This panel challenges scholarly understandings of esotericism, investigating figures and practices that were challenging in their times as well as in ours. Daniel Joslyn traces the influence of Alice Bunker Stockham’s _Karezza_ on Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and Margaret Sanger, investigating the ways that this sexual practice was connected to visions of racial purity and socialist expectations. Shannon McRae explores the intersections of sexual magic, white supremacy, and ecology in Mabel Dodge’s archival correspondence. Payal Anil Padmanabhan analyzes Billie Potts’ 1978 _A New Women's Tarot_ as a manifesto, illuminating the material, spiritual, and political aims of tarot in the context of Second Wave Feminism. Finally, John McCormack compares the twenty-first century New Age guru Carissa Schumacher to medieval Christian mystics like Catherine of Siena and Birgitta of Sweden, arguing that such a comparison can help challenge contemporary scholarly perspectives on who “counts” as a mystic.
My paper tells the story of "Karezza," a sex-mystical practice coined in a wildly popular manual published in 1896, and its influence on canonical sexologists and the development of "modern" sexuality. In particular, it looks at influence of the practice - which entailed separating procreative from spiritual sex, refraining from orgasming, and viewing the act itself as a form of spiritual and racial purification - on its most important early twentieth-century advocates, Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis, and Margaret Sanger. Across works that collectively sold near a million copies, these authors all advocated for Karezza as part of a "modern," "civilized" sex life and as a means of cultivating a healthy, spiritual form of sexual passion and desire. As socialists, all moreover viewed the practice as integral to the gradual and peaceful overcoming of capitalism. My paper thus connects scholarship on Western Esotericism with the histories of race, gender, sex, and politics.
This paper argues that the marriage of art patron and socialite Mabel Dodge to a Taos Pueblo man, Tony Lujan, was an act of sex magic with the end goal of liberating the authentic self from the confines of Western sexual repression, in order to heal larger psychic wounds suffered by European immigrants as a result of alienation from the land. It explores her study of theosophy, magic, and psychoanalysis in order to attain that end, and presents archival research of various of her correspondences on the topics of metaphysics, magic, and sexuality, with such figures as Gurdjieff, Will Levington Comfort, Freda Lawrence, and Aleister Crowley.
My paper focuses on one of the first texts that made a demand for a feminist tarot in America: Billie Potts’ A New Women’s Tarot (1978). My analysis identifies patterns of creative choices within this pamphlet that would ultimately guide the feminist and woman-centred decks that would follow. The paper will further explore how contributions of feminism in art and print during Second Wave Feminism led to the emergence of the tarot as a tool of political self-expression. While tracing the particular materiality of the feminist tarot, I trace its relationship to the popular feminist medium of the manifesto. My presenation also speculate on the possible futures of a tarot that is feminist.
In 2021, HarperOne published The Freedom Transmissions, a 400-page tome claiming to be new revelations of Jesus (referring to himself as Yeshua) channeled by a boutique New Age guide with wealthy, well-connected clients, Carissa Schumacher. Does Schumacher – because she claims to give voice to a more traditional religious figure than some New Age channelers – “count” as a mystic? Or does she not count, because her expression of a conventionally eclectic twenty-first century spirituality makes her unlike those “unquiet souls” whose lives and writings implicitly challenged the religious and social status quo? This paper will compare Carissa Schumacher’s life and work to medieval Christian women mystics such as Catherine of Siena and Birgitta of Sweden, while also situating her in a genealogy of Spiritualism, in order to argue that Schumacher is a contemporary mystic who challenges scholars to reconstruct the category without classic definitions of “religion,” “theology,” and “secular.”