Bilaga 1. Förteckning över konferenserna

Bilaga 2. Styrelsen genom åren

Bilaga 4. Stipendiater vid Donnerska institutet 2013–2020

Bilaga 3. Donnerska institutets pristagare

Den 29 mars 1956 i Dornach, Schweiz undertecknade Olly och Uno Donner ett donationsbrev som lade grunden för ett nytt forskningsinstitut i Åbo. De donerade sin egendom till Stiftelsen för Åbo Akademi för att grunda Donnerska institutet för religionshistorisk och kulturhistorisk forskning som en knutpunkt för forskningen kring religion och kultur, en mötespunkt för forskare, studerande och samhället i stort samt en utsikts­punkt mot stora världen, ny kunskap och nya idéer. Historiken ger en grundlig beskrivning av institutets uppkomsthistoria och de viktiga personer som under årens lopp bidragit till verksamheten. Den presenterar forskare och bibliotekarier, internationella symposier och kulturseminarier, forskningssatsningar och hyllkilometer av forskningslitteratur, forskarpris och stipendier, fester och vardag. Historiken speglar också den ämnesmässiga utveckling som skett inom religionsforskningen, både nationellt och internationellt, under den här tiden. Mystik blir vetenskap: Donnerska institutet 1956–2021 har skrivits av Nils G. Holm, professor emeritus i religionsvetenskap vid Åbo Akademi och långvarig styrelsemedlem vid institutet. Historiken är rikligt illustrerad med bilder från alla årtionden vid institutet.

In an effort to explore the gap between pre-war occultism and the New Age movement, this article examines the public areas of stage magic, folklore magic, and handbook magic between 1947 and 1960. It firstly investigates possible connections between stage performance and the implicit character of religious beliefs and combines these observations with the notion of magic in the field of parapsychology. Then the latter approach is put into the context of mental health discourse, scientific culture, and the metaphysics of nature. The field of handbook magic, finally, relates to public debates about rationality and superstition as an attempt to popularise and legitimise knowledge and techniques of twentieth-century ‘high magic’.

In this article, I explore previous conceptualizations of ‘the paranormal’ within religious studies and the social sciences. Introducing some statistics on paranormal variables in Western populations, I argue that the empirical data make a strong case for future studies of paranormal variables, as well as warranting conceptual clarification. Sketching an outline of previous conceptualizations of ‘the paranormal’, I conclude that definitions tend to stress that purportedly paranormal phenomena transgress the boundaries of scientific explanation, as well as demonstrate a degree of tension towards both mainstream or institutionalized science and religion. Lastly, I present the main contribution of the article: an attempt at a new working definition of the term ‘the paranormal’ based on the conceptualizations reviewed, encompassing substantial and discursive components and, possibly, functional ones.

Finnish spiritualist and theosophical journals of 1905–20 brought esoteric teachings and vernacular belief traditions into dialogue with each other. Theosophical journals, in particular, released interpretations of Finnish mythology and the national epic the Kalevala, connecting them with the Ancient Wisdom. Both spiritualist and theosophical journals published belief narratives, which ranged from traditional migratory legends taking place in rural environments to the personal histories of urban residents. In mainstream thinking of the modern era, belief traditions were valuable only as vanishing traces of the nation’s past. In esoteric journals, they proved the existence of a spiritual reality. The narratives could be published as such, but traditional interpretations, especially those involving Christian morals, could be revised and replaced with explicit esoteric interpretations.

Esotericism and mysticism are two notoriously elusive concepts. Both are based on referential corpora of works that are so internally diverse as to defy any simple characterization. A definition of mysticism needs to encompass a range of empirical cases that include medieval Christian visionaries, Sufis, and Hindu gurus such as Ramakrishna. Similarly, the term esotericism denotes the work of individuals as diverse as Paracelsus, Swedenborg, and Carl Gustav Jung. Unsurprisingly, in a recent encyclopedia article (Nelstrop 2016) mysticism has been characterized as a ‘taxonomical black hole’, while esotericism has been described by a leading scholar on that topic, Wouter J. Hanegraaff (2005, 2012), as a waste-basket category for a range of currents that have little else in common than having been rejected by mainstream theologians and by rationalists from the Enlightenment to our own time. This article argues that the terms are not only laden with significant definitional problems, but that applying them to any particular phenomenon has little, if any, theoretical added value. Instead, this article advocates a higher-level taxonomy that sees the elements of both sets as examples of a more general category: religious phenomena which are supported by charismatic authority.

Research into the life and work of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher and one of the foundational figures of modern mysticism, remains an emergent field within the academic study of religion/s. While esotericists such as H. P. Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner have been thoroughly studied, international academic study of Gurdjieff is still scarce. Gurdjieff lived his early adulthood amidst a severe power struggle between the major powers of the Russian, British and Ottoman empires. He survived the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Russian Civil War of 1918–22 and two World Wars. In his writings, he states how after the turn of the twentieth century, he understood it to be his mission in life to help mankind stop wars from happening, and during his years as a teacher, the question of war was omnipresent because of the events surrounding him and his pupils. Despite all this, there is no previous academic research on the topic of Gurdjieff and war. In this article, I examine the role of wars and armed conflicts in Gurdjieff’s personal life narrative according to his own writings, present his narrative in a military-historical context and analyse his narrational tools and motives as a first step towards a comprehensive study of a much larger subject.