Across cultures and centuries, forms of knowing have emerged that do not fit within institutional epistemologies. They are experiential, symbolic, or transformative rather than analytic or instrumental. Wouter J. Hanegraaff famously called this domain rejected knowledge, the “dustbin” of Western intellectual history, populated by the occult, the mystical, and the magical. Yet rejection is only one of several mechanisms by which knowledge falls outside the academic sphere. This essay proposes a new conceptual matrix that distinguishes hidden, occult, rejected, metaphysical, suppressed, liminal, and sapiential modes of extra-institutional knowledge. Together they define a wider umbrella: trans-academic knowledge, forms of understanding that exist beyond but not necessarily against academia, validated through lived experience, inner observation, and contemplative practice.
1. Rejected Knowledge and the Genealogy of Exclusion
Hanegraaff (1996) traced the genealogy of Western esotericism as the history of what the Enlightenment left behind, rejected knowledge disqualified by the rise of rationalism and the modern university. His point was not to romanticize the rejected, but to reveal that academic canons are historically contingent. The “academic canon” refers to a body of works, authors and texts. The selection of which works are “essential” was determined by the politics, prejudices, social hierarchies, and prevailing cultural values of the time they were selected. The process of critical inquiry or analysis shows that the essential, foundational works studied in schools and universities were not chosen because they are universally the “best” or “truest,” but rather because the people with power at a specific point in history, usually privileged groups, chose them to reflect and reinforce their own values and worldview. Those fragments of knowledge not fitting in where easily ‘rejected’.
“Rejected” names a social process, not an ontological flaw. Foucault (1976) described a similar mechanism when he spoke of subjugated knowledges: local, discontinuous knowings buried beneath official discourses. Both highlight the politics of epistemic legitimacy.
2. Hidden and Occult: The Logic of Concealment
Not all that lies outside the academy is rejected; some knowledge is deliberately hidden. Esoteric and initiatory traditions use concealment pedagogically, not defensively. The occult (from occultus, hidden) refers to realities veiled from ordinary perception, accessible only through inner transformation. Occult knowledge is thus epistemically hidden, not institutionally forbidden. Its boundary is metaphysical, not social. Occult knowledge ,when it surfaces, can of course become rejected.
3. Metaphysical Knowledge: Beyond the Material Paradigm
Metaphysical knowledge engages questions of being, consciousness, and causality beyond material empiricism. It once formed the crown of the philosophical disciplines but was gradually displaced by methodological naturalism. While metaphysics now survives mostly in philosophy departments, its experiential correlates, mysticism, contemplative science, visionary phenomenology, have been disjoined from it. These modes seek direct acquaintance with reality’s structure through introspection, a form of what William James called noetic experience.
4. Suppressed Knowledge: Power and Censorship
At times, exclusion becomes suppression. Knowledge threatening theological or political power has historically been silenced: alchemical manuscripts burned, heretical cosmologies banned, indigenous medicine outlawed. It became forbidden knowledge.
Suppression implies an active power relation; its modern analogues appear when research funding or publication norms exclude anomalous findings that contradict economic or ideological interests. This is the epistemic violence Santos (2014) calls attention to in his Epistemologies of the South.
5. Liminal Knowledge: The Threshold of Acceptance
Some ideas hover between exclusion and incorporation, what Turner (1969) called the liminal phase. Liminal knowledge occupies this threshold: emerging paradigms such as complexity theory, consciousness studies, or contemplative neuroscience begin in liminality and may later become normalized. Haraway’s (1988) concept of situated knowledges already hinted that every scientific perspective is partial; liminal knowledge makes that partiality explicit by proposing new frameworks of embodiment and subjectivity.
6. Sapiential Knowledge (alchemistic psychology): The Wisdom Dimension
Beyond hidden or rejected domains lies sapiential knowledge, the wisdom that transcends both institution and rebellion. Found in mystical theology, Sufism, Taoism, and contemplative phenomenology, sapiential knowledge is experiential and transformative. It seeks not to explain the world but to realize unity with it. Polanyi’s (1966) notion of tacit knowledge, “we know more than we can tell”, offers a secular echo of this dimension. This knowledge can of course also be ‘rejected’.
7. The Matrix of Knowledge States
| Dimension | Defining Mechanism | Relation to Academia | Typical Domain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hidden | Secrecy or initiation | Parallel | Mystical schools, initiations |
| Occult | Concealment by nature of reality | Parallel/alternative | Hermeticism, alchemy |
| Rejected | Historical exclusion | Opposed | Esotericism, parapsychology |
| Metaphysical | Trans-material ontology | Divergent | Philosophy, mysticism |
| Suppressed | Power-based censorship | Subjugated | Heresy, indigenous cosmologies |
| Liminal | Transitional status | Emerging | Consciousness studies, integrative medicine |
| Sapiential | Experiential wisdom | Independent | Contemplative and visionary traditions |
8. Toward a New Umbrella: Trans-Academic Knowledge
The preceding categories form a spectrum rather than fixed boxes. Their shared feature is that they fall outside institutional validation, yet each possesses its own methods of verification, initiation, direct experience, symbolic resonance, or transformative effect.
For this broader ecology of knowings, the neutral term trans-academic knowledge is proposed. It denotes knowledge that moves across, beyond, and sometimes through the academic domain while maintaining coherence, rigor, and experiential authenticity.
Trans-academic knowledge is not anti-scientific; it is para-scientific and inter-subjectively verifiable within its own communities of practice. It includes contemplative phenomenology, mystical epistemology, visionary cosmology, and other modes where the knower can become transformed by the act of knowing.
9. Conclusion: Reweaving the Ecology of Knowledge
The modern world has inherited a fractured epistemology: institutional knowledge commands legitimacy, while interior and symbolic forms remain invisible. Today, we have a divided view of knowledge: In other words – the systems and institutions (like science or government) decide what is true, while personal feelings, symbols, and spiritual insights are dismissed. Yet as consciousness studies, contemplative research, and integrative sciences expand, the boundary between “inside” and “outside” begins to blur. Recognizing trans-academic knowledge as a legitimate umbrella concept may allow dialogue between the sciences of matter and the sciences of meaning.
Such a dialogue requires not belief but epistemic hospitality, the willingness to let different forms of knowing coexist within a single, plural field of human inquiry.
Shunyam Adhibhu
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