Podcast episodes – The Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast (SHWEP)

• Fred Donner on the History of Early Islām

  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.

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  53:35
• Matthew Melvin-Koushki on Islam, ‘the West’, and Western Esotericism

  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.

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  1:04:29
• Introducing Islām

  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.

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  1:13:03
• Paul Pasquesi on the Book of the Holy Hierotheos

  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.

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  57:40
• The Pseudo-Dionysios, the Esoteric, and (Christian) Mysticism

  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’.

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  1:06:05

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