Selling the Supernatural: Prejudice, Profit, and Romani Practices

Theme: Religion & Religious Studies

Published: 28 August 2026

Summary
In this episode of SCAS Talks, Egil Asprem, Professor of History of Religions at Stockholm University and a former SCAS Sabbatical Fellow, discusses esotericism as a field examining forms of knowledge and spirituality marginalized by modern categories of science and religion. He explores how magic has shaped ideas of modernity, influenced political movements and intersected with contemporary conspiracy theories. The conversation focuses especially on European Romani minorities, whose association with magic has historically generated both damaging stereotypes and limited economic opportunities through demand for healing, fortune-telling and other services. Asprem presents the remarkable 1709 Swedish court case of Anna Maria Adamsdotter, showing how performance, sleight of hand and Romani language could create authority while also expressing resistance to persecution and social exclusion.

Keywords
Romani minorities, magic, esotericism, conspiracy theories, history of religion

Suggested Link/s
About: Egil Asprem

Transcript of the Episode

Egil Asprem 00:10
Anna Maria Adamsdotter. she was accused not of having done any kind of magic, but she was accused having stolen seven pairs of socks, and she was imprisoned for this. And she came into the court, I said, "Yeah, well, I actually I did have these socks, but they were given to me as payment from this young woman who wanted help getting a husband, and you know I obviously can't do that, but I indulged her and gave her this strange root that I told her to wrap in a piece of cloth and hit it over the back of the man that she wants to have, and then he will be so kindled with love that he cannot sleep for whether night or day". And then, of course, the court got interested. And all right, so now you are, you may or you may not have stolen those socks, but it's clear that you claim to be doing some kind of magic here. And so then they continue to interrogate her about what other kind of arts that she knows, and she is very happy to provide them with cases of this.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:10
Welcome to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode, I talk to Egil Asprem, professor of History of Religions at Stockholm University and sabbatical fellow at SCAS during the spring term of 2026. Egil Asprem is a historian of religions and a specialist in the study of esotericism. Much of his research has centered on the history of magic and its entanglements with science, politics, and emerging forms of religiosity in the modern world. In this episode, we will hear more about some of his research, especially about the Romani minorities and their use of magic. And this is the second episode on our theme: "Religion and Religious Studies". Welcome to SCAS Talks and the studio, Egil.

Egil Asprem 01:57
Thank you very much.

Natalie von der Lehr 01:59
It's a pleasure to have you here. Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Egil Asprem 02:03
Oh, sure, I can do that. I mean, you summed it up really nicely, I think. So, yeah, I'm a historian of religion by training, which means that my training is in looking at religion as a human phenomenon. So different from theology, the history of religion is really about the non-confessional study of religion as product of human creativity, cultural production, and how this has been yeah produced in history, and yeah what role it has in society, and how it's interrelated with other domains of human culture, from art to science to politics and so forth.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:37
So you're a specialist in the study of esotericism. Let's talk a little bit more about that. Some of your thoughts about what this actually entails, especially in terms of your research.

Egil Asprem 02:46
So, esotericism - it's a tricky field. You could say it's an interdisciplinary field within the humanities. It's a fairly new one as a field in a way, and there are different ways of trying to conceptualize what it's really about, as is usually the case with interdisciplinary fields in the humanities. So one of the predominant ways of theorizing esotericism in recent years, which is problematic but still has some pedagogical purchase, is that it's about forms of religion and also actually more broadly knowledge production that have, especially since the Protestant Reformation and since the Enlightenment, been seen as something that's not desirable, so rejected knowledge. So you could think about things like the occult sciences of astrology, alchemy, magic, but also forms of religious practice that have an undue, according to the orthodoxy, let's say, an undue focus on personal experience and kind of coming to religious truth on your own outside of the church. So these kinds of practices that actually have a very long history and precedents going back to especially late antique forms of philosophy and religion. So think of the Neoplatonists and so on, and have also continued to to persist within Western culture, but in a more hidden or marginal way, and often also in a way that defies easy categorization in terms of the the modern categories of research, like as I said, science, religion, philosophy, art, these terms that we use to to grasp human culture with, which are fairly modern. So, being in the study of esotericism, one thing it entails to get back to your question, is to always move in between disciplines. I've studied partially within one discipline and partially within another, and then try to get the whole picture. So that would be anything from someone like Isaac Newton, for example, you know, one of the luminaries of the history of science, the fact that he wrote much more on alchemy and biblical interpretation than he did on physics has been a hard thing to to understand earlier. I mean, nowadays it's it's well known, but these kinds of examples are at the heart of I would say the study of esotericism. That means it's perhaps dominated by people like me who come from the study of religion, but we also have close connection with the history of ideas, the history of science, art history, other disciplines like that.

