The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism PDF

TH E CA M B R I D G E H A N D B O O K O F W E S T E R N
M Y S T I C I S M A N D E S O TE R I C I S M
Mysticism and esotericism are two intimately related strands of the Western
tradition. Despite their close connections, however, scholars tend to treat them
separately. Whereas the study of Western mysticism enjoys a long and established
history, Western esotericism is a young field. The Cambridge Handbook of Western
Mysticism and Esotericism examines both of these traditions together. The volume
demonstrates that the roots of esotericism almost always lead back to mystical
traditions, while the work of mystics was bound up with esoteric or occult
preoccupations. It also shows why mysticism and esotericism must be examined
together if either is to be understood fully. Including contributions by leading
scholars, this volume features essays on such topics as alchemy, astrology, magic,
Neoplatonism, Kabbalism, Renaissance Hermetism, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism,
number symbolism, Christian theosophy, spiritualism, and much more. This
handbook serves as both a capstone of contemporary scholarship and a corner-
stone of future research.
Glenn Alexander Magee is Professor and Chairman of the Department of

Philosophy at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University. He is the
author of Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001) and The Hegel Dictionary (2011),
as well as many articles on German philosophy and its connections with mysti-
cism and esotericism.
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THE CAMBRIDGE
HANDBOOK OF WESTERN
MYSTICISM AND
ESOTERICISM
M
Edited by
GLENN A LE XANDER MAGEE
Long Island University
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

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© Cambridge University Press 2016
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First published 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Magee, Glenn Alexander, 1966– editor.
The Cambridge handbook of western mysticism and esotericism / edited by
Glenn Alexander Magee.
New York : Cambridge University Press, 2016. | Includes index.
LCCN 2015042979 | ISBN 9780521509831
LCSH: Mysticism – History. | Occultism – History.
LCC BF1999 .C3533 2016 | DDC 130–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042979
ISBN 978-0-521-50983-1 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
To Michael Murphy
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments page xi
Editor’s Introduction xiii
List of contributors xxxvii
i antiquity 1
1 Ancient Mysteries 3
Charles Stein
2 Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism 13
Joscelyn Godwin
3 Parmenides and Empedocles 26
Jessica Elbert Decker and Matthew Mayock
4 Plato, Plotinus, and Neoplatonism 38
Gwenaëlle Aubry
5 Hermetism and Gnosticism 49
Roelof van den Broek
6 Early Jewish Mysticism 59
Daphna Arbel
7 Early Christian Mysticism 69
April D. DeConick
ii the middle ages 81

8 Sufism 83
William C. Chittick
9 Kabbalah 95
Brian Ogren
10 Medieval Christian Mysticism 107
Bruce Milem
vii
viii Contents
11 Hildegard of Bingen and Women’s Mysticism 118

Anne L. Clark
iii the renaissance and early modernity 131

12 Renaissance Hermetism 133
Antoine Faivre
13 Christian Kabbalah 143
Peter J. Forshaw
14 Paracelsianism 156
Bruce T. Moran
15 Rosicrucianism 171
Hereward Tilton
16 Jacob Boehme and Christian Theosophy 184
Glenn Alexander Magee
17 Freemasonry 200
Jan A. M. Snoek
18 Swedenborg and Swedenborgianism 211
Jane Williams-Hogan
19 Mesmer and Animal Magnetism 223
Adam Crabtree
iv the nineteenth century and beyond 235

20 Spiritualism 237
Cathy Gutierrez
21 H. P. Blavatsky and Theosophy 248
Michael Gomes
22 Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy 260
Robert McDermott
23 The Golden Dawn and the O.T.O. 272
Egil Asprem
24 G. I. Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way 284
25 C. G. Jung and Jungianism 297
Gerhard Wehr
26 René Guénon and Traditionalism 308
Mark Sedgwick
27 Via Negativa in the Twentieth Century 322
Arthur Versluis
Contents ix
28 Contemporary Paganism 334

Chas S. Clifton
29 The New Age 344
Olav Hammer
v common threads 357

30 Alchemy 359
Lawrence M. Principe
31 Astrology 372
Kocku von Stuckrad
32 Gnosis 381
Wouter J. Hanegraaff
33 Magic 393
Wouter J. Hanegraaff
34 Mathematical Esotericism 405
Jean-Pierre Brach
35 Panpsychism 417
Lee Irwin
36 Sexuality 429
Hugh B. Urban
Suggestions for Further Reading 441

