Occult Bohemia: Magic and Nationalism in Central Europe

ongoing

The project's objective is to understand and analyse ties between occultism and ethnicity and nationalism. Scholars discussed ethnicity and nationalism mostly with regard to German and Nazi occultism, however, Slavic countries also drawn interest recently and remain unexplored since there is a substantial scholarship on the occultism in western Europe and its world globalization, while eastern and central Europe has been neglected until recently. The project fills these knowledge gaps by investigating the Czech occult milieu and its relation to nation and ethnicity between 1890–1945 as a representative case of Slavic occultism. Project's hypothesis is that despite external and outer differences, both Slavic and German occultism is based upon the same shared set of assumptions and concerns. The project challenges the current hypothesis which presupposes an intrinsic difference between the German and Slavic occultism. The research methodology involves a combination of a discursive-historical approach focused on the analysis of topoi. This is supplemented by the comparative method. Although discursive approaches have been used in several studies in the study of esotericism, this project aims to develop such approaches further by focusing on topoi analysis. The project contributes to a better understanding of Central European nationalisms by interlinking research on nationalism and alternative forms of religion and bringing into mutual conversation thus far separated debates in the study of esotericism and nationalism. The project will also introduce new material, unknown to an international scholarly audience, filling a gap in religious and political history in 19th- and 20th-century central Europe. In sum, the project proposes originality and innovation on the level of theory (hypothesis), methodology advancement, presents new material, and interlinks several research fields and approaches.