Natalie von der Lehr 05:14
Yes, I have a background in the natural sciences, and my instinct is, my reaction to magic and esotericism is like what? What about the connection between magic and science?

Egil Asprem 05:27
This has actually been one of my focus points in previous research, anyway. Relationships between science and esotericism, so to say. So I would say one thing it's fairly well known that historically, so going back like before the Enlightenment, and even especially like before the so-called Scientific Revolution, it's very hard to separate these things. Obviously, if you talk about "scientia" in Latin, it's basically knowledge and theology is a science in that sense as well. And actually, it's the it's the queen of sciences. But more specifically, when it comes to like the study of magic, as late as in the Renaissance, you would have concepts such as natural magic, right, which would encompass things like the study of hidden properties of objects, of herbs, plants, and so on. So it would encompass medicine, but it would also encompass things like magnetism, would encompass the study of poisons and so on and so forth. But this would be then understood also as being connected with astrology and so on. So it would be in a different, of course, worldview frame, but it would be still the the place from which the sciences emerged, so to say. So historically, that's clear enough. And actually, what I find more interesting in my research has been to look at what is the role of things like magic, the occult, alternative forms of spirituality or religion in the modern age. What kind of role have they played in the construction of modernity, the building of modernity, so to say? How have they changed in relation to new dominant forms of knowledge? These kinds of questions. And that takes us into, of course, also key kind of theories of modernity, such as Max Weber and the idea of disenchantment, the idea that with the modern age, mysterious, incalculable forces have no place in nature. Everything can, in principle, be calculated and explained by rational methods, when there's no place for invoking spiritual forces to make things happen. Instead, you have engineering and you have technology. This kind of idea, and that's of course an ideal for modern knowledge production and the way that we relate to to the world. But in the shadows of that, there's also always been and still continues to be today a great interest and fascination in the magical and occult and so on. So that's been one of the things that I've been looking at in my research in various ways.

Natalie von der Lehr 07:53
Yes, very interesting. I think we should get back to this a bit later. But very briefly, then you've already mentioned some aspects, but what is your research about? What are you actually looking at?

