The phrase “the dark enlightenment” occupies a highly contested and volatile space in our contemporary political moment. On the one hand, the phrase is linked to the writing of alt-right thinkers Cutis Yarvin and Nick Land who use it to signal their rejection of democracy as a viable path toward freedom. Despite Yarvin’s longtime status as a controversial neoreactionary blogger, the tide seems to be turning thanks in part to Vice President J.D. Vance. Likewise, Land’s book, The Dark Enlightenment, currently occupies the number one spot in Amazon’s postmodern literary criticism list. These thinkers offer an anti-humanist alternative to what they understand as the failure of the Enlightenment project. Undergirding their commitment to accelerationism, the rapid intensification of technological change and unregulated capitalism in hopes of destabilizing existing social systems, is a growing commitment to esoteric and occult beliefs.
On the very opposite end of the political spectrum, feminist, queer, and decolonial scholars have turned towards esotericism as a way out of Enlightenment epistemes. For example, in his book, Dark Enlightenment, Kennet Granholm (2014) notes that “We are dealing with a situation where esoteric discourse, practices, and philosophies were becoming increasingly popular, in stark contrast to their relegation to the realm of ‘rejected knowledge’ during the Reformation and the Enlightenment.” Likewise, Nathan Snaza (2024) turns to what he terms “endarkenment” to theorize a wide array of practices that call for “endarkened logics of otherwise sociality.” Drawing on the work of Ashon Crawly and Black feminist thinker Cynthia Dillard, Sanza finds in endarkenment a liberatory framework with the unique capacity to facilitate communitarian ethics, care, and resistance.
Because esotericism acts as a ballast between these vastly different political positions, this paper returns to the writing of medieval mystic Jacob Böhme to understand how his cosmology and apocalypticism developed into the theological system promoted by Helena Blavatsky and The Theosophical Society. Many Theosophists in the nineteenth century understood Böhme’s visionary texts to be the key to accessing lost forms of ancient knowledge or Gnosis. Although this view fell out of favor with scholars in the twentieth century, some esotericists still understand themselves as continuing a timeless lineage or revivifying some version of a lost ancient tradition. This approach to esotericism looks for universal truth in recurring themes and beliefs across world religions and is aligned with perennialism/traditionalism. A version of perennialism is evident in the work of religious studies scholar Mircea Eliade (2004) when he argues that shamanism features “archaic techniques of ecstasy that are of almost universal occurrence.” Highlighting the shortcomings of this popular understanding, Kennet Granholm (2014) notes, “While most current specialists on Western esotericism regard perennialism as an object of study rather than a tenable scholarly position, the notion of an ‘occult tradition’ is not uncommon among non-specialists.” Traditionalist philosophy, which seeks universal truth from an anti-modern perspective, is frequently espoused by far-right groups invested in recovering a lineage of ethnic purity and lost knowledge. This is certainly the case with the alt-right version of dark enlightenment. On the other hand, perennialism/traditionalism are at odds with feminist and decolonial scholarship, which prefers to problematize universalizing narratives.
This distinction points to another significant rift in understandings of the dark enlightenment: drastically differing interpretations of scientific racism and social Darwinism. Although some scholars of esotericism have attempted to exempt Theosophy from the scientific racism of the nineteenth century by emphasizing the universalizing aspect of Theosophical cosmology, which prioritizes the oneness of humanity over racial differences (Santucci 2008), it is challenging to interpret Blavatsky’s elevation of the “Aryan” race as a purely spiritual endeavor. For example, in The Secret Doctrine, she writes:
Mankind is obviously divided into god-informed men and lower human creatures. The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called (Blavatsky 1888: 421).
This racist sentiment is complicated a few pages later as she muses that if the continent of Europe were to disappear tomorrow and the African tribes were scattered across the earth, those who make up the civilized and uncivilized nations could easily be inverted. She concludes that “the reason given for dividing humanity into superior and inferior races falls to the ground and becomes a fallacy” (Blavatsky 1888: 425). While Theosophical understandings of race are clearly varied, spiritualized, and often contradictory, Blavatsky’s writing does evidence how “constructions of whiteness shape and operate” esoteric beliefs and practices (Bakker 2021: 162).
The paper concludes by turning J. Kameron Carter’s reconfiguration of ecstasy as a response to modern colonialism and anti-blackness in his recent book, The Anarchy of Black Religion. Carter writes, “I’m interested in such terms as strange, mystical, heretical, and so on not as signifiers of a time lag (unmodern benightedness) but as signifiers of dissonance and dissidence...that exceed terms of order, terms set in motion through the modern (re)invention of religion as bound up with the advent of racial capitalism.” Carter’s reworking of religion and his understanding of the mystical as a signifier of dissonance and dissidence offer a path of resistance against perennialism and anti-blackness. Reconsidering the category of religion beyond the purview of its recent invention, Carter seeks the strange and mystical as markers of excess and difference. Esotericism is, of course, also a modern reinvention, but if we carefully attend to the moments of dissonance and dissidence that fascinate Carter, the possibility of a future that does not acquiesce to the anti-democratic neoreactionary version of the dark enlightenment is possible.
The phrase "the dark enlightenment" occupies a highly contested and volatile space in our contemporary political moment. On the one hand, it is linked to the writing of neoreactionary thinkers Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land who use it to signal their rejection of democracy and racial equality as a viable path toward freedom. On the very opposite end of the political spectrum, feminist, queer, and decolonial scholars have turned towards a different version of the dark enlightenment or endarkenment as a liberatory framework with the unique capacity facilitate communitarian ethics, care, and resistance. Because esotericism acts as a ballast between these vastly different political positions, this paper examines the writings of medieval theosophist and mystic Jacob Böhme to understand how his cosmology and apocalypticism shaped contemporary debates about race, technology, and the end of time.