Index 463
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for this volume grew out of discussions over meals at a week-long
academic conference on Western esotericism, held at the Esalen Institute in
May 2007. I would therefore like to thank, first of all, conference organizers
Jeffrey J. Kripal and Wouter J. Hanegraaff – particularly the latter. It was in
conversation with Professor Hanegraaff that I originally floated the idea of
proposing a volume on Western esotericism to Cambridge. He encouraged
me to do so, but the scope of the volume was later widened to include
mysticism as well. Thus, what began as a proposal for a modest collection of
about a dozen or so essays grew into the large volume that you now hold in
your hands.
Everything that happens at Esalen is due, directly or indirectly, to the
generosity and inspiring influence of its “innkeeper,” Michael Murphy.
Without Mike, there would have been no conference, no conversations,
and no book. Thus, I dedicate this volume to him.
For advice and guidance in the selection of authors and other matters, I
must thank, again, Wouter Hanegraaff and Jeff Kripal, and also David
Appelbaum, Antoine Faivre, Joscelyn Godwin, Lee Irwin, Peter Kingsley,
Peter Manchester, Robert McDermott, Bernard McGinn, Barbara
Newman, Frank Sinclair, and Arthur Versluis.
Thanks are also owed to Beatrice Rehl, my editor at Cambridge, for her
support, good humor, and patience. Indeed, I must thank the contributors
for their patience as well, since this project has been plagued by many
setbacks and delays. Now that it has finally come to fruition, I hope that
everyone involved will consider it worth the wait.
G.A.M.
New York City
July 2015
xi
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
1 A New Approach to the Hidden Intellectual History of the West

