Occult Bohemia: Magic and Nationalism in Central Europe

The project's objective is to understand and analyse ties between occultism and ethnicity and nationalism. Scholars discussed
ethnicity and nationalism mostly with regard to German and Nazi occultism, however, Slavic countries also drawn interest recently
and remain unexplored since there is a substantial scholarship on the occultism in western Europe and its world globalization, while
eastern and central Europe has been neglected until recently. The project fills these knowledge gaps by investigating the Czech
occult milieu and its relation to nation and ethnicity between 1890–1945 as a representative case of Slavic occultism. Project's
hypothesis is that despite external and outer differences, both Slavic and German occultism is based upon the same shared set of
assumptions and concerns. The project challenges the current hypothesis which presupposes an intrinsic difference between the
German and Slavic occultism. The research methodology involves a combination of a discursive-historical approach focused on the
analysis of topoi. This is supplemented by the comparative method. Although discursive approaches have been used in several
studies in the study of esotericism, this project aims to develop such approaches further by focusing on topoi analysis. The project
contributes to a better understanding of Central European nationalisms by interlinking research on nationalism and alternative forms
of religion and bringing into mutual conversation thus far separated debates in the study of esotericism and nationalism. The project
will also introduce new material, unknown to an international scholarly audience, filling a gap in religious and political history in 19thand
20th-century central Europe. In sum, the project proposes originality and innovation on the level of theory (hypothesis),
methodology advancement, presents new material, and interlinks several research fields and approaches.