Open Access. © 2019 Bernd-Christian Otto, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580853-038 Bernd-Christian Otto The Illuminates of Thanateros and the institutionalisation of religious individualisation From the perspective of recent research on ‘religious individualisation’, modern groupings of ‘learned magic’ seem to entail a striking paradox. For large parts of Western history, ‘learned magic’ has been a decidedly individualistic enterprise, given that: (1) the bulk of the sources provide ritual prescriptions for pursuing individual goals or desires, and thus aim at facilitating or improving one’s individ- ual life (be it in the realm of love, wealth, protection, harm, or healing); and (2) most premodern ritual prescriptions assume the ritual soloist. 1 Even from the late 19th century onwards, when group formation and sophisticated group rituals came to the fore, the goals of ‘learned magic’ remained largely individualistic, independ- ent of whether they shifted towards individual apotheosis and self-deification, or continued to focus on inner-worldly and purely instrumental matters (see Otto forthcoming). It therefore comes as no surprise that the textual-ritual tradition of ‘Western learned magic’ 2 triggers most, if not all core notions of ‘religious individ- ualisation’ (see Otto 2017), and thus seems to represent an important individualis- ing current in Western history from antiquity till this day. In the light of this basic characterisation, group formation might be a par- ticularly difficult enterprise in the realm of ‘learned magic’. If its practice is ulti- mately individualistic, it seems to collide with typical group dynamics, such as the need for shared rituals and mythologies, the development of binding teaching curricula and organisational structures, the institutionalisation of authoritative leadership, and the dogmatisation of ‘learned magic’ by means of selecting or discarding specific ritual techniques or by stipulating homogenous concepts of ritual efficacy. In other words, group formation, as soon as it became historically 1 I would like to cite a recent Chaos Magick practitioner in this very first footnote, Ray Sherwin, who seems to confirm my claim. See Sherwin 1978, 2: ‘Since magick is an individualist pursuit the individual must always be of paramount importance and anyone who denies this is looking for profit or power or does not know any better’. In this regard, I shall point out that many written works of Chaos Magick authors are today out of print, and can only be accessed either via rare and excessively over-priced ebay offers, or through electronic texts on the internet, whereby the latter may circulate in many different versions. In the following, I will usually rely on the latter, but do my best to precisely indicate the online version used (in the references section), in order to avoid confusion. 2 On its conceptualisation see Otto 2016.