Queer occultism

Abstract

The rise of German sexology in the nineteenth century coincides with the rise of occult discourse and practice. The former has always maintained an important status in queer German studies. Scholars have historically turned with great interest to the works of, among others, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Albert Moll, and Magnus Hirschfeld, in order to advance the famous Foucauldian notion that the homosexual was born in the clinic. And with good reason: early sexologists produced frameworks through which to study queer life, generated discursive strategies to define and analyze it, and turned to various forms of media engagement including scientific writing and popular pamphleteering to disseminate their work to the public. No wonder, then, that their epistemic practices and broader advocacy work take center stage in scholarship on late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century queer German studies. But when it comes to occult discourse, which has likewise presented epistemic frameworks by which to define and engage queer life, queer German studies has often been somewhat hesitant to engage it seriously.

My sense is that the occult's epistemological foundations, which directly compete with and reach beyond the purview of Enlightenment epistemologies, rendered occultism as a cultural practice too fringe, even ridiculous, to warrant serious scholarly engagement. But such a view keeps scholars from a rather sizable cultural archive replete with information about how queer people navigated their lives, defined their relation to others, and conceived of how to engage with the world on terms often radically different than those that come into view when studying the history of sexuality through sexology. Occult practitioners did not favor empiricism. They instead pursued “unreasonable” methods that drew on divination, sensing, and speculation to glean information about the world. And, in so doing, they most certainly engaged queer methods and drew participation from queer people. That occult practice and queerness have a strong connection in our times today is no secret—see, for instance, Nathan Snaza's exciting new scholarship on queer feminist esotericism and contemporary liberation movements. But the connection between queer people and occult practice has a longer history, one that is particularly rich in the German-language context around 1900.

One site for scholarly engagement on matters of queer occultism in German studies is Hans Freimark's remarkable study Okkultismus und Sexualität (1909). For Freimark, the rise of the occult during his time is a phenomenon directly tied to a depreciation of empiricism as a guiding mechanism by which to know the world. In his assessment, occultists provided the public what science could not: access to deeper understandings of phenomena that reach beyond the capacities of scientific tools. These phenomena pertain to various discourses on human spirituality, psychic depth, and mystical forces said to connect all life together. What they have in common is that they are all in some way “übersinnliche Vorgänge und Vorkommnisse” particularly of interest to queer people (Freimark 3). In fact, in his ethnographic accounts, Freimark repeatedly makes the point that people whose sexual practices deviated from the norm or whose embodied lives departed from gender binaries historically served divinatory functions as priests or other types of mediators between the material and immaterial world. He also notes that queer living means having to view and experience the world differently and that, in doing so, queer people come to be more attuned to the operations of the world. This, in turn, affords them certain divinatory capacities of apprehending worldly and beyond-worldly phenomena. In Freimark's study, queer people are naturally predisposed to occultist practice.

Eugène Wilhelm, a prolific sexologist working in Hirschfeld's circle who published his work under the pseudonym Numa Praetorius, lists Freimark's study in the yearly bibliography of notable books published in sexology in the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, a major organ for sexological thought edited by Hirschfeld himself. In other words, despite Freimark's explicit rejection of empiricist thought such as that espoused by most contributors to the Jahrbuch, the editorial board and a major bibliographer for the periodical saw it as an essential publication to understand the growing discourse around sexuality during its time. The inclusion of Freimark's book in a sexological periodical then suggests a complicated relationship between sexology and occult practice, even if practitioners on both sides frequently and vehemently disagreed with one another's practices. Studying the sites of convergence and divergence, how occult thought shaped some sexological writing and how sexology informed occult practitioners, would be an exciting avenue for future research in queer German studies.

Theorists of the queer occult such as Freimark articulated frameworks for understanding queer life in non-sexological terms. But their methods are not without fault. Occultists at times drew on orientalist, racist, and otherwise exclusionary and harmful discursive practices in order to articulate their fascination with and dedication to divinatory practice. As such, their craft—and the occult as a phenomenon overall—warrants rigorous interrogation. But this interrogation would have to be balanced with the fact that occult esotericism—perhaps not so counterintuitively—was never exclusively reserved for the select few. It appealed to a group of people eager to find tools to help them articulate a meaningful relation to the world. Occult practices were a heuristic that drew on speculation, playfulness, and other epistemic procedures that often inspired people to depart from any type of doctrinal program that might have been put into place.

Take, for instance, the first German-language book on tarot and accompanying deck, Der Tarot—die kabbalistische Methode der Zukunftsforschung als Schlüssel zum Okkultismus (1920), which was conceptualized and written by the occultist Ernst Tristan Kurtzahn. The author insists on a clear doctrine for how and by whom tarot is to be used, but bemoans what he anticipates to be a departure from his prescription in practices that he already sees deployed among other tarot users in public settings (Kurtzahn 84). Despite the book's authoritative tone and its author's esoteric leanings that make portions of his system challenging to follow, it was reissued and well received domestically and internationally. The cards have a generative function for users no matter their background. Indeed, the cards’ symbolic order invites speculation that departs from any prescriptivism. In the process of tarot, dominant discourses are revised and shaken up so that new relations to formerly hostile objects can be forged. In this regard, occult thought appears susceptible to what Sara Ahmed calls queer use, namely when an object is used “for a purpose that is ‘very different’ from that which was ‘originally intended’” (Ahmed 199). Indeed, occult practitioners might have done very queer things via these practices, phenomena which certainly deserve the attention of scholars in queer German studies.