Esotericism and politics are frequently intertwined: esotericists have played an active role in political movements and organizations and esoteric concepts and frameworks have served as blueprint for political theorizing. The papers in this session engage the intersection between esotericism and cosmopolitanism, nationalism, conspiracism, and sovereignty.
What futures can be conjured from an ancient mythical place? This paper examines the Theosophical Society's use of the Sanskrit concept of Āryāvarta — the ancient Vedic "land of the noble ones" — as a vehicle for a distinctive vision of global spiritual futurity. Rather than treating Theosophy as a nostalgic movement, it argues that the Society's reimagining of Āryāvarta functioned as a forward-looking cosmopolitan project and a blueprint for a coming Universal Brotherhood of Humanity. Drawing on primary sources including Blavatsky, Judge, and Olcott’s writings, the paper traces three phases of the concept's evolution, from its Orientalist origins, through the Society's tumultuous alliance with Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj, to its gradual transformation into a model of transnational spiritual cosmopolitanism. The Theosophical Āryāvarta, this paper contends, was always oriented toward a future not yet arrived.
George William Russell, "AE" (1867–1935), was a central figure in both the Irish Nationalist movement and the Dublin Theosophical Society, yet the relationship between these two commitments remains understudied. This paper examines three episodes in AE's work to demonstrate that his nationalism and his Theosophy must be read together. In The Irish Theosophist (1892–1897), AE reinterprets Irish legend through a Theosophical lens, presenting Irish adepts as exemplars of Blavatsky's Wisdom-Religion and prophesying a "Celtic Avatar" who would displace British rule. In The National Being (1917), a Theosophical spiritual anthropology undergirds his call for proletarian emancipation through agricultural cooperation. Finally, The Avatars (1933) fictionalizes the Avatar's arrival as a critique of Ireland's stagnation. Tracing AE's thought across these works reveals a reciprocal relationship: nationalist texts shaped his Theosophy, while Theosophical concepts grounded his nationalist commitments. AE's career thus illustrates Theosophy's capacity for mobilization in a revolutionary, anti-imperial register.
This paper examines the reception of works of popular conspiracy fiction in order to develop on Eve Sedgwick’s critique of Robert Hofstadter and demonstrate the ubiquity of paranoid and conspiratorial thinking in contemporary culture. It suggests that a playful orientation to works produced, marketed, and (in most cases) read as fiction allow conspiratorial consumers to blur the edges of reality, blending truth and fantasy.
Ultimately, in a world increasingly dominated by games, playful paranoia is not only the domain of the fringe conspiracy theorist, but the basic stance of political participation. Via the dazzling and disorienting toy of the internet, an American “conspiracy nation” has transformed into a global phenomenon.
When Shakespeare’s Macbeth fantasizes about “jumping the life to come,” he voices a temptation that continues to animate modern theories of sovereignty: the dream of securing the future by collapsing time itself. The political afterlives of Friedrich Nietzsche reveal divergent responses to this impulse. Neoreactionary political theory—most notably in the Patchwork model proposed by Curtis Yarvin—draws upon Nietzsche’s language of hierarchy and the Übermensch while detaching it from the temporal ontology that grounds it: the doctrine of eternal recurrence. In Yarvin’s neocameralist vision, sovereignty becomes a project of security and futurist stabilization, seeking to eliminate contingency through technocratic monarchy. By contrast, the anarchist esotericism of Peter Lamborn Wilson retains Nietzsche’s Dionysian temporality and its yea-saying. Wilson’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone imagines sovereignty as fleeting, ecstatic rupture—carnival time rather than fortified permanence. Juxtaposing these interpretations reveals that there is more than one way to play the King.