This thesis explores the theme of ‘creative seekership’ within contemporary esotericism. Creative seekership, as presented here, deals with the ways in which artistic practices are employed in the pursuit of esoteric knowledge and experience. Such practices are often attributed magical or esoteric significance by artists, ritualising their cultural productions, and emphasising the already-blurred boundaries between art and magic. The concept of creative seekership is developed over the course of this research to construct a holistic theoretical model that demonstrates the embedding of creative practices in the subjectivities of experience, the interpretive and discursive frameworks of knowledge, and the broader horizon of ‘occulture’ and its cultural milieus.
This work is unusual in that creative seekership is studied through the application of autoethnographic research methods. This autoethnographic research concentrates on examining creative seekership through accounts of my own music-making from the late 1990s to early 2000s. While scholars engaged in ethnographic work in contemporary esotericism studies have become increasingly visible in their own research, the implications of ‘insider scholar’ or ‘complete member researcher’ identities in autoethnographic research have been under-explored – primarily as a consequence of the academic boundary work with which the field was engaged until the 2010s.
This thesis, therefore, takes the opportunity to explore the possibilities of developing a form of ‘analytic autoethnography’ in accord with the scholarly and interdisciplinary perspectives that have been established in esotericism studies over the last three decades. Here, the practice of autobiographical writing is approached from a ‘grounded’ perspective, allowing theoretical models to emerge from hybrid compositional and analytical processes. The outcome of this process presents scholars not only with a theoretical framework for analysing creative seekership in contemporary esotericism, but also demonstrates how autoethnography may contribute to the field of esotericism studies as a plausible methodology for future researchers.