This handbook brings together articles on two subjects: Western mysticism
and Western esotericism. These two areas are distinct, yet they are related so
intimately that treating them together is not only possible but ultimately
necessary if either is to be truly understood.
Mysticism in the West has tended to arise (as it has elsewhere in the world)
within the context of a religious tradition, generally as a kind of deeper
reflection on the inner meaning of the religion. This is obviously the case
with Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism. However, the origins of
Western mysticism go back much further, to pagan polytheism in fact, and
the mystery religions of Ancient Greece.
Scholarship on Western mysticism enjoys a long, established history and is
almost as old as scholarship on the religions from which mysticism typically
springs. The same is not true, however, for scholarship on Western esoteri-
cism. It is, in fact, a very young field. Defining “esotericism” is a difficult task,
and one fraught with controversy. However, we may begin simply by noting
that this is the word increasingly used today to designate currents of thought
formerly referred to as “occultism” or as “the occult sciences” (terms that
came into wide usage in the nineteenth century). These currents have a long
history in the West, sometimes hidden and subterranean (as the word
“occultism” implies) – at other times, in the Renaissance for example, as
part of mainstream thought. Esoteric doctrines, schools, or practices include
alchemy, astrology, magic, Kabbalism, Renaissance Hermetism,
Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, number symbolism, sacred geometry,
Christian theosophy, spiritualism, mesmerism, and much else.1
1
The terms “esotericism” and “esoteric writing” are also used by academics to refer to the
practice of secrecy, of hiding one’s meaning or intention behind an “exoteric” veneer. Here
xiii
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139027649.001
xiv Ed itor’s Introduction
The ideas and movements just mentioned are familiar, in one way or
another, to most people. We know that they exercised a great influence in
the past (and still do). We have encountered traces of them in literature, film,
and fairy tales. They peek through the cracks of standard histories of philo-
sophy, science, and literature when, for example, it is mentioned in passing
that Renaissance art and science were influenced by hermetic and kabbalistic
teachings; that Goethe was an alchemist, and Newton an astrologer; that
Kant and Strindberg read Swedenborg, and Schelling was a spiritualist; that
Blake and Hegel were influenced by Jacob Boehme; that W. B. Yeats was a
member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; and so on. These facts
are mentioned, though not emphasized. They are seldom denied, but they
are more or less avoided by most scholars. This began to change only
recently.
In the 1930s, Paul Otto Kristeller became one of the first modern scholars
to claim that the study of hermetic and esoteric literature was crucial for an
understanding of the Renaissance. However, it was not until the publication
of Frances Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition in 1964 that the
academic study of esotericism really took off. Yates went on to write several
other ground-breaking books, including The Art of Memory, The Occult
Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Her
work, in effect, spawned an entirely new discipline.
In 1965, an academic chair for the study of Western esotericism was
established at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne) in Paris
(currently held by Jean-Pierre Brach, and formerly by François Secret and
Antoine Faivre). In 1999, a similar chair was established at the University of
Amsterdam (currently held by Wouter J. Hanegraaff), where it is attached to
a small department featuring several other specialists in esotericism and
offering undergraduate and graduate-level degrees (see www.amsterdamher
metica.nl).2 The European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism
(www.esswe.org) held its first conference in July 2007, a major event, hosted
“esoteric” refers simply to “hidden doctrines” of any sort, including ones that are skeptical,
atheistic, and materialistic. Leo Strauss and his school are famous for using the term “esoteric”
in this manner. As should be obvious, the denotation of the word in this volume is quite
different – though the two usages are related. For Strauss’s views, see Leo Strauss, Persecution
and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952).
2
In 2005, the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom became the world’s third
institution of higher learning to create a chair in esotericism. The position was held by
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who served as director of the Centre for the Study of Esotericism
(EXESESO) within the College of Humanities at Exeter. However, following Goodrick-
Clarke’s untimely death in 2012, the university decided to close EXESESO.
Editor’s Introduction xv
by the University of Tübingen. Since 2001, the society has published a peer-
reviewed journal, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism.
In the United States, the Association for the Study of Esotericism
(www.aseweb.org) was founded in 2002 by Arthur Versluis of Michigan
State University, and has held biennial conferences. It publishes a web-
based journal, Esoterica. There are now a number of scholars of esotericism
teaching at American universities, many of them in religious studies
departments. For many years now the meetings of the American
Academy of Religion have included sessions on Western esotericism,
beginning with the “Esotericism and Perennialism Group” in the mid-
1980s. This group was an offshoot of the Hermetic Academy, an organiza-
tion founded in 1980 by Robert A. McDermott, President Emeritus of the
California Institute for Integral Studies.
The present volume includes contributions by many of today’s leading
scholars of Western esotericism, bringing them together with a number of
prolific and talented scholars working in the area of Western mysticism.
Treating these two fields together makes this Handbook unique. As we shall
see, an understanding of the roots of esoteric currents almost always leads us
back to the mystical traditions. Further, the work of many of the mystics was
bound up with what today would be called esoteric or occult
preoccupations.
Two things should be clear from what has been said thus far. First, these are
fascinating subjects. Second, they constitute, in effect, the hidden intellectual
history of the West, running like a dark thread through the fabric of the more
conventional intellectual history we have all been taught. The influence of
mystics and esotericists on science, philosophy, theology, literature, politics,
and popular culture is immense, but it is a story scholars are only just
beginning to tell. This volume constitutes a kind of summa of the present
state of research.
However, the foregoing more or less presupposes that we know what the
terms “mysticism” and “esotericism” mean. But how are we to define them,
and to distinguish between them? And should we even attempt to? After all,
on a certain understanding, these terms can be seen as virtually synonymous.
The mystical has always been “hidden” – if only in the sense that it is difficult
for most to access. The term “mysticism” itself is derived from the Greek
adjective mystikos, meaning “pertaining to the mysteries (ta mysteria),” or the
secret rites of Eleusis. This word ultimately derives from the Indo-European
root mu-, meaning “to be silent.” Yet, while everything that is mystical may
be hidden (in the sense just mentioned), not everything that is hidden is
mystical.
xvi Ed itor’s Introduction
Gershom Scholem attempted to distinguish between the mystical and the

esoteric as follows:
Mysticism means a kind of knowledge which is by its very nature
incommunicable. It cannot be directly transmitted; it can be made
visible only indirectly, because its substance cannot be expressed in
human language. Esoteric knowledge, on the other hand, means a
kind of knowledge that may be communicable and might be
communicated but whose communication is forbidden.3
But Scholem is using “esoteric knowledge” in a much narrower sense than is
employed in this volume, and in the academic field of Western esotericism.
As the reader will see, much of what currently falls under this rubric is not and
never was “secret” or “forbidden,” nor was it the property of an elite. To
take merely one example, spiritualism was a populist movement with an
egalitarian ethos, whose proponents were anything but secretive (see the
essay by Cathy Gutierrez in the present volume).
Nevertheless, Scholem’s understanding of mysticism is fundamentally
correct and can be used as means not just to distinguish mysticism from
esotericism (as the term is used by the authors herein) but also to discern how
they are related.
2 The Nature of Mysticism

