For forty years, scholars have tried to define esotericism. Faivre proposed a form of thought with six components. Hanegraaff traced a history of rejected knowledge. Bergunder called the word an empty signifier that means whatever a given era needs it to mean. Asprem broke the whole thing down into cognitive building blocks. Each definition corrected the previous one. None of them settled anything.

Recently I read a chapter by Dimitry Okropiridze that explains why. His argument is simple and, once seen, hard to unsee.

Whenever we interpret anything, we face a choice with only two options. Either the concept determines what the phenomenon means, or the phenomenon determines what the concept means.

Concept first, or thing first. The essentialists put the thing first: esotericism exists, and our definitions try to catch it.

The constructionists put the concept first: “esotericism” is a label, and the label creates what it appears to describe.

Okropiridze shows that the whole history of definitions is a pendulum swinging between these two poles, and that the pendulum can never stop, because the two directions are mutually exclusive and yet both necessary. He calls this the antinomy of interpretation. His advice to scholars: stop trying to merge the poles. Become a commuter instead, someone who travels between them, knowingly, without pretending the two cities are one.

I find this liberating, for a reason Okropiridze does not draw out. The pendulum only swings if you insist on defining the category. The moment you change the question, it stops mattering.

Ask not “what is esotericism?” but “what does esoteric training do to the one who trains?” and the antinomy loses its grip. A training system, Bardon’s ten steps, a pranayama curriculum, a monastic rule, is not a category waiting for a definition. It is an ordered sequence of exercises with standards of completion.

You can study it the way you study any instrument: how it is built, what it produces, whether its results repeat. The endless question of whether the material is “really” esoteric becomes a librarian’s question, useful for shelving, irrelevant for the work.

And here is the part that made me smile. Every serious practitioner is already Okropiridze’s commuter, and has been for centuries. In disciplined inner work you learn, early and painfully, to separate two things: what appears, and what it means. A light behind closed eyes appears; that is a report.

The tradition says it is the astral plane, or purified prana, or a symptom of eye strain; those are interpretations. The report belongs to the phenomenon-first direction. The interpretation belongs to the concept-first direction. The trained observer travels between them daily, keeps the ticket stubs, and never confuses the two cities. What philosophy of interpretation now recommends to scholars as a sophisticated methodological posture is, in the inner laboratory, simply the first skill you acquire, or you get nowhere.

So the good news hidden in forty years of definitional failure is this: the failure was never about the material. It was about the direction of the question. Asked from the outside, esotericism dissolves into a pendulum. Asked from the inside, from within the training, there was never a paradox at all. There was only work, its instruments, and the discipline of describing what they do.

By the way….is it Esoterism or Esotericism

A sharper question than it looks, because the two forms are not free variants; they mark camps.

“Esoterism” is the older and more literal English rendering of the French ésotérisme (the 1828 coinage your paper’s intro mentions via Hanegraaff). It survived mainly in one lineage: the Traditionalists. English translations of René Guénon (1886-1951) and Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) consistently use “esoterism,” and Schuon even titled a book Esoterism as Principle and as Way. In that lineage the word carries the full religionist load: esoterism as the inner, transcendent core of all authentic traditions, the perennial doctrine itself. Whoever writes “esoterism” in English today is, whether they intend it or not, wearing Traditionalist colours.

“Esotericism” (built on the adjective esoteric plus -ism) is the form the academic field standardised on, and the standardisation was itself a piece of boundary work of exactly the kind your paper analyses. Faivre’s translated works, Hanegraaff’s entire oeuvre, the Amsterdam chair, and not least ESSWE, the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism, all use the longer form. The extra syllable quietly signals: we study this as a historical and cultural category, we do not profess it as a doctrine. It is a shibboleth, one of those small lexical passwords by which the field recognises its own.

So even the spelling is boundary work: ‘esoterism’ is the Traditionalists’ word, ‘esotericism’ the scholars’, and the missing syllable marks the border.” Bytheway here my confession: behind my esotericism there is an esoterism: behind the writing, a doing.