WE CONTROL EVERYTHING

- Welcome, seeker,
let me teach you comparative religion!

 

Two quotes from the introduction to "The Occult Roots of Religious Studies" (2021), edited by Yves Mühlematter and Helmut Zander. The entire book seems to be available free at Academia.edu, so I might read all of it when I get the time. Another contribution to the genre "everyone was really an occultist", apparently. Bingo! 

>>>For example, the anthroposophical milieu has not been researched sufficiently. One could think of the anthroposophist Uno Donner, a Finnish industrialist, who donated a chair for religious and cultural history to the University of Turku/Åbo and and also donated/held one of the largest book collections on religion in Northern Europe. 

>>>Another would be the German Diether Lauenstein, priest of the Christian Community, who learned Sanskrit from the Marburg indologist Johannes Nobel, habilitated (presumably) in 1944 at the University of Greifswald, where he subsequently received a teaching assignment for Indo-European Studies and Sanskrit. He was involved in the founding of the Herdecke community hospital (a nucleus of the University of Witten-Herdecke) and died as a supporter of apartheid in South West Africa (modern-day Namibia). We thank Robin Schmidt for the clues.

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>>>However, this problem is not specific to representatives of the cultural sciences; rather, these blurred boundaries can also and especially be found in the “hard” natural sciences, where an even clearer distinction between science and pseudo-science, or religious studies, is often assumed. 

>>>Such examples include Marie Curie, who not only stood in the laboratory, but also attended spiritual seances, or Albert Einstein, who was not only a theorist in the field of physics, but also read Blavatsky and attended lectures by Rudolf Steiner. 

>>>Georg Cantor, the inventor of set theory in mathematics, who was interested in both Catholic theories of infinity and the existence of the “true” Rosicrucians, may be added to this group, along with the mathematician Jan Arnoldus Schouten, the explorer of differential geometry, who was also interested in Theosophy, or Thomas Alva Edison, who not only invented the light bulb and the two-way telegraph, but was also a temporary member of Theosophical Society Adyar (partly for economic reasons, e.g. to better sell his products in India?). 

>>>The separation between the humanities and the natural sciences, which was established in university practice – though always criticised in theory of science – never disappeared on an individual level.