Egil Asprem 08:04
All that I've been talking about now is kind of the broader framework. It's always revolving around how these marginal heterodox forms of knowledge and religion, what place they have in in modernity, I would say. But that can then take many different kinds of expressions. So in my PhD work and work related to that, I was looking specifically on this notion of disenchantment, actually, and how esotericism and the natural sciences in the early 20th century still related to each other in various ways. At a time when the sciences have clearly separated themselves from all of this stuff, that's it's "the other". You know, that's what we're not doing that's irrational, but we're still in a period such as the early 20th century where you have a lot of really mind-boggling breakthroughs. So, of course, if you take physics, you have of course relativity theory, you have quantum mechanics, but also in biology, you have big discussions about what life really is, and you have a resurgence of theories about vitalism and organicism. In the study of the human mind, psychology is starting to be shaped, but you have on the margins of that also an interest in psychic phenomena, so to say. Like, is the mind really bound by the brain, or can it also like influence physical properties on the outside, like telekinesis. Can you have mind-to-mind contact via telepathy and so forth. So, what does this all this have to do with esotericism and magic, you might say. Well, so one thing, of course, is in this period I think there is one thing that happens, and that also persists later on, is that there's a revolt against at least the perceived view that 19th century science had been overly mechanistic and deterministic in its theories about how the world works, and there is a new way of grappling with spontaneity, with the incalculable, with probabilities rather than with determinism. And in the debates about that, you see some even of the leading scientific names are kind of looking towards the esoteric to find a language for it, probably not taking it very seriously necessarily, but using it as a kind of a way to perhaps make their own scientific production look more interesting. So Niels Bohr does this a lot, lots of references to Daoism and you know these kinds of things. Heisenberg does it to some extent as well. You have collaborations between Wolfgang Pauli and CG Jung, the psychologist who's very into alchemy, and they both of them relate to parapsychology and the study of kind of these occult powers of the mind, so to speak. So there's a lot of stuff like that happening in the 1920s, 30s that I studied for my dissertation. So that's in the domain of science, but there's a lot of other things as well. So if you go to politics, for example, in the 19th century you have something that we usually refer to as occultism. So a series of movements that emerge both sides of the Atlantic. You might think about currents such as spiritualism, so the idea that you can connect to the spirits of the dead, but also other spirits, and talk to them via seances and so on. Get information, knowledge. You have the current of theosophy that becomes really a global movement in sort of this colonial context. But anyway, so this occultism, these various occult movements, are often very politically progressive, so there are strong links between spiritualism, theosophy, and so on, and progressive causes from socialism. So especially like pre-Marxist, so utopian socialism, which was a lot more religious, and this is something that tends to be forgotten today when we talk about, think about socialism as linked specifically to Marx and Engels and so on, but then of course you also have on the other side of the spectrum, so to say, especially in the into the 20th century, you have deeply reactionary forms of esotericism such as traditionalism and so on that have had a fairly deep influence on the formation of the European new right in the post-war period, and still today, and even so, still today, you have some of the main, the biggest far-right publishing houses are publishing not only kind of handbooks in how to take over a democratic state and to fight liberalism and these kinds of things, but also also books that are produced by quote unquote esotericists. Julius Evola would be like the the main poster boy for this part of the the far right. So I've done some work on on those kind of connections as well. I mean, and related to that perhaps is the study of conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories and religion. So, I mean, there's been a boom in research on conspiracy theories in the last decade or so, maybe a bit more. And for obvious reasons, it just suddenly became so prominent. I wouldn't say necessarily that conspiracy theories have become more common, but they've had they've gotten a different significance to them. They're used in political mobilization in a very different way from you know the 90s or even early 2000s. And one one aspect of that has been that that has interested me in a way is how conspiracy theories have also intersected with the kind of fringe religious milieus that I am interested in, sometimes referred to as the the cultic milieu, which intersects alternative spiritualities, alternative health, and complementary medicine, but also often forms of utopian politics, communal living, and these kinds of ideas of a new coming age in which we will also build better societies. In these milieu conspiracy theories have you know always circulated as one way of explaining why why we are not seeing this wonderful new age manifest you know well it's because of the global elites that are holding us back or it's because of the scientists and their reductionist materialism denying the spiritual, true spiritual science. It's because of the medical establishment and big pharma holding back the natural cures. And so that has always been there. And I think one fascinating thing that's happened, or at least become more prominent the last decade or two, is that these sorts of forms of suspicion, which is you know, so conspiracy theories obviously are a mode of suspicion. They have provided bridges between far right ideology and quote unquote new age thinking, which has led to some strange bedfellows, you could say. And this, I think, became obvious to many five, six years ago. So starting with perhaps the the attempted storming of the Reichstag in Germany in 2020, then the attempted storming of the of Capitoleum in the U.S. in 2021, and also in in the broader kind of COVID anti-lockdown protests across the world, you could see some of these different kinds of constellations being formed of people coming from the quote unquote spiritual side., walking at least side by side with hard right people, and that created synergies that have lived on after.

