The main SHWEP podcast is a roughly-chronological historical narrative: it starts way-back-when and moves forward from there. However, Episodes 0-4 are introductory materials. If you are a newcomer to the podcast, Episode Zero introduces the concept behind it. If you are a newcomer to the history of western esotericism, check out Episodes One, Two and Three, which provide a lot of useful background. If you want to skip the intro and start exploring the nitty-gritty of the history of western esotericism, start with Episode Four and go from there.
If you want to explore further, be sure to check out the SHWEP Oddcast, which features interviews with specialists that have not yet been integrated into the main SHWEP chronology.
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We let the tape run and turn from what our evidence for early Islām is to the scholarship which got us to where we can assess this evidence at all. Fred Donner gives us a window into the academic study of Islamic origins over the last hundred years or so.
We discuss what little we know and how much we don't know about the nature of the early ‘Believers' movement’, the nature and origins of the Qur'ān, the curious case of the so-called Constitution of Medinah, and what went on during the earliest decades of the Arab conquests. Fred Donner is our guide into unknown territory.
We let the tape run, discussing languages, and what ‘the classics’ is supposed to mean, the contrafactual proposition that the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after the first world war was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century, the question of the ‘wastebasket of history model’ of western esotericism and how relevant it is to the Greater West model, and the magical war being fought for the future, and the need for warriors to get the language right.
We welcome Matthew Melvin-Koushki back to the show to discuss how we might improve our historical picture of western esotericism by including the vast majority of the surviving historical dossier of western esotericism. There's only one problem: in order to do this, we need to embrace the Islamicate world as a major part of the west.
With Episode 200 the SHWEP has reached a milestone of sorts. We are in the seventh century, and the world-order suddenly changes irrevocably as a new political force arises from Arabia: the Believers. We discuss three main respects in which the history of Islam is the history of western esotericism.
We discuss one of the lesser-known, but most esoterically-important, classics of Syriac spiritual literature, the Book of the Holy Hierotheos. Hierotheos was said to have been the teacher of Dionysius the Areopagite, but he wrote in Syriac, and taught a suspiciously-Evagrian practice of ascent to god.
We turn to the questions: What is ‘mystical’ in the Corpus Dionysiacum? What is esoteric? The answers we come up with involve pretty much every aspect of the western esoteric traditions, and, after all the initiatory liturgy, esoteric scriptural hermeneutics, and theandric activity are cleared away, there remains the ascent to ‘the ray of the divine shadow’.
We dive further (or is that climb higher?) into the divine darkness and what can(not) be said about it. Much of what can be said comes from Proclus, it turns out, but then the Pseudo-Dionysios takes it to the next level. Or does he?
Into the divine darkness of a hyper-non-existent god walks the Pseudo-Dionysios. In this episode we join many esoteric currents from the antique and late-antique past into a new synthesis which will forever shape western esotericism going forward.
We are delighted to speak with Anthony Kaldellis about ‘Byzantium’, fabled empire full of Greek-speaking Romans which never fell until the fifteenth century, and which plays an outsize role in the history of western esotericism. Come for the historiographical debates about the term ‘Byzantine’, stay for the ‘Byzantine’ court astrology.
Plotinus said that our task is not to be good, but to be god. In this interview we explore what that meant to later Platonists, from Iamblichus to Olympiodorus and taking in a host of thinkers in-between. The answer given is apophatic, but we also learn that divinisation may be closer than we suspect.
We discuss three of the most important thinkers from the final generations of philosophical teaching at Alexandria. One is an upstart Christian. Two are esoteric Platonists of the Golden Chain. One may or may not have been an alchemist.
We discuss how Platonist philosophical teaching played out at Alexandria before Justinian's edict of 529 and in its aftermath. Featuring cameo appearances from the fall of the western Roman empire and Horapollo's Hieroglyphika.
We follow Damascius' tale from the final flowering of the Golden Chain at Athens in the 470's through a decline and fall of philosophic teaching at Alexandria, and chaos at Athens following the death of Proclus. Our book ends in disjointed fragments, which is weirdly appropriate.
We begin our read-through, exploring the philosophic and religious cultures at Athens and Alexandria from the days of Hypatia down to the height of Proclus' career. Come for the prosopography of many extraordinary religious and philosophical characters of late antiquity, stay for Isidore's theurgic bird-imitations.
In the first part of a Storytime read-through of Damascius' great, gossipy account of the late-Platonist life, we come to grips with the messy text as it survives, and discuss some main themes of this fascinating, fragmentary work.
We discuss the great Damascius, final scholarch of the Athenian Academy, with Sara Rappe. Things become very apophatic.
We discuss Justinian's great church, Hagia Sophia, the gem of Constantinople and of Orthodox Christianity. We then look at a number of theories out there which read Hagia Sophia as encoding esoteric messages beneath her Orthodox exterior, and use this case-study as a springboard for discussing the thorny problems involved in interpreting architecture, especially esoteric architecture.
We discuss the fascinating town of Ḥarrān (in present-day Türkiye), a place known from late antiquity until at least the eleventh century for its continued tradition of astral, polytheist worship. Kevin van Bladel tells us much to enthral us about this place, but also crushes the dream of a continued tradition of Athenian Late Platonism at Ḥarrān.
We discuss the life, times, and reign of Justinian, ‘probably the most consequential Roman emperor, at least since Constantine, and maybe since Augustus.’ He transformed the empire; nothing would be the same after his reign. Said reign also saw the closure of the Athenian academy and a number of crucial crises within Christianity, all of which are essential for the history of western esotericism.
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