Esotericism and Orientalism: Nineteenth-century narrative initiations (Rudyard Kipling, Richard Burton)

This dissertation examines Victorian representations of "Oriental" religions in literary, occultist, and academic texts, arguing that the Orientalist study of religion generated new theories of textuality, subjectivity, identity, and sexuality in Victorian culture. It suggests that esotericism played a key role in nineteenth-century Orientalist encounters with traditions like Sufism, Buddhism, and Vedanta: for instance, esoteric movements like Theosophy led the reception of these religions, which were described as esoteric in Orientalist texts. Moreover, the hermeneutical work of esotericism (the encrypted meaning that can only be deciphered by initiated readers, the further initiations that obtain from deciphering such encryptions) offers an apt heuristic for the multitudinous meanings and deployments of Oriental religions in Victorian literature and culture. Esotericism reveals the many ways in which religion plays hide and seek with race, sexuality, language, and nation in the texts and contexts of Orientalism.; The first chapter establishes the historical intersection of esotericism and Orientalism through a study of the overlapping yet schismatic conversations between Theosophy and philology, particularly around the Aryan family hypothesis. Theosophy anticipates postcolonial critiques of Orientalism even while extending the invidious logic of race science: indeed, the chapter reads Theosophy's idiosyncratic texts as parables about the illogic of race science. Chapter Two studies race and sexuality in the Orientalist encounter with Sufism through two love stories: the Aryan hypothesis that enabled its scholarship, and the "esoterotics" that defined Sufism's literary reception. The chapter applies the heuristic of esotericism to Richard Burton's apocryphal "translated" poem, the Kasidah, arguing that false translation acts as a technology of esotericism. The discussion adopts the non-literal hermeneutics that philologists noted in Sufism to explain how Victorian aesthetes coded the stylized idiom of poems like The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with a queer import. Finally, the dissertation asks how esotericism might renew our understanding of Orientalism in canonical works like Rudyard Kipling's Kim, a key text for postcolonial criticism. Critical debates about the novel have ignored its fictional ethnography of Tibetan Buddhism: in fact, the lama's exegetical practices demonstrate a way to deconstruct the Masonic codes and cryptic initiations of empire and ethnology in the novel.