Natalie von der Lehr 15:08
Yeah, during the pandemic, it was really quite fascinating to see the right winged and sort of people who believe in a spiritual life marching or being side by side in these demonstrations against the lockdowns or against the vaccines or anything like that.

Egil Asprem 15:23
This became obvious to many, and it's a very surprising thing, like five years ago or so, a bit more. But it also has deeper historical ties. It's just not been as influential, perhaps, as it became now.

Natalie von der Lehr 15:37
But let's focus then on one aspect of your research, and that is the Romani minorities and their use of magic, such as hand reading, spell work, fortune telling, healing, and so on. And this is also what you do here at SCAS, if I've understood correctly. Can you tell our listeners a bit more about this project?

Egil Asprem 15:55
Yeah, sure. So this is like a specific, for me, more recent project. So I got some research funding from the Swedish Research Council to look at how the European Romani minorities have been entangled with European discourses on magic since basically the beginning of the Romani diaspora, Northwest European Roman diaspora, which is usually dated to around 1417. So talking several 100 years of history here, but my interest in in that project is really you could say, or the argument that I'm starting to develop in broad strokes is that European ideas about magic were central in stereotyping this new group at that time. So you didn't know where do they come from? Are they Christian? Do they have some other religion? We don't know. People were clinging on to ideas of magic, which have often been associated precisely with the the other, the ethnically different and the religiously different, the outsiders, and this stuck early on. And it's, I also argue that it's actually a source of many kind of anti-Gypsy stereotypes that live on still today. So both in terms of this kind of exotification of you know being connected with some exotic magical powers, but also these destructive ideas about lying and stealing and fraud and these kinds of things, which is another aspect of what people think about when they think about magic, and did so even in the Middle Ages already, and even earlier actually in antiquity too. Magic had this two sides of kind of associations. So that's that's the one side. You know, magic as a source of stereotyping, as a source of prejudice against Roma and other people also who have been stigmatized as as gypsies, quote unquote. But then I'm also arguing and trying to show how being associated with magic also creates certain limited strategic opportunities because, as we've touched on before, there's always been a huge fascination for magic and actually a need, a demand for magical services among broad segments of the population. So people have wanted non-normal interventions to help them with things like health, sickness, prevent misfortune, ensure that their crops don't fail, help finding a spouse, solving marital problems, help with childbirth, you know, all of these precarious aspects of human life have always attracted the demand for various kinds of interventions, which sometimes you know established authorities couldn't provide, so or wouldn't didn't want to provide. So this has been an issue with some of the anti-magical dimension of Christianity as well. That it's been problematic to to offer these kinds of things often, even though in reality you know parish priests would also often be experts of this kind of supernatural healing and so on, and you could find knowledge about this in monasteries and so on. Anyhow, there was a limit, limited access to these services, and that's something that minorities like Roma could enter into and be sought after. Actually, their competence in or assumed competence in this this area, so it could provide a source of of income and sustenance. But it could also, in addition to sustenance, it's also being associated with the magical and the occult and all the the problems it has. It also provides a certain form of respect, fear, maybe in some cases as well. You have to be a bit careful with these people because they might curse you. But also, when you are engaging in, say, fortune telling, these kinds of things, you also create interpersonal relationships, and there's a sharing of knowledge about the local communities. And this kind of information, I think, could also be quite useful for a minority as well.

Natalie von der Lehr 19:42
But did you find anything interesting in the material when you research sort of?

