Approaching Religion
December 18, 2023
Tero Heinonen
3 citations
Finnish mystical tourists appropriate religious elements from South America, such as plant medicine ceremonies involving ayahuasca, cacao, and sacred tobacco, treating them as spiritual commodities. They reimagine local beliefs as ancient, authentic heritage, adapting practices for therapeutic use in collectively created musical and ritual spaces. Singing prayers to plant spirits, understood animistically, is central. The appropriation gives Finnish participants a racially privileged role over subaltern indigenous peoples through commercialization, where reimagined elements become spiritual commodities. This aligns with individualistic well-being needs and a 'sacralization of the self'.
Approaching Religion
December 2, 2025
Chloë Sugden
Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, founder of the Eranos Conferences and creator of the Eranos Archive, used her self-identification with the "Great Mother archetype" as a strategy for feminine spiritual authority. Through conference-hosting, image curation, archiving, and visionary art-making, she expressed this authority. Analysis of her Visions drawings (1934–37) and Archive images situates her within 1930s New Age esotericism. Her "mythopoetic performance" of the Great Mother is interpreted as a mode of institutional and visionary authority, exemplifying how fin-de-siècle women mobilized visionary experience and archetypal symbolism to construct autonomous spiritual and epistemic leadership within modernist intellectual cultures.
Approaching Religion
December 2, 2025
Oscar Ortiz-Nieminen, Terhi Utriainen, Alexandra Bergholm
An angel-themed art photograph by Finnish artist Hanne Kiiveri, inspired by a waking dream of her late sister, sparked diverse audience interpretations. Analyzing viewer responses through Egil Asprem's kataphatic (concrete) and apophatic (abstract) modes of thinking reveals that both the artist and audiences draw on popularized tropes from Western esotericism, particularly the kataphatic tradition. This "occultural resourcing" shapes how viewers engage with the juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, the mundane and spiritual. The analysis raises broader questions about photography's capacity to picture the otherworldly and what can be seen through a photograph.
Approaching Religion
December 2, 2025
Rachel Denniston
The essay argues that seekers at the crossroads of esotericism and modern art operate as relational weavers, connecting visible and invisible, material and immaterial, self and other, public and private, and past, present, and future. It proposes a feminine praxis of seekership that merges recent scholarship on seekership with feminist theory, focusing on the social and psychic dimensions of relationality. Using the American artist Paulina Peavy (1901–1999) as a case study, it shows how her art-making and curating were guided toward collective social and spiritual change, resisting the lone visionary trope and instead highlighting her psychic and social networks as productive spaces for her praxis.
Approaching Religion
December 2, 2025
Nina Kokkinen
Clairvoyance, mediumship, and gender intersected in early-twentieth-century art, as shown by the Finnish artist and occultist Meri Genetz (1885–1943). Although esotericism shaped modern art, visionary and mediumistic practices are often marginalized in mainstream art history. Analysis of Genetz's archival material and self-portraits from the 1920s–1930s reveals that conceptual ambiguities, discursive demarcations, and gender bias contributed to this marginalization. Her case demonstrates that deep engagement with occultism does not always produce easily identifiable artistic traces; archival research and familiarity with esoteric discourses are essential for identifying such phenomena. The study challenges male-oriented narratives of modern art and calls for reassessing mediumistic and visionary art as vital to twentieth-century art.
Approaching Religion
December 2, 2025
Helen Bremm
Art history's conventional separation of material from meaning and its focus on form and image alone cannot adequately account for the work of Leonora Carrington and other women artists working at the intersection of art and esotericism. Examining two case studies from Carrington's esoteric practice—one concerning materials and one concerning making—shows that moving beyond hierarchical dualistic thinking is necessary to understand the role materials played in the meaning and magical function of her works. Her painting process functioned as an epistemological practice that drew on esoteric principles and expanded Surrealist notions of the marvellous by attending to the non-human in materials.
Approaching Religion
December 2, 2025
Nina Kokkinen
This special issue explores how women and gender-diverse artists have navigated artistic and occult identities since the 19th century, reclaiming the figure of the witch as a symbol of empowerment. It introduces new conceptual frameworks—feminist ecoaesthetics, magical futurist art, and seeker as weaver—to challenge male-centered narratives in art history and esotericism. The term "witching" is used politically to reimagine normative approaches to art history and its intersections with occultism and magic. The issue highlights the contributions of artist women to both the art world and occulture, reshaping modern religiosity. All articles were peer-reviewed and developed from discussions at an international seminar held in August 2025.
Approaching Religion
January 16, 2019
Marjo Kaartinen
Vera Hjelt's theosophical beliefs, inspired by Annie Besant, shaped her work as a schoolteacher, factory owner, writer, occupational safety inspector, and member of parliament. Her letters to Cely Mechelin, previously unused in scholarship, reveal a theosophic awakening by summer 1894. The article argues that Hjelt's esotericism, particularly the idea that harming any part of a universal whole harms all, motivated her efforts to improve women's factory working conditions. During the Voikka strike, when workers hated her, her theosophical thinking comforted her. This shows Western esotericism's influence on late 19th- and early 20th-century Finnish culture and policy.
Approaching Religion
January 16, 2019
Tomas Mansikka
The article examines how a pro-Enlightenment bias in the study of Western esotericism distorts the understanding of what counts as esoteric knowledge. Using René Descartes as a case study, it argues that the conventional divide between 'critics' and 'religionists' in the field is reversed when viewed from a pre-Enlightenment perspective. The perception of what is generally agreed upon as 'esoteric' in modern studies is shown to be inverted through this historical lens.
Approaching Religion
January 16, 2019
Hippo Taatila
This review examines Tobias Churton's biography of G.I. Gurdjieff, which argues that Gurdjieff was a spiritual magician whose teachings and persona were rooted in Western esotericism. Churton's work deconstructs previous portrayals of Gurdjieff, presenting him as a complex figure who synthesized various esoteric traditions. The review assesses Churton's evidence and interpretations, noting the book's contribution to understanding Gurdjieff within the context of Western esoteric currents.
Approaching Religion
January 16, 2019
Tiina Mahlamäki, Maarit Leskelä-kärki
The study of Western esoteric traditions and practices has expanded as a research field since the 1990s. This thematic issue focuses on opening that field within Finnish cultural history, while the included articles also address other parts of the long tradition of Western esotericism in European history.