Are there any good academic books that explain this? All I've managed to find is new age woo woo

Can I get a quick rundown on the cyclopedia?

Just read it. It’s an encyclopedia. A reference work for esoterica.

Based recs

Have you read Albert Mackeys encyclopedia on freemasonry?

While it's not academic, Grant's The Magical Revival isn't woo woo.

There are tons of good, serious books about Christian metaphysics. The woo is only really a problem in Eastern religion because most pseuds are attracted to the eastern faiths beacuse they mistake beimg more exotic with greater mysticism.

Rent free

Esoteric knowledge is not the type of thing you will learn in an academic setting, it is experiential, not rational-discursive.

Do you know Hebrew? If not, you've already been filtered.

Is Kabbalah about fusing into the void like other dumb new age buddhist philosophies?

This dudes shelf is fucking stacked

youtu.be/kwl3qc7g7mY

I just noticed his little logo is two hands rubbing

>jewish

holy fuck

The back story on this guy is bizarre. First of all he's not jewish, he grew up in Mississippi and was involved in a school shooting. He had some type of cult called the Kroth in high school and one of the guys in it went nuts and killed his mom and two students en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_High_School_shooting. Afterwards Sledge went on TV and read the most cringy note imaginable from the shooter wlbt.com/2021/06/17/making-mississippi-school-shooter/ scroll down to the Justin Sledge interview

What the fuck? How deep does the rabbithole go on this guy? He's not Jewish but knows Hebrew and Aramaic?

>“I must be realistic,” Sledge pondered in the paper, “who would love such a learned wretch? When people comment, I wish I were as smart as you, I wish I could tell them of the massive sacrifice I have made for my mentality.”

>During his trial, Woodham claimed to have gotten ideas of committing the murders by being involved with Justin Sledge and Grant Boytte. Woodham admitted to being a Satanist, and claimed that Justin Sledge and Grant Boyette had invited him to join "The Kroth." He claimed that they had told him he had "potential to do something great," and promised him that he could get his ex-girlfriend back through black magic.

Attached: 1634959376301.jpg (662x697, 56.46K)

The recs in these two posts are basically all you need, just came in to say that. Moshe Idel has other great stuff like Primeval Evil in Kabbalah, and I've heard Scholem's name thrown around so the rest of his bibliography is probably worth checking out if it relates to the topic.

He is Jewish, but seemingly non-theistic. He wears the kippah and is married to a Rabbi. From the bio on his site:
>Do you believe in God?
>I don't find the conception of god(s) either metaphysically convincing or mythologically desirable, i.e., I have no good reasons to think such beings exist and, given what I have learned about the lot of them, I hope none of them do.
>What are your religious beliefs?
>I am Jewish, belong to the Reconstructionist movement, and closely align myself with the teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, z”l.
>Are you a practitioner of Esotericism, Magic(k), Kabbalah, etc.? Why not?
>No. I have religious reasons but also I don’t find the promises of such practices nor the worldview implied interesting or tempting. “Salvation,” “Enlightenment,” “Gnosis,” etc. just don’t interest me personally as spiritual goals, not to say that they aren’t interesting concepts as such.

>Upon reading this, his English teacher complimented Sledge due to the obvious intelligence dripping from the page. But she also confessed, “Much of this I do not understand.”
Very based. We all do cringey LARPfaggot stuff in highschool, but forming a cult and making your teacher cream herself from not understanding simple verbiage is a better way to do it than most.

>He wears the kippah and is married to a Rabbi.
Women can't be Rabbis

In Reform they can.

That's nothing but a LARP.

>It's a Maya glyph of a hand grasping a fish with the phonetic value being "Tzak," meaning "to conjure a mystical vision." The hand grasping the fish is also keen, the slippery fish isn't easily held so the grasp is always-already slipping away pointing to the concrete (grasping) and the illusive (the slipping away) aspect of mystical experiences.
youtube.com/watch?v=qqsTx0JutsA

This conversation is a LARP. Was this the basis of your claim that he isn't Jewish? How droll.

>geocache failed to load
Anyway to fix this? It's not my adblocker, and I really hope this site isn't missing server data on a less-than-year-old article. I want to see cult autism.

Different user what I meant here is that he's not ethnically jewish he's a convert.

No I mean what's the point of being a "Rabbi" or identifying as "Jewish" if you're not even going to take the faith you ostensibly belong to seriously? There's no point pretending to be a Rabbi if you're not going to actually adhere to the very clear, very obvious traditional exoteric doctrines and rites of the faith

he was also a member of a communist group in university & he got arrested during a protest action in 2011. his doctoral dissertation was on Marx's ethics: digitalcommons.memphis.edu/etd/909/

Ah I see, but where does the claim come from? I'm not even saying it's unlikely, I just don't see it mentioned in either article.

You can seethe about your denominational elitism all you want, but Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism still see themselves as Jewish and are in turn recognized by the wider world as Jewish. Which is ultimately the only thing determining what religious category a group belongs to from a scholarly perspective.

>Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism still see themselves as Jewish and are in turn recognized by the wider world as Jewish
Israel won't let Messianic Jews in

Israel is an illegitimate state whose very existence seeks to delegitimize Jewish identity and security around the world. The state's official policies and stances on matters should be viewed as, at worst, the opposite of Jewish interests. I say this as a neutral academic, no bias.

>I disagree with your political and religious beliefs and/or hate your ethnic origin but I’m still learning from your content. What should I do?
Unless he believs his conversion to Judaism not only made him a Jew, but specifically ethnically Jewish, this doesn't make any sense.

>What is your philosophical, metaphysical worldview?
>I would consider myself a dialectical materialist in the tradition of Structural Marxism. With a little whiskey I am soft on Lukács.
How do you research some of the most beautiful and spiritually deep works in history and become a dialectical materialist in the vein of Marx? He studies the soul yet feels attached to the most soulless ideology in human history.

Because it's fucking cool and your academic interest doesn't need to match your personal beliefs at all.

It's a red flag he doesn't actually understand any of the material that he studies. What would you think of a person who studied medicine and biology in his spare time but was an avowed homeopath?

>It's a red flag he doesn't actually understand any of the material that he studies.
That would need to be substantiated more specifically.
>What would you think of a person who studied medicine and biology in his spare time but was an avowed homeopath?
False comparison because medicine and biology are hard sciences. If this person said only true things about medicine and biology, they would not practice something which runs counter to it. You can study things like religion, culture, and philosophy without being a member or proponent of each specific form because all it takes to make truth statements is to say "this person believed X, these people practice Y, this thought system works like Z," etc.

I appreciate the man more now that I know he isn't himself some kabbalist neo-gnostic new age woowoo-er, because those people are retarded and cannot be trusted to bring neutral, academic information on what historic people actually believed and practiced.

>False comparison because medicine and biology are hard sciences.
You only think it's false because you give "hard sciences" undue epistemological priority over philosophy when it's the other way around, philosophy comes first because philosophy informs your empirical epistemological views about the reliability of the "hard sciences". Truth itself is under the purview of philosophy, science is a mere methodology, and a limited one at that.

>If this person said only true things about medicine and biology, they would not practice something which runs counter to it
Yes that's my point. Except it's true things about metaphysics and philosophy rather than medicine or biology. Same argument still holds true.

This is not an discussion on epistemology. I know you just discovered philosophy and are excited to share these cool ideas, but you're losing track of reality because of it.

>This is not an discussion on epistemology
It wasn't but you decided to bring in a distinction between the "hard sciences" and philosophical inquiry that forced me to point out that your epistemological views come prior to science, not after it. If you weren't making this fundamental error then you wouldn't be trying to distinguish between what you think is the realm of objective knowledge (hard science) and the realm of informed opinion (philosophy)

You can acknowledge the reliability of hard sciences without delving into the murk of epistemology, user. Maybe I'm the retarded one; I'm not studied in philosophy and I'll admit that outright. But whether epistemology comes prior to science or not, science is still universally reliable because its results are consistent regardless of your acceptance of its tenents. Philosophy and mysticism are notoriously poor at predicting, they seek to describe. And if they're a good system, they seek to describe what science cannot, which is a lot.
>but my specific philosophical system makes complete sense and I can prove all of its consistencies and capacity to predict
If you or anyone else really could do this, then there would be much more of a consensus in these fields rather than countless disparate theories and systems.

This link should work if you want to see the interview with Justin Sledge.

My question is on whether this is 100% the same Justin Sledge? I mean, I do see a resemblance and the voice is similar enough. But the quality of the video is kind of poor, and it's just such a bizarre fact if this really is the same Justin Sledge as Esoterica

Oops, forgot the link:
wlbt.com/2021/06/17/making-mississippi-school-shooter/

The Wikipedia article says its him and links to his site at the end of the article. I suppose it could be wrong but how likely is it there are two Justin Sledges out there deeply into Magick and occultism?

Yeah all the videos don't load for me, no idea why.
I'd find it highly unlikely that this isn't the same guy. He probably grew a lot over the years since this incident, as the persona in his videos seem like someone consciously trying NOT to start any wierdo cults around the ideas he discusses.

Do you think we could freak him out if we start commenting on his videos about how he inspired us to form a gnostic commune to share secret magical knowledge

Because Judaic reason sets up God as infinitely pure Being detached from reality; therefore man is but a particular thing, governable entirely by rational laws of motion. This is the kernel of diamat.

The methods and formulas of science are but it's theory is not. If you are a materialist, that is sufficient.

>If you or anyone else really could do this, then there would be much more of a consensus in these fields rather than countless disparate theories and systems.
The Indians and Buddhist do this but they go in opposite of belief sets the average western person holds to an enormous degree, both scientist and layman. The elitist secular beliefs permeate the discussions as necessary in spite of their lacking philosophical or logical backing and make progress difficult due to the drive to treat all religions as Abrahamic ones.

So...Is the word y'all looking for the word 'pseud'`?

No. Though I'm only one of those people, I don't think any of us was looking for pseud.