Egil Asprem 19:47
So I can take a very specific case now. The most spectacular case that I have written about is from the town of Karlskrona in southern Sweden from 1709, where this woman called Anna Maria Adamsdotter is on trial. She's living in the city with her husband, who works for the local regiment there, which was common for Romani men actually to do that to work in take military positions. And she has also some children who she was living with there. And that she was accused not of having done any kind of magic, but she was accused of having stolen seven pairs of socks from a market stall on Christmas Eve, and she was imprisoned for this. And she came into the court and said, "Yeah, well, I actually I did have these socks, but they were given to me as payment from this young woman who wanted help getting a husband, and you know I obviously can't do that, but I indulged her and gave her this strange root that I told her to wrap in a piece of cloth and hit it over the back of the man that she wants to have and then he will be so kindled with love that he cannot sleep for whether night or day". And then of course the court got interested and "all right so now you are you may or you may not have stolen those socks, but it's clear that you claim to be doing some kind of magic here". And so then they continue to interrogate it about what other kind of arts that she knows, and she is very happy to provide them with cases of this. I would stress this: she's not accused of any of this thing. She brings it up, and she delights in talking about this, it's clear from this record, and so she talks about how she would do various kinds of things. So, for example, when she comes to the house of a rich farmer or a priest that usually have problems with rodents and would like to to get the rodents away from their huge estates, then she said she could do that, and she would take like a small box, and she would collect some live mice and hide them on her body, and then she would kind of ask the farmer or priest to get a big barrel, and she would say that I can I can summon the rodents to this barrel. I'll just give you a demonstration, and then she does these kind of small rituals and speaks also in a magical, strange language, so Romani, basically using that as a magical language, and then by sleight of hand smuggles these mice into the into the the barrel, and they think that she's teleported them there basically, and so that's like one example. But then the most spectacular one is that she would go to suggest that she would come to a farm where you know she thinks that the people there might had some problems, maybe with livestock dying or being sick, and so on. And then she would bring with her a small artifact that she would carve out from bone. She would take the sort of leg bone of a cow or something and carve something that looks like a human skull. She would fasten hair onto it on the top with pitch and tar, and it would look like, yeah, really frightening. And she would make this thing appear in strange ways to also make people think that indeed they may be bewitched. So, for example, she would come to to a farm and say that, okay, we'll we'll figure out whether your misfortune comes from God or from bad people. So whether it's natural or caused by witchcraft, basically, right? So all you have to do is to bring me an egg, a hens egg. So okay, get an egg. The the farmer and his wife can hold the egg, and she has her hand above the egg and speaks some incantations again in this strange language that they don't understand. Now she's hidden this little skull figure under her thumb and crushes the egg, and releases the skull figure with with the thumb. And lo and behold, the egg is crushed, and there's a devil in the egg. This is attested in the court records that when she does this, they are strengthened in their belief, and you can you can imagine that. And so actually, this this egg trick is something that has been recorded later on with other Northwest European Romany groups. So we have cases from Germany in the 19th century, from Poland in as late as the 20th century, post-war period even, of very similar, almost identical forms of practice. So this is clearly a tradition, and this Anna Maria is the earliest recorded case anywhere in the world, and the little figure that she made that has actually been identified as well. It's at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. It has survived. When we read this court record, we see that this this object was was there, and it has come to the Nordic Museum via the court, basically. So you can also trace this lineage, which makes it the earliest known artifact that can be connected to a Romani person anywhere in the world. But not only that, Anna Maria's spoken incantations are also recorded in the record. So she was asked to repeat what she said when she made the the devil appear from the egg, or or the mice transport into the the barrel, for example, and she well, I don't really want to do that, but well, okay, so she speaks in in her language, the the gypsy tongue, as they say there, or the "tartarska språket". The scribe kind of records that, and then she's asked to also translate it, and she doesn't want to do that first. She says, ah, it's only some indecent words in my own language that I used to make myself kind of confident with, but then she she does in the end say what it means. The scribe, however, writes, "I cannot give you the translation here because it has such an indecent and foul meaning". But her spoken words that have been recorded phonetically as to the best of the ability of this early 18th century clerk can be translated still today, so it's possible to see this is a version of Northwestern Romani, inflected Romani even, and indeed the first few sentences of it, which are the ones that are easiest to translate, are a series of invectives of a sexual nature. Let's just put it that way. That are clearly like curses that makes makes fun of, ridicules the persons who think that they are getting like a magical spell, right? So it's a big, it's a form of performative resistance, right there. Like to the to the insider, they know that this is kind of ridiculing them, the clients, and in the court, in context of the court as well, this is a story that demonstrates some kind of empowerment, some kind of superiority, at least in this situation. And that's you know, if you're really, really, if you belong to a group that's in such a precarious state as Roma in early modern Europe, this kind of performative resistance is maybe all you have. I should maybe add that Anna Maria Adamsdotte, this person, she was also sentenced to death three times, survived all the all three times, she was deported two times, received corporal punishment several times, so she's also like a witness to the severe repression connected with her group as well.