The essence of mysticism is to be found in the concept of gnosis (about which
Wouter Hanegraaff has contributed an entire essay in this volume). Gnosis is
precisely what was supposed to have been acquired by those who participated
in ta mysteria: a direct perception of the ultimate truth of what is. This
knowledge was life transforming and impossible to adequately express in
words. If we examine all that is typically categorized as “mystical,” we find
that in one way or another it alludes to such an experience, or flows from the
standpoint of one who has had it, and attempts to help others to be receptive
to the same.4 (It is, therefore, highly appropriate that the first essay in this
3
Gershom Scholem, Jewish Mysticism in the Middle Ages, The 1964 Allan Bronfman Lecture (New
York: Judaica Press, 1964), 3–4.
4
A great many definitions of mysticism have been offered by scholars – too many to cite here. I
recommend readers consult Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, Vol. 1: The
Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1994), xv–xx.
In many ways, William James’s discussion of mysticism in Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902) remains unsurpassed (see Lectures XVI and XVII in any unabridged edition).
Editor’s Introduction xvii
volume, written by Charles Stein, introduces readers to what we know of the

mystery rites of Eleusis.)
To be sure, there are significant differences between the mysticisms of
Parmenides, Plato, Plotinus,5 Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, the
Kabbalists, the Sufis, the Rhineland mystics (Hildegard of Bingen, Meister
Eckhart, etc.), and Christian theosophists such as Jacob Boehme – all of
whom are discussed in this collection. Still greater differences are to be found
between all the above and what those of us in the West call “Eastern
mysticism”: Vedanta, Shaivism, Tantra, Taoism, Zen, and so on.
Nonetheless, there is an identity underlying these differences – a reason all
of them have a “family resemblance” for us and lead us to group them under a
single term, however inadequate that term may be.
All of the mystics – East and West – are concerned with knowledge of the
transcendent source of all being, the object of gnosis. Since everything in our
experience flows from this source, or owes its existence to it, the source itself
cannot be understood in terms of the categories we employ in thinking or
speaking about finite things. The doctrine that the source is “beyond the
opposites” or that within it all conceptual oppositions meet or are left behind
(the coincidentia oppositorum) is nearly universal to what we call mysticism. It
follows that, according to mysticism’s peculiar logic, the transcendent source
transcends the distinction between transcendence and immanence. Further,
if the being of all is to be found in a One that is beyond every duality, then in
spite of appearances all really is one.
Thus, mysticism typically teaches that all finite things are connected; all are
parts or aspects of a cosmic order – call it the Tao, the Logos, the Absolute, or
what have you. We might also call it an “infinite whole,” meaning a whole or
One that is not limited by anything external to itself, thus making it simulta-
neously the most indeterminate being (since nothing determines it) and the
most determinate one (since it is the One, subsuming all determinations).
Usually, the mystics also hold that there is a fundamental identity between
ourselves and the One. This doctrine is perhaps most starkly laid out in
Vedanta, in the identity between Atman (one’s true self or nature) and
Brahman (the transcendent source of all being) – but the same teaching is to
be found in Eckhart. Indeed, it is a perennial teaching and is often expressed
as the identity of the macrocosm and the microcosm. Further, if the One/All
is identical to the impersonal and universal soul of which each of us is a finite
5
The first three figures listed here are commonly referred to as philosophers, and modern
historians of philosophy would like to believe that there is a sharp distinction between
mysticism and philosophy. The present volume – especially the essays dealing with these
three figures – makes it clear that matters are not so simple.
xviii Ed itor’s Introduction
inflection, then it would seem to follow that the being of all things is soul-
like, or ensouled.
Now, the preceding is an attempt to describe what is typically taught by
the mystics – with the usual caveat that there are countless variations and
differences of emphasis. But it is crucially important to understand that when
the mystics tell us these things, they are attempting to put into words the
“information” conveyed wordlessly in the experience of gnosis. No such
account can ever be fully adequate – yet the most brilliant writers and
teachers among the mystics can give us a vivid glimpse. The typical mystical
experience (the experience of gnosis) seems to involve several basic compo-
nents. These include: a fundamental alteration in the quality of experience, as
things seem to become more vivid or real; the sense that one is seeing into the
true nature of things; the intuition that all is really one; the sense that the
distinction between self and other has collapsed; and the overwhelming
feeling of the rightness of things – that everything, just as it is, is fundamentally
right. All of this is experienced at once, and in a form that is quite distinct
from both thinking (in the sense of reasoning) and mundane sense experi-
ence. It is obvious how the doctrines of mysticism summarized earlier are an
attempt to put the wordless into words; to convey in the form of commu-
nicable teachings, as far as possible, what is revealed in gnosis. (A classic, and
highly personal, account of this attempt to render the “content” of gnosis in
words is to be found in the writings of Jacob Boehme; see the essay on him in
this volume.)
The foregoing account of the nature of mysticism should make it clear
why it is necessary to distinguish it from esotericism. For what, after all, do
astrology, magic, alchemy, and spirit-seeing have to do with what I have just
discussed? Actually, as will slowly emerge, they have a great deal to do with
mysticism. And yet they are distinct from it at the same time; esotericism is
not mysticism. So what is it?
3 Approaches to Understanding Esotericism

