the volume does a number of things.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Wonderful. Do you have anything to add, Christa? I mean, you were part of this story.
CHRISTA SHUSKO: Yes. I feel very lucky to have been there at the inception and to have some of these wild conference conversations about what this book could be. I think I was probably more of the little devil on the shoulder for Amy just saying, yes, yes. Do it. Do it. And knowing how difficult it is to edit out of the collection and to do that work of scholar wrangling that she did so admirably in very difficult times.
I think that that work of editing, scholarly collections, I've never done it myself, but I've seen other people do it who I'm close to. And that's a difficult task in the best of times, and these were obviously not the best of times. So I was very excited when it finally emerged through all of that.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thanks a lot. So now, let's delve into the book. So the book is divided into four parts. After a very informative introduction that I will quote at length today, Amy, the four parts are race, place, and othering. Locating the feminine. Rethinking influence power on authority and embodiment. And we can all see how you really touch on very, very key topic, not only for the study of Western esotericism, but also for today's lives, of all of us.
So my first question starts with some quotes from your introduction, Amy. So you're right that the study of women in esotericism has been framed as marginal or as a sideline to the histories of men. And that the academic history of esotericism has largely been until recently a story told by, about, and for other men through the lenses of man's experience.
And the question becomes then not to how women's stories should fit into this dominant narrative, but how women's experiences challenge and break the narrative itself. So do both of you want to comment on this and maybe tell us a bit more about this aspect of the book?
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Sure. Sure. And it's kind of interesting because in the book as it emerged, there tended to be, for the most part, studies of particular types of women who tended to be of an upper and more literate class, tended to be 19th century. And I think that reflects a lot of the scholarship, rather than the potentials for the scholarship, which is obviously a much, much broader topic.
I think one of the areas for me where the study of women really changes the narrative is particularly around the topic of class. And when we look at the way that a lot of-- and I'll say a Western esotericism because I think that as this book notes, I think that Western esotericism as a discipline has had its own discourses that while they are being challenged, this is still a set of scholarly discourses that we're interacting with, even as we're unraveling them.
And I think that part of the discourse of that field as it has emerged is the story of men in conversation with broad philosophical and theoretical, societal conversations and philosophical conversations. And from that, we tend to have a particular set of class discourses.
So when we talk about women in esotericism, and I think particularly women and magic, we start seeing a much wider participation that challenges some of those narratives. So we're not talking maybe about the big philosophical, or historical, or political conversations anymore. We're now starting to talk about, say, issues of agency. How we see the world. How things get done. How esotericism and esoteric practices and magic end up being very strategic ways that women are working in the world.
And that's something that I think that the volume could have brought out. I think that there's a lot more work to be done, particularly on, say, magic and class. Of course, race, culture, colonialism. And we see the touches of those in this book as well. But I really see this book as a starting point for those wider explorations that I think are so crucial to rethinking some of these wider discourses.
Yes, Christa?
CHRISTA SHUSKO: I really appreciated too, Amy, in the introduction, the way that you placed the position for both what you were intending to do and also what we as contributors were able to do. And sort of positioning it as not some kind of final word, of course, but as a step along the way to trying to uncover these different kinds of histories and experiences.
And I really think that that's important to do since I try to impress this on my students, and I also try to impress it on myself, that we can become very attached to what it is that we study, of course. And we can become very, sometimes, too precious about what it is that we study. And I think that what I have tried to do myself is to work to be less precious and more careful.
And I think in being more careful, then I'm able to disentangle maybe some of those attachments that I developed towards my object of study and be able to say, I could be very wrong about this. I hope that I'm not, and these are some things that I see now. But in five years, maybe I'll be terribly embarrassed about what I wrote and the perspective that I took because I am where I am.
And I think that that's something that I really appreciated with the collection as a whole, is not to say that this is now wholly representative, but it is starting to try to represent experiences, and individuals, and groups who may not have been highlighted earlier.
AMY HALE: Yeah. I think it was just really a way of just putting important things out there. And I think that there is a tendency, and that was just on a very personal level. I don't know if this is a completely gendered behavior, it might be. But there's a tendency to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
And to have waited for the perfectly inclusive work on this to come out, then that would have taken a lot longer, and it would have been impossible to have done at that moment. So I think that being honest about where we are at any given moment and starting the conversation was really critical.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thanks a lot. I think we'll maybe have the chance in this conversation to think about what can we do from here and possibilities that can be imagined, how to write another added volume or how to work towards more inclusion and diversity. For example, I can't ignore, there are three White cis women here talking about this. And you're very candid and straightforward in your introduction also on this aspect. That again, as you both of you just said, you see the book as a movement towards more diversity into the field, and there are still things to do.
But one of the things that I really think was extremely important to stress and in the book and introduction, I'm quoting you again, is the tension between marginality or oppositional identity and mainstream and what I would call the ordinary and the extraordinary aspects of setting Western esotericism.
So you say that scholarship about women's roles and contribution to the esoteric milieu also challenges currently overarching narratives about the development of esotericism as a rejected category of thought. And you also say that many esoteric worldviews as neither neatly theorized, nor are they exercised in oppositional identity formation. Esoteric beliefs and practices were and are likely just part of the fabric of already marginalized lives.
And I think that this is very important to stress because there's a tendency in wanting to concentrate in those who study magic or esoteric practices on exceptionality, of alter set of consciousness, while the ordinary aspect of life, the everyday aspects of life are so important as well. And I think personally that who thinks the ordinary is boring, let's say, speaking from a place of privilege. And so I want to maybe, if you want to expand about this aspect of the book, that of course, is quite central because women were and are often marginalized also within this type of practice.
AMY HALE: Sure. And I'll give you what I think is a really great example. So the other day, I hosted this lecture for the Last Tuesday Society which, is something that I do and something folks interested in the esoteric should check out. This really cool lecture by an archeologist, contract archeologist called Wayne Perkins.
The subject of the lecture was actually magical midden deposits in homes. I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with this set of practices. But basically, what he is theorizing and a number of archeologists are now looking at is the practice of depositing items in walls and in spaces in homes in order to get probably varying degrees of magical protection in the home.
So people have probably heard about the unfortunate practice of either walling up cats or putting cats in walls. But there are all sorts of things that are found generationally in homes, particularly things like shoes and baby shoes. And what he's arguing is that this is actually a domestic practice. So this is a form of women's protection magic happening in the home. And it seems as though there are very few texts that actually support this. So you can't just go to a folklore collection and hear women talking about putting baby shoes in the walls. So this is something that's currently being theorized.
Now does this suggest something about a worldview? Absolutely. And how people think protection works, how people think spirits may be encased in material possessions, particularly in things like shoes that end up being very personal. But is this a big philosophical statement? Well, it reflects it reflects something about particularly worldviews. But how this sits in terms of bigger conversations about rationality, about religion, religiosity, I feel that it tells us something else about everyday concerns and everyday practices around those concerns.
And a lot of those, which are not literate at all, we find coming out of women and of the working class, the poorer classes. And these are things that absolutely fascinate me. And for me, this helps me rethink what the overall story of esoterecism racism looks like, and what it looks like when we include a variety of people who may be doing magic in a very situational way.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's a very key question also for me as a scholar. Even if you think about contemporary magic, I think there has been an unnecessary emphasis on the extraordinary aspect of magic and less emphasis on the ordinary aspects of it. And I think they would indeed change how we think about magic in general. So thank you for this, and I thought it was brilliant.
But you, with of your work, Christa, you are challenging this marginality/mainstream sort of dichotomy, which is, of course, again, a heuristic device because your chapter in the book is on a woman that I did not know, I have to confess. Her name-- her not real name, but it was Eleanor Kirk. And your chapter title is The Power of Beauty. And you tell the story of this American woman, and she might be the only American woman in the text. Might be one of the few. I think the other topics of the book are much more centered towards European and UK-oriented women. Do you want to tell us a little bit the story of Eleanor Kirk and on the power of beauty?
CHRISTA SHUSKO: Sure. I'm so fascinated now by these things in walls that I want to talk more about that, but I'll refocus myself here on Eleanor Kirk. Yeah. I think that Eleanor Kirk is someone that probably very few people have heard of in recent times but was very popular in her day. She was a newspaper woman who was basically working and writing as a newspaper woman to support her family.
It's not exactly clear, and it's a little hard to trace all of the biographical information about her life. But she was either widowed and/or abandoned by a perhaps drunk husband a couple of times before she was 40, and she had five children to take care of. And so started to work as a writer for newspapers in New York at the time.
And she also became involved with the Working Women's association, which was Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony's organization that was kind of the predecessor organization to their later suffrage work. And she seems to have been very central in that they wanted her to take over the presidency when they were going to move on to these more national endeavors on suffrage. And she turned them down because she said I need to I need to work. I am a working woman, so I don't really have time for doing too much more of this.
And her trajectory, I think, is really interesting in getting to the esoteric or the occult ideas. She was very skeptical throughout most of her life through the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. And then it was in the 1890s when she starts to take up these ideas and really, really embrace developments like mental science, which is where she's going to become very interested in, beauty, and the idea of health and immortality even, and trying to use the powers of the mind.
And also sometimes, other external properties, like other kinds of, I don't know, kinds of coconut creams and other sorts of products that she thought could also assist in helping women especially to be beautiful. And seeing that as a positive thing as opposed to seeing that as something that is a negative sort of vain urge that women had.
She saw that as being an urge that she thought made sense, even if it was the case that many women sort of took up the quest for beauty in ways that she really frowned upon. So she was not like, yay, all women. She often was talking about how stupid women were. Or not stupid, but misguided in how they approached their lives and their health especially.
And yeah. By the end of her life, she thought she had had an experience at least of going to Mars and astral travel. She wrote this book about that called The Christ of the Red Planet. She became very interested in astrology in 1892. But I think that, yeah, what I think is interesting is the way that she was definitely embracing these popular ideas.
She was picking up on all of these, I don't know. She had a lot of hustle we would say, right? Like she was always having to make money. She was always having to try to figure out what is this next business that can support my family. And once she became successful, continuing to try to support other women's businesses and things like that.
So I think for her, she took all of that previous experience and previous attitudes she had and carried that with her when she discovered the esoteric and occult. And so that's one of the things that I just find really interesting about her.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's one I wish you could tell us more about, this astral travel to Mars, if you want. I think it's a great venue, this one, to delve into this type of business. But I also wanted to ask you about common sense because you are mentioning common sense a lot in your article. And I found it extremely fascinating because thinking about a work in esotericism that relies on common sense, I think, it's a very generative juxtaposition. So do you want to tell us more about Mars and common sense?
CHRISTA SHUSKO: I don't know if those two fit together exactly. The phrase common sense was one that Kirk used quite a lot in her newspaper articles. And she was using it. Obviously, that's not a universal concept that's going to be subjective what we take to be common sense in any given moment.
But what she meant by it, I think, in trying to give people advice, she was trying to say you don't necessarily need to spend lots of money. You don't need to do these things. You don't need to be swayed by certain kinds of fashion. You should have good sense in her understanding at least. And listen to what the doctors might tell you.
She also sometimes thought that doctors would cave to their patients because they thought it just wouldn't be popular. So she was sort of advocating for this idea of common sense in a number of different venues. So doctors should sort employ their common sense as doctors in treating patients and not falling prey to the fashions of the day and kind of allowing their patients to tell them what they wanted, right? So all of these different layers of interests that she had.
And I think that it is interesting then that common sense element comes into her occult and esoteric practices later on, at least with mental science, I would say. But also with astrology too, which that's not included really very much in the chapter in this book. And what she was thinking about with astrology and with mental science as common sense was how can we-- first of all, she wanted to write things in a way that was I think as accessible as possible.
So in her books on astrology, she's like, yeah, there's all of these books where there's charts, and there's all of this. It's very confusing. And the signs, and the rising, and all of that. And she just wanted to pare it way down and sort of take out what is going to be useful for people. What is going to help them to live better lives and more informed lives in terms of their relationships with other people.
So I think that that's where she was coming from, at least with common sense. But it was I think a phrase that I ended up using because she used it so much. And maybe I didn't always unpack it entirely how she was using it within those different contexts. But I think that in her mind, at least, she was trying to advocate for things like being sensible economically. Don't overspend. You don't need to buy the fanciest fabric. Maybe this other fabric is much more sturdy.
And she gets very specific and practical. And maybe these specific yeast cakes are a little bit more expensive. But if they're reliable, then it makes more sense to use those over some other cheaper yeast cake that she wasn't getting a promotion money for. Of course, she was getting kind of paid promotions by some of these companies too.
So I think that that's where her common sense came in. But for me, again, one of the things that's interesting about Kirk is how she had laid this very solid foundation for who she was and what she thought about the world. And that changed in some ways quite radically when she encounters esoteric ideas. But in other ways, she stays very much the same in those attitudes that she has towards being sensible and trying to get people to act in ways that are going to be better for themselves and for the people around them.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: I think this is fascinating in a number of ways. Of course, because as you say in the article, it reconfigures the issues around secrecy, for example, that have been associated with esotericism or the occult in general. But those of what Amy was saying before about including the everyday the experiences that are really part of our lives. And we read them within our framework that stresses the esoteric elements in it. That it's not esoterecisim, or magic, or the occult. It's not something that necessarily is not already part of our life. And so I think this is also a very important remark.
And Mars. Tell us about Mars. I think that the story that you tell at the end of the article is fascinating. Do you want to tell us more?
CHRISTA SHUSKO: Sure. Actually, I have a chapter in The Brill Handbook of UFO Religion, I think is the title. Sorry, Ben Zeller, who edited it, if I'm remembering the title wrong. But that's a really fascinating moment in Kirk's life in 1901. So she was getting close to 70 at that point. And she has this book that she wrote called The Christ of the Red Planet. And that was the first book that I had come across of hers. I came across it in a list of publications from a small kind of occult-related publishing house in Chicago.
And I just thought, that is a title. I need to see if I can find that book and figure out what is going on with The Christ of the Red Planet. So yeah. She has this experience where she travels to Mars and encounters a number of different divine beings there. One of which is a telepathic pony named Elsa. So that's a fun other endeavor. But she also seems to meet her dead sister. And so there are spiritualist elements, and she meets some of these other sort of deities, divinities, and then finally meets Christ, who is the Christ of that planet. So he's red, but he's radiant and beautiful.
And the way that I was trying to tie it into this chapter was that that was sort of her vision for herself at that stage, where she is old, and she is wrinkly, and her hair is white. That she is able to sort of re-embrace her beauty from her youth. And so she reaches a state of perfection and immortality and kind of freedom too. Everyone is wearing these very shimmery, kind of translucent robes on Mars. I think Christ doesn't have any shirt on at all. So he's kind of bare chested and very beautiful.
So just a fascinating life, I think. That's where she ends up. She was born in Rhode Island and then lived most of her life in Brooklyn and New York, but somehow ends up on Mars at the end of her life too or near the end of her life. So I think that book is an interesting one in that it's very unusual for where her interest had been all of her life, that she gets, not just to this point of embracing mental science, but also having this very astral projection sort of an experience too.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you. I was being interested in magic in a way that it's related to time and different ways to experience them, and temporality. I thought it was a very compelling example that I will use in the future. So thank you. Very glad that you wrote about it.
So I have a number of other questions, but I encourage the audience. If you want some clarifications, if you have some particular questions, please feel free to write them in the Q&A feature. Yes, better than the chat box. Q&A feature. And I will be happy to include some of your questions in the rest of this meeting.
So I think it's very important for my students as well who are approaching the study of magic and esotericism and paganism, what is inhabiting the space of Western esotericism or esotericism, as we all prefer to call it, as a woman today? Do you have any thought about challenges, opportunities, maybe some stories, some experiences of yours, some imagination, some thinking about the future that you want to share with our other audience and with the students in particular?
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Well, for one thing, it is and continues to be a rich and growing area of study. I think that in this case, there's the study of it and then the academic institutions that support it. And so it depends on, I would say, what do you want your relationship to those institutions to be? And where do you see your own-- this is for anybody who's interested in this kind of research.
What voice do you want to have in your research, and what do you want your institutional relationship to academia to be? And I kind of wanted to address, there was a question in the chat, about inclusivity and the price of the book. And I want to thank the writer for actually addressing that because it's an issue.
And I will say that despite the fact that there are a number of us who have either non or tangential relationships with academia-institutionalized academia that I did feel and we did feel that it was important to do this in an academic context, which means that you have to deal with really kind of not great publishing things.
I really have problems with the price of academic publishing, with the gatekeeping around it, with the exclusivity. And to have something that where we're talking about women, where we want to be accessible and then we can't, I do see that as problematic. So I really want to acknowledge that.
At the same time, it was important to do that within that context for the women who actually might need to have these publications, so that they can advance their careers. I think that there are a lot of ways to do research and to write and to be engaged with even the academic discussions around esotericism as a woman or as anybody without necessarily feeling like you need to be an academic.
But that academic culture is a challenge for everyone. I will say, however, that there are some really great things happening right now. There's the ESSWE. The European Society for the Study of Western esotericism, I got it, has now a gender and sexuality section, which is a wonderful and really progressive section of ESSWE that is doing some fantastic work and is taking some of the themes that I really wish could have been explored in this book and just kind of running with it.
So I think that there are great opportunities right now. Whether there are opportunities in academia is kind of a completely separate question. But there are certainly lots of platforms. That's just my experience.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thanks a lot, Amy. I am happy that you mentioned, Alice, the question. I would have asked it. And you are, actually, I have to say, engaging with non-scholarly audiences a lot. And what I admire about your work as well is your ability to be able to engage with audiences that's not only academic, but with the rigor and clarity that comes from your academic background and research.
And I think, I don't know. I don't want to know less of your public work, Christa. But I think we cannot escape from trying to engage with publicly-engaged scholarship in order for us to be able to balance a little bit of the gatekeeping attitudes of academia. And you're already doing that and modeling that. So I thank you also for that, Amy.
We have a few questions. So one is from the audience. I'm sorry, Christa, do you want to add anything because I just jumped in.
CHRISTA SHUSKO: No. That's fine. I'm happy to skip to further questions, since I think Amy was very comprehensive and gave us lots to think about already.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: So Addie is asking, can you discuss the intersection of esoteric spirituality and commerce, or maybe more popularly, something akin to spirituality. You talked about Eleanor needs to make money, which coincided with her spiritual interest and the way women uniquely found a way to exist in both spaces.
AMY HALE: That's a great question.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Yes, I agree.
CHRISTA SHUSKO: I just pulled it up. I was like, I was realizing there's things in the chat and things in the Q&A. So I'm one of those visual people. So I was just rereading it. Yeah. I definitely think with Eleanor Kirk, she's a great example of that intersection, as you put it, between esoteric spirituality and commerce.
And I think that there are a lot of parallels now if it wasn't the middle of the-- and pandemic is still ongoing of course. COVID-19 is not behind us. But when we were forming the chapters, there was a certain pressure that I know most of us probably experienced in various areas of our life.
And what I think now looking back at that chapter and thinking about how I would maybe shift it or change it a bit, I think I would do more to try to make those connections to contemporary practices that I think are very similar to Eleanor Kirk and what she was doing, in that weaving together of trying to make a buck.
And I feel like if she was alive today, she would be on Instagram or TikTok. She would be an influencer. She would be getting all of these product placements. She would be all about hashtags. I mean, this is just pure speculation on my part. But there are certain things about the way she was doing and what she was doing and trying to make some of these kind of higher occult teachings that were very, very dense and complex and turn them into something that was accessible and useful for more average readers.
Now again, she was targeting readers. So she was targeting people who would be accessing textual work through newspapers and other sorts of things. But it was still a way that she was trying to kind of come from some of these very dense theosophical and other sorts of works. So the 1880s, if anyone's ever tried to read the secret doctrine or some of these other very enormous sorts of theosophical works, they're not the easiest to get through. And so I think that that's something that I thought was kind of interesting, was how she is both kind of selling her own ideas, but also doing this work of repackaging ideas and kind of doing that in a way that could be beneficial.
One of the things I also really about her in terms of maybe commerce and esoteric spirituality too is just the way that she was very interested in trying to help other, especially women with small businesses, that she became aware of and who would write to her. She also published in the late 1880s before she really got into the occult. She had published these books about writing and about how to get published basically.
So some of the questions about how to get into publishing or how to get into these conversations, she was really interested in those kinds of things. And she wrote these very practical, like there was a directory called periodicals that pay contributors. And it was this directory of all of these different periodicals at the time, how much they would pay for what kinds of articles. I don't know that she went quite as far as acceptance rates, but she definitely sort of laid out this directory as a way to try to help other people to become financially independent. And so I just thought that was kind of interesting that she was bringing these kinds of ideas together and really embracing that sort of entrepreneurialism, even as she was getting into the esoteric and occult.
AMY HALE: I've been really fascinated by this whole question. And it's kind of intersecting with-- so I'm working on a collection of Ithell Colquhoun's magical essays currently. And I keep coming back to Kirk and also to Julia Phillips had a great piece on Madeline Montalban in the book. And all three of them actually were doing a lot of writing for money. And they were writing in these periodicals. They were doing this kind of esoteric journalism, having columns.
And so I've thought about this in a way that did this keep some of these women from having a higher profile because they were making money, but they were actually publishing in publications that were ephemeral. Like Dion Fortune's actually a good kind of counterexample where she had the books. Because when you're doing that those kinds of books, you have to have somebody who is paying for the publishing of them. And even in the day, you had to have established a market.
But the women we're working with were again using magic as a tactic, a survival tactic because they were using it to make money. And that's also something that we see this in the kind of contemporary wellness stuff that I see, in many ways, an inheritance of the kind of work that Kirk was doing. Where there's this tendency to de-legitimize any kind of commercial end or transaction or framing of occult esoteric and magical subjects. But then we look at how that impacts women's practice, ideas about women's practice, and I think there are definitely some questions to be asked there about those intersections and our judgments of them.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Fantastic. Thank you, both, for these answers. I think you touch on very, very, very important points. There are many fantastic questions in the chat box. So I put two questions together. So Kayla asks, how do non-affiliated scholars, especially women, find each other and find places for publication? And Sam asks, so I recognize that this is not directly related to the substance of the lecture at hand, but could I ask Amy what it means to her to be unaffiliated to an institution, and what it means practically in practical terms to be a scholar in the mold that she's in, given that academia is in such a generalized state of collapse, but many of us may still want to research religion in one form and another, institutional affiliation or not. I would appreciate further reflection on this.
So how we find each other, and how is it doing research as an unaffiliated scholar?
AMY HALE: These are great questions. The first thing that I would ask anybody who's interested in these kinds of, let's just call them conversations. First, ask, what it is that you want out of it? Are you interested in having an academic position? Are you interested in being involved in scholarly conversations?
I am very fortunate in the fact that I was able to just walk away from academia, which was my choice. I wanted to do it. But I also have the background, and the skills, and also the colleagues to still be able to do scholarly research if that's something that I choose to do, which at the moment, it's not really what I want to do. I actually want to be doing more popular work. So I'm a freelance writer. And I do a lot of work writing for galleries. And I'm very lucky in the sense that I'm able to do that as a living.
So I would think, what do you what do you want to do? Because I am academically trained, so I know how to speak that language when I need to. But find out what it is that you want out of that. There are great organizations. ESSWE is wonderful. The American Academy of Religion has some really fantastic and robust work going on in paganism and esotericism. Do you want to be a part of a scholarly conversation? There's also the Magical Women's Conference. And they do all sorts of things coming out of London. And they have both academics and non academics.