Natalie von der Lehr 26:50
You mentioned that your research is highly interdisciplinary. What do you need? What kind of research environment do you need in order to actually do your research and to do your studies?

Egil Asprem 27:01
Yeah, I mean, as you've heard, it's I've done quite a few different things, but the kind of interdisciplinarity that I've mostly been dealing with is kind of within the humanities still. So I need access to great library resources, but also good conversation partners across different fields, and this kind of context of open-mindedness and exploration of curious-driven research. The kind of environment that you have here at SCAS is one way to put it. It's actually quite perfect for that.

Natalie von der Lehr 27:28
Yeah, I was coming to that because you're a sabbatical fellow now during this term here. So, what is your experience so far of this multi- and interdisciplinary research environment?

Egil Asprem 27:38
What's fantastic with SCAS, I think is that you get an international group of people from different kinds of higher education institutions across the world really, different fields, mostly in the humanities and social sciences, but all coming together also around this interest in a curiosity-driven approach to to knowledge and to really not being driven so much by what the department needs to profile itself in the right way, or the kind of the logic of funding and so on. Of course, that's always there in the background as well. But at least the conversations that we're having at SCAS are always driven by curiosity in a way that I think is rather quite ideal. Also, being able to partake of research in in fields that I find interesting and fascinating, but wouldn't you know make the effort to go to and to sort of seek out myself, but every Tuesday to get like high end lectures and seminars on on various topics. That's really quite a treat as well. And then, of course, talking about these things over lunch every day. Excellent lunches also I have to say.

Natalie von der Lehr 28:44
Yeah, so you have a lot of opportunities to exchange ideas.

Egil Asprem 28:49
I mean, it's not like I'm discussing my own research so much, or like what I'm doing at SCAS now is to really try and finish up some of the publications coming out of my project, right. And so that means I'm sitting by myself and writing a lot. But you need to get other kinds of inputs. So actually, not talking specifically about my research so much, but other research-related issues with great colleagues across the disciplines over lunch is very stimulating. Also, beyond sort of what it means for my specific research topic.

Natalie von der Lehr 29:24
Thank you very much for joining me here in the studio, and our listeners, of course, also.

Egil Asprem 29:28
Thank you very much, Natalie.

Natalie von der Lehr 29:33
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In this episode, you've heard Egil Asprem, professor of history of religions at Stockholm University, and sabbatical fellow at SCAS during the spring term of 2026. We have talked about some of his research on esotericism, especially about Romani minorities and their use of magic. This was the second episode in our theme "Religion and Religious Studies". In the previous episode within this topic, Johan Elverskog told us more about the history of Buddhism, and this was episode number 71. SCAS Talks covers a wide range of topics reflecting the Collegium's multi- and interdisciplinary research community. There is something for everyone. If you enjoyed this episode, please recommend SCAS talks to colleagues and friends, and subscribe to us so you don't miss future content. You can find us on Podbean, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and most podcast apps. Thanks again, Egil Asprem, for joining me here in the studio, and thank you for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai