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In the nineteenth century anarchists were accused of conspiracy by governments afraid of revolution, but in the current century various 'conspiracy theories' suggest that anarchists are controlled by government itself. The Illuminati were a network of intellectuals who argued for self-government and against private property, yet the public is now often told that they were (and are) the very group that controls governments and defends private property around the world. Lagalisse intervenes in such misinformation. Studying anarchism as a historical object, Occult Features of Anarchism also shows how the development of leftist theory and practice within clandestine masculine public spheres continues to inform contemporary anarchist understandings of the 'political,' in which men's oppression by the state becomes the prototype for power in general. Readers behold how gender and religion become privatised in radical counterculture, a historical process intimately linked to the privatisatio… (more)
User reviews
This slender volume contains a lot of food for thought. After methodological preliminaries, "Supreme Magus" Erica Lagalisse supplies a history of modern esoteric movements with attention to their
"Are anarchists truly interested in mobilizing people and their discontent into resistance movements? Or is the priority among activists to distinguish one's self as having 'good politics' and protect their small, safe social enclave?" (101)
The author's academic discipline is anthropology, so in both the diachronic history and synchronic analyses, her perspective takes an ethnographic orientation. She anticipates two and a half audiences for her work here. She expects both scholars and activists to benefit from her overview and to pursue the many worthwhile resources for inquiry indicated by her footnotes. (Some of these references were new to me, and I will indeed be chasing them down.) In addition, she expresses "hope that some persons identified as 'conspiracy theorists' read it and feel both productively challenged and validated by my words" (110).
With a different motive than those "anarchist academics" asking Lagalisse "to authorize my texts by citing Carl Schmitt" (87), I could not help noticing a couple of key sources missing from her references, which would complement the exposition that she has undertaken in the first part of the book. Godwin's Theosophical Enlightenment remains a helpful unveiling of the leftist valences of occultism and its forebears, while Couliano's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance gives further insight on those topics for which Lagalisse appears to have relied on the work of Frances Yates, and reaches conclusions about the modern transformations of hermetic magic similar to those intimated in the final paragraph of Occult Features of Anarchism.
Lagalisse offers brief but trenchant discussions of some of the shibboleths of 21st-century social critique, including "cultural appropriation" (75-6) and "intersectionality" (97-101). Honestly, the book would have been worth reading for these bits alone, but to have them treated in the larger context of this discussion of esoteric history and political culture is highly worthwhile.