Western Esotericism

This section covers the current that runs underneath European intellectual history: Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, alchemy, Christian Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, Thelema, New Thought and chaos magic.

It is the section where the site's usual finding inverts. Elsewhere, practices generally turn out to be younger than they claim. Here the material is genuinely old — and the people using it have usually claimed it was older still, in ways that can be checked and were.

Three things organise the section.

The dating question is the drama. In 1463 Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum for Cosimo de' Medici, who had him set Plato aside to do it, in the belief that these were Egyptian writings older than Moses. In 1614 Isaac Casaubon demonstrated from the Greek that they were composed in the early Christian centuries. That single piece of philology collapsed the prestige of an entire tradition, and it is one of the founding acts of modern textual scholarship. Similar corrections recur: the Rosicrucian manifestos, the Masonic lineage, Blavatsky's Mahatma letters.

Alchemy was chemistry. The reading of alchemy as primarily spiritual allegory is largely a nineteenth-century invention, elaborated by Jung. The historians who went back to the laboratory notebooks — Lawrence Principe and William Newman above all — found people doing real experimental work with real apparatus, producing real substances, inside a religious and philosophical frame. Newton left about a million words of it.

And this is where the vocabulary came from. Correspondences, astral planes, subtle bodies, initiation grades, the Tree of Life, the tarot's Hebrew letters, "as above so below" — nearly everything the modern spiritual world says without knowing where it got it was assembled here, mostly between 1450 and 1900, and can be traced to named people in datable books.