Throughout history, esoteric beliefs and practices have been frequently outlawed, criminalized, and scandalized. The panelists in this session all explore novel scholarly approaches to the study of esotericism and the law. Maria Koutsouris’s paper explores how Marsilio Ficino’s fear of inquisitorial scrutiny influenced his portrayal of polytheism. Marla Segol’s paper shows how medieval and early modern kabbalistic interpretations of the Song of Songs led to widespread condemnation, litigation, and punishment of practitioners. Alexander Rocklin’s paper traces social and moral panics in Trinidad, revealing social tensions connected to anti-witchcraft laws, esoteric practice, and race.
In this presentation, I explore how Marsilio Ficino’s fear of inquisitorial scrutiny influenced his portrayal of polytheism. Ficino was subjected to Papal investigation after he published Three Books of Life due to the work’s portrayal of magic. This paper argues that the threat of inquisition led him to obscure his polytheistic cosmology, central to his magical praxis, particularly in his Platonic Theology. Ficino based his cosmological model on Plato’s concept of the 'One,' which preserved the autonomy of Greek deities. However, Ficino aligned his language with Christian monotheism to avoid persecution. His inclusion of Orphic hymns and his treatment of gods and goddesses, such as Jupiter and Nemisis, demonstrates Ficino’s cautious integration of ancient polytheism in a Christian intellectual theater. I hope to reframe Ficino’s work within the context of polytheism. I urge a reconsideration of the legacy of Platonism and challenge the traditional Christian-centric interpretation of the philosophy.
The Song of Songs is key to articulating the sefirotic cosmology of kabbalah, its conceptions of the human body, its kinships, its relationships cosmos and divine, and its capacity to act on both through ritualized sexuality. Over time, these kabbalistic interpretations of the Song of Songs are used to innovate ritual performances that push orthodox, nomian conceptions of the power of the body past its limits and into heterodox antinomian practices that led to widespread condemnation, litigation, and punishment of practitioners. At the same time, and by similar strategies, each iteration is grounded in its time and place and in dialogue with the discourses and practices of its neighbors. In this essay I examine these synthetic interpretations and ritual performances in kabbalistic texts from the 13th to the 17th Centuries to show how they are all part of a cumulative orthodox tradition leading from sacred sexuality to self-sexuality and heterodoxy.
Moral panics are revealing of social anxieties, popular critiques, and tensions bubbling up from beneath the surface of a community. In this paper I trace a series of up-swells of rumors and “mob” actions connected to an esoteric boogieman in Trinidad called Gumbo Glisse. According to popular accounts, Gumbo Glisse uses devil dealings and esoteric books in order to menace and mesmerize unsuspecting victims. I argue that the initial appearances of Gumbo and the mass vigilante justice that followed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest social tensions connected to anti-witchcraft laws, esoteric practice, and race as well as emerging disquiet over oil extraction in the colony.