Workshop (7 November 2025) – Comparing Genealogies of Hidden Knowledge in Global Modernity: Religion, Folklore, and Occultism

Date: November 7, Friday, 2025

Venue: D602, Building 14, Ikebukuro campus, Rikkyo University

 

Schedule:

Sponsored by KAKENHI-PROJECT-25K00515, with the support of the East Asian Network for the Academic Study of Esotericism

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Per Faxneld（Södertörn University）

Abstract:

The lives of pivotal figures in Japanese martial arts are often narrated in a manner that can be labelled hagiographical, conforming quite closely to established academic taxonomies of this religious genre. Said narratives also conform to many of the conventions surrounding what would in folkloristic terminology be called “folk heroes”. Their life stories – as recounted by family, direct disciples, and later practitioners of their martial arts – typically follow an established arc, carry moral lessons, construct a cultural identity (which may be both national and trans-national), and reflect specific values and self-cultivation aspirations. In many cases, they also tell of miraculous deeds, abilities, and experiences. Drawing on research on hagiography and folk hero tales, while focusing on Ueshiba Morihei (植芝 盛平, 1883–1969) as a case study, this talk examines how and why these biographies seem to correspond to the conventions of these genres, but also at which points they diverge from them, and how they are reshaped and renegotiated in a global context. The latter dimension will be approached primarily using texts produced in a North American and Scandinavian setting.

 

Tommy Kuusela (The Institute for Language and Folklore, Uppsala, Sweden)

Abstract:

Stories of a hero with ursine descent are ancient and appear in folktales, folk legends, and myths from a large geographic area around the world. In folklore, what can be labelled “the bear’s son motif, or tale type” can be identified with well-known narratives or tale types where it is only one of several components. Famous heroes of Scandinavia like Beowulf or Bǫðvarr Bjarki have notable bear characteristics, even though the known stories or poems about them do not explicitly say that they were of bear parentage or raised by bears. We find stories of the bear’s son motif from the Middle Ages (i.e. in Saxo Grammaticus’ 13th-century Gesta Danorum) up until the 19th century. In Swedish folklore, there is a legend type collected throughout the country, telling of how a bear kills a pregnant woman and tears the baby out of her womb. For a time, the baby is raised by the bear and becomes known for his extraordinary strength. In this talk, I will describe different examples of ursine descent and bear characteristics among “super heroes” of Scandinavian mythology and folklore, and return to Friedrich Panzer’s ground-breaking study on the bear’s son motif (Studien zur germanischen Sagengeschichte, I: Beowulf, 1910), with more recent examples from folklore.

 

Kasper Opstrup（University of Copenhagen）

Abstract:

This talk investigates how cunning folk in the Western Jutland region of Denmark stood at the crossroads of folklore, religion and occultism, mediating between text, community and a living landscape. Along the storm-lashed coast, cunning folk acted as healers, diviners and protectors against the dangers of sea-travel and shipwreck. Rooted in heaths, bogs, burial mounds, and the shifting coastline of the North Sea, these practitioners drew on both oral tradition and the written word – especially the so-called Black Books or Cyprianus grimoires whose contents were passed down through family, apprenticeship and secrecy – to navigate the line between the seen and the unseen. Their proximity to socially excluded groups – e.g., rakkere, tatere and kæltringer who spoke the secret cant rottvælsk – points to a broader culture of concealment and counter-knowledge. Drawing on their grimoires as well as the folklore collections of H.P. Hansen and Evald Tang Kristensen, the talk points towards a deep entanglement between sea, secrecy and survival where human communities and natural environments shaped each other at the intersection of folklore and the occult.

 

Minoru Ozawa（Rikkyo University）

Abstract:

Runes, which were thought to have emerged in the second century, was initially employed as a means of communication among the Germanic peoples, and later came to be used in forms characteristic of the Nordic region. From the sixteenth century onward, it was studied as the script of the Goths, and from the eighteenth century again as that of the Germanic peoples, attracting attention both in scholarly research and within esoteric contexts. In particular, since the Armanen runes invented by Guido List in twenteeth-century Vienna—based on his highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the Eddaic poems—runes have frequently been detached from academic contexts and used instead as symbols in occultism and far-right movements.

These runes were introduced to Japan from the Meiji period onward. This paper highlights several case studies of their reception in Japan in relation to esotericism and occultism: in the prewar era, when runes were sometimes equated with kamiyo-moji (supposed “ancient divine scripts” of Japan); in the 1970s, when Taniguchi Yukio incorporated both folkloric interpretations partially influenced by the Nazi era; in the 1990s, when runes began to appear in subculture and fortune-telling; and in the 2000s, when they came to be employed as a means of evoking magical imagery.

 

Presenter Bios:

Per Faxneld is Professor in the Study of Religions at Södertörn University (Stockholm, Sweden). He has published several monographs and collected volumes on esotericism, three of which with Oxford University Press, and more than a hundred articles and book chapters on this topic and adjacent areas like alternative spirituality and new religious movements. Faxneld also has an interest in folkloristics, having written on faeries in the UK and co-edited a comprehensive update of a classic study of werewolf beliefs in Sweden. Currently, he is conducting a major project on how notions of spirituality have been received – both positively and negatively – among Swedish practitioners of Japanese martial arts, against the backdrop of local processes of secularisation.

Tommy Kuusela has a PhD in History of Religions and is a folklorist. He works in one of Sweden’s largest folklore archives as a researcher and archivist. He has published more than 70 articles on his research interests: Old Norse religion, supernatural animals, folk magic, and Scandinavian folklore.

Kasper Opstrup is a researcher and writer specialising in hybrids of art/literature, occultism and radical politics from the mid-19th century onwards. Currently, he is the PI of the Novo Nordisk-funded research project Twisting the Fabric of Space: On the Art and Politics of the Hidden at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Minoru Ozawa, now positioned as a professor of medieval history at the College of Arts, Rikkyo University, has studied medieval history and Scandinavian languages in Tokyo, Copenhagen, and Reykjavik, and worked as a research fellow at Nagoya University before joining Rikkyo University in 2011. His main research area has concentrated on political, economic, social and cultural aspects of the Scandinavians in the 8th-12th centuries. His academic interests are also expanding into other fields, especially the maritime history of the European continent, and intellectual history in early modern and modern historiography, including that of Japan.