Our first impulse is to try to identify what esoteric currents all have in
common; to identify their essential characteristics. But when we speak of
esotericism, we are speaking of a category that subsumes quite a lot of very
different things. What can the four esoteric “sciences” just named –
astrology, magic, alchemy, and spirit-seeing – all have in common? To say
the least, it is not obvious. And so it has recently been suggested that instead
of searching for the essential characteristics of esotericism, we should under-
stand it instead through the history of how this catchall category was
Editor’s Introduction xix
“constructed.” This is the approach taken by Wouter Hanegraaff in his

important book Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western
Culture.
For Hanegraaff, the story of esotericism’s construction begins in the
Renaissance, when Florentine humanists argued for a fanciful “genealogy
of wisdom” in which figures such as Plato, Plotinus, and Hermes
Trismegistus were all seen as transmitting an ancient wisdom whose source,
ultimately, was divine. This hugely influential “ancient wisdom narrative,” as
Hanegraaff refers to it, was in effect the first modern attempt at a history of
philosophy. In the second half of the seventeenth century, however,
Protestant German theologians went on the attack against the ancient wis-
dom narrative. Their aim was to “‘purify’ Christian theology from its con-
tamination by pagan error.”6 Thus, they jettisoned the “Platonic
orientalism” of late antiquity, Hermetism, Gnosticism, Kabbalism, theoso-
phy, alchemy, and generally anything that seemed to somehow conflict with
what they saw as true Christianity. Also cast out were the Renaissance
purveyors of the ancient wisdom narrative – such as Ficino, Pico della
Mirandola, and Bruno – as well as figures such as Paracelsus and Boehme.
The result was the creation of a kind of “wastebasket” of rejected knowl-
edge (to use Hanegraaff’s vivid description). Quite without intending to,
these historians had created the category of what we call today “esotericism.”
From then on, these esoteric figures and movements – though they often had
little in common – would be seen as all somehow belonging with one
another in a “counter tradition.” Secular Enlightenment historians basically
adopted the approach of the Protestants, only this time esoteric currents were
rejected not because of their apparent incompatibility with Christianity, but
because they were considered “irrational.” (Interestingly, both the Protestant
theologians and the Enlightenment rationalists were united in their hostility
to the esotericists’ claims to “inner illumination.”7) The result, to make a
very long story short, was the construction of the history of science and
philosophy that we are familiar with today. In both cases, Hanegraaff argues,
what has occurred is that certain figures and schools of thought have been
marginalized due to the prejudices of historians.
6
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 103.
7
See Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 137. It would be a gross error, however, to
make a sharp distinction between the two groups. It was possible for someone to be both a
Protestant theologian (or, at least, a Protestant) and an Enlightenment rationalist, and indeed
many men saw themselves as such.
xx Ed itor’s Introduction
On the one hand, Hanegraaff has given us an account of the process by

