Dr Georgia van Raalte an academic researcher whose research focuses on occult and esoteric literature, contemporary magical practice, and the intersections of magic and sexuality. She is an esoteric theologian and the author of Approaching Babalon: Essays for the Abyss. She is a poet and an artist as well as a witch, magician, and a pagan Priestess.
Her academic research, artistic practice, and magical work are all concerned with initiation: with mystical, literary, and artistic provocations of transcendence, and the personal, social, and cultural transformations that are catalyzed thereby.
I completed my MA in Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where my thesis looked at Dion Fortune’s feminine-centric form of practical occultism. I completed my PhD research at the University of Surrey under the supervision exploring the initiatory nature of Fortune’s occult novels. were initiatory During the course of this research, I realised that the techniques that Fortune utilised to create initiatory experiences through her fiction applied to many other texts, too, and that the initiatory potentials of fiction, and its utilization of distinct imaginal worlds, did not only apply to Fortune’s work, or only to explicitly esoteric fiction, but to fiction and the esoteric as a whole. I discovered that the initiations produced by reading fiction were an important but academically-neglected site of transformative praxis.
There has been a tendency thus far among scholars of esotericism to hide their own involvement in esoteric practice. Such positioning may have been necessary to establish the study of esotericism in the academy; however, it too often it amounts to an intellectual dishonesty that actively harms pagan communities. I am committed to helping the spiritual communities of which I am a part grow and develop through my academic work. Coming to the study of esoteric currents from a background in theology, I was keenly aware of the lack of space in the academy for pagan and esoteric theology. Divinity has long been studied by those who practise it, both privately in their imaginal worlds and publicly, serving their community. Why should pagan and esoteric spiritualities be any different?
Throughout the course of my academic career I have come to understand that initiation in particular is something that can only be understood through practical, experiential involvement and theological engagement. Though it was frightening to choose to be public with my esoteric practices as an academic, I have so far achieved great success in bridging these two roles. I have been honoured to have been invited to speak in an academic capacity at events around the world, from Treadwell’s bookshop in London, to the Ozora Festival in Hungary, to the Babalon Rising Festival in Ohio, to the OTO Academia Conference in Barcelona.
I take my roles of priestess, initiator and scholar with utmost seriousness, and with infinite jest. As you explore my work I encourage you to remember that, above all else, magic is a form of play.