So I would say find out what you want. And then figure out, just find what routes you need to take to meet that. Because there are also lots of ways to publish in this area. It just depends on what kind of publishing want to do.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Thank you, Amy. If I can jump into the conversation, Kayla said, very practically, as a co-chair of the pagan studies unit. And I think you, Chris, as well, as the co-chair of this esotericism unit at AAR, both our units accept papers from students from scholars who are not affiliated from practitioners even. And if it's good, if it's shareable, if it's thought provoking, it's going to make it.
And so if you're interested in inhabiting the academic space in a way that is not necessarily the kind of mainstream one, you're more than welcome. You won't be the only one. To a certain extent, we are all sort of navigating this account belonging and affiliation in different ways and different from what it used to be. So please reach out to me if you want, and I can give you more details about how to do that. And of course, it's extended to all our audience and friends, so shall the world. Christa, do you have anything to share on this before we wrap?
CHRISTA SHUSKO: No. I think you covered it. I'm reading all these great questions in the chat. So if we don't get to them, maybe I can-- you said that they can contact you. So feel free to send them Giovanna's way. And we she can send them our way too some time. Oh. I want to get to this one about age and beauty.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: Yes. I think we have time for one more. So pick one question.
CHRISTA SHUSKO: I was just really interested with this discussion about-- Melissa in the chat said that she's talking about the connection between beauty and old age or women and old age. And what is it about Eleanor Kirk and maybe esotericism itself that can allow us to rethink the meaning of beauty in terms of age, womanhood, et cetera. I won't go into all of it.
But I just think it's quite interesting. I was talking. Before we started the webinar, I said, I might say something about menopause magic. And now, I have this chance to do so. One of the things that I find really interesting about Kirk, among many things, and also another woman who I have spent a long time researching. I haven't published on her yet, but Alice Bunker Stockham, who was a medical doctor turned mental scientist and a cultist in Chicago right in the similar time period in the 1890s.
Both of them were born in the 1830s. And both of them sort of get into the occult, at least do more embracing of the occult later in their lives. So when they're in their 50s, 60s, 70s, is really where the writings that kind of approach the field of esotericism and occultism the most when they generate that.
And I think that's interesting for a lot of reasons in terms of thinking about that issue of age. I mean, some of it might be this desire for the lost beauty of youth that both of them seem to get into to some extent. But I think some of it is also where they are in life. They both were mothers. Their children had been sort of raised at that point, although they still had some responsibilities and other familial directions, both of them.
But for me, I find that really interesting and fascinating and kind of hopeful, that there is this possibility for later in life developments. And I guess I think about the attitudes towards beauty in that way. Some accounts of Eleanor Kirk when she was old actually do talk about how beautiful she is. Oh, her silver hair and how white and pure white it is, and all of these things.
So to me, that's also interesting, that maybe they were trying to challenge some of those issues about aging, even as the fantasy in Eleanor Kirk's mind at least was this very youthful vision of herself and the color hair that she always wanted to have, she finally has when she's on Mars. But in other ways, I think it's quite interesting that they're able to think about shifting into this entirely new field and new area when they're in their 60s basically, which I think is really fascinating.
GIOVANNA PARMIGIANI: That's wonderful. Thank you so much. I think it's almost time to wrap up. And I really loved all the questions. So I really encourage all of you who are interested in reaching out to me, to us, to write me an email. I will share that the email with today's guests. And Hillary, if you can, copy the question and send them over to us. I think we'll be able to take a closer look at those as well after the event today.
So thank you, Amy. Thank you, Christa, for this wonderful conversation. Thank you all for being here. It was really a conversation between not only the three of us, but they included our audience. And I'm so happy to being able to host this type of events. So please, all of you, stay tuned on the activities of the CSWR, the T&T Initiative, the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative, and of gnosiologies.
One last shout-out. Our next event will be on March 8. I will have a conversation with Dr. Grace Nono, performing artist, ethnomusicologist, and scholar of Filipino shamanism, on music, voice, and healing. So you can find all the information on the CSWR website about this event and all the others. We'll try to gather, I see in the comments information about potential bibliography, references. We'll try to gather this information, and we'll try to reach out to you. Thanks again to all of you, and have a lovely, lovely day.
AMY HALE: Thanks, everyone.
CHRISTA SHUSKO: Thanks so much. Bye.
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