USA Africa Dialogue Series - THE ESOTERIC:A HAIR'S BREADTH INTERNATIONAL SURVEY

In order to define the field,one has to pursue a degree of clarity as to what one means by the term 'esoteric'. I have not done any serious research into meanings of the term but I am gravitating towards  its description  as knowledge hidden on account of its distance from conventional cognitive faculties.

The best known discourse on this field,understood as a cognitive category,an institutional framework created by practitioners of esotericism and a discipline for academic study,comes from Europe.In its institutionalisation as an academic discipline,it seems to have been dominated by the work of Antione Faivre whose characterisation of esotericism seems rooted in the history of Western esotericism but there are other conceptions, such as from French and European scholars,which I have come across in passing, which seem more globally inclusive.

The esoteric  certainly plays a strong role in Africana thought and practice.It is central to Amadou Hampa Ba's expositions of Fulani and related cosmologies and their practical implications,as demonstrated in his Kaidara,and I expect,in hisRadiance of the Great Star and his book with Germaine Dieterlen on Peul initiation Koumen(can be translated fom French to English by using Google translator).Dieterlen expounds on a fascinating esoteric initiation system in "Initiation among the Peul Pastoral Fulani" inAfrican Systems of Thought.At the centre of the controversy over the authenticity of claims by Marcel Griaule and his associates,such as Dieterlen,on claims of imaginatively,conceptually and scientifically sophisticated cosmologies  and cognitive practices and rituals in Dogon and geographically close African civilisations is their claim that this knowledge is organised in terms of esoteric institutions to which their critics have not gained access.

 In Yoruba orisa tradition,there are specific concepts and practices that define and distinguh the esoteric and the exoteric.Concepts like ori inu,oju inu,oju lasan,odu,awo,aje,Awon Iya Mi Osoronga.I would like to describe these  later.Babatunde Lawal and Rowland Abiodun address these concepts in the context of   art history.One of the most exciting explorations I have read on Orisa esoteric thought and practice is the work of David Wilson,better known as Awo Falokun Fatumbi, particularly his "Obatala:Ifa and  the Chief of the Spirit of the White Cloth",which is at the free document archive Scribd.

Classical Igbo conceptions and practices of healing and divination are also deeply grounded in esoteric conceptions,as represented by the work of Anenechukwu Umeh After God is Dibia,as well as the essays  of Patrick Iroegbu on Igbo medicine and his book on the subject:Healing Insanity:A Study of Igbo Medicine in Contemporay Nigeria.

Islamic thought and its Western students seem to have taken pains to develop conceptions of the esoteric,as evident in Sufism and the work and scholarship around it of Ibn Arabi,along with the Traditionalist scholarship in the field,as the books of Titus Burckhardt and Fritjuof Schuon,among others.

A very good book which   examines the concept from the perspective of Jewish thought while relating it to extra Jewish cognitive trends is Moshe Halbertal,Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications (Princeton University Press, 2007).

Halbertal is at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and seems to be carrying on the torch lit by Gershon Scholem in his magisterial, ground breaking work in Jewish mysticism while based at that university, work carried forward there  by Joseph Dan and Moshe Idel,as well as by Eliot Wolfson and others in other countries.  I expect the work of these scholars addresses what esotericism means in the context of classical and modern Jewish thought and practice.

Of course,Hinduism and Buddhism have well developed conceptions of the esoteric as I have suggested it may be described.

It might be useful to understand esotericism  as a cognitive category  and therefore as operative outside  explicitly religious and philosophical contexts.

Can it be explicitly developed as a pedagogical  strategy  in an academic context,as defined by the contemporary global dominance of the Western academy?

Thanks

toyin

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