which different esoteric currents came to be understood as all belonging
together under one rubric. On the other hand, he also argues that our
modern conceptions of “real” science and “real” philosophy were formed
in opposition to this discarded “other” – which was itself a construction of
modern science and philosophy! There is thus a simple reason for the
embarrassment of historians of philosophy and science when confronted
with the facts mentioned earlier about Newton, Goethe, and Kant: To be
rational and “modern” means not to believe in the esoteric.
This account of the construction of esotericism offers us a great deal of
insight, but it does not follow from it that we cannot discern fundamental
common features of things esoteric – and Hanegraaff does not claim other-
wise. (Later on, I will very briefly discuss his own account of what char-
acterizes esotericism.) A much more radical version of Hanegraaff’s
“constructivist” approach is to be found in the work of Kocku von
Stuckrad, who, for all intents and purposes, denies that there is any such
thing as esotericism with discernible, common features.8 Instead, according
to Stuckrad, we can speak only of “esoteric discourses,” united solely by the
fact that they are all “others” rejected by the cultural forces of modernity
described earlier. Esotericism is, thus, merely a “construct.”
This position invites a basic question: In virtue of what were esoteric
thinkers, schools, and texts seen as belonging together? In virtue of what
traits were they marginalized by modernity? We are faced with a question
parallel to the one Socrates raises about piety in the Euthyphro: Is something
esoteric because it was rejected by the Enlightenment; or was it rejected by
the Enlightenment because it was esoteric (i.e., because it had certain specific
features)? On most days, the items in my wastebasket have nothing in
common other than that I no longer want them. But on the days I am
pruning the house of specific sorts of things, the items in my wastebasket have
a great deal in common – even though it might not be obvious to anyone
other than myself.
If we turn, then, to attempts to identify the characteristic features of
esotericism – the features that so enraged Enlightenment rationalists – we
will find that the best place to begin is with the approach of Antoine Faivre,
arguably the major figure in the academic study of esotericism now living. In
Access to Western Esotericism, Faivre stipulates that there are four fundamental
8
See Kocku von Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden:
Brill, 2010). Stuckrad’s approach is critiqued in Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy,
361–367.
Editor’s Introduction xxi
characteristics of esotericism (which he calls a “form of thought”), that is,

four basic criteria for deciding whether something belongs to this category.
He states, “By nature they are more or less inseparable, as we shall see, but
methodologically it is important to distinguish between them.”9 These
characteristics are:
1. “Correspondences.” The entire universe is conceived in esoteric thought
as an emblem book. “Everything is a sign,” Faivre states.10 The most
fundamental of these correspondences is that of the macrocosm and the
microcosm, which underlies, among other things, astrology.
2. “Living Nature.” This is the notion of what is sometimes called “cosmic
sympathies” (which is obviously related to the idea of correspondences).
Nature is a living whole, whose finite members exist in relations of
sympathy or antipathy to one another. As Faivre points out, it is the
knowledge of these sympathies and antipathies that forms the basis of
magic (as well as, just to mention two more examples, Paracelsism and
animal magnetism).
3. “Imagination and Mediations.” Faivre explains: “The idea of correspon-
dences presumes already a form of imagination inclined to reveal and use
mediations of all kinds, such as rituals, symbolic images, mandalas, inter-
mediary spirits.”11
4. “Experience of Transmutation.” Esotericism tends to involve the attempt
to effect a fundamental transformation of things in the world (as in
alchemical transmutation or magic) and/or of the self. Of course, nuclear
physics also deals with the fundamental transformation of things in the
world, so here we must note the obvious, that esoteric transmutation
involves, as Faivre puts it, “the passage from one plane [of reality] to
another.”12 And the other plane, standing opposed to this mundane one,
is not accessible by empirical science.
In addition to these four fundamental features of esotericism, Faivre also lists
two other elements that are frequently, though not always, found together
with those just discussed:
9
Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994), 10. As I discuss shortly, Faivre actually lists six criteria on pp. 10–15 of Access. Faivre
repeats the same list in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed. Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman
(New York: Crossroad, 1995), xv–xx; and in Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2000), xxi–xxiv.
10
Faivre, Access, 10.
11
Faivre, Access, 12.
12
Faivre, Access, 13.
xxii Ed itor’s Introduction
5. “The Praxis of the Concordance.” This involves a tendency on the part of

many esoteric thinkers to try and find links between different traditions or
teachings, or among all of them. This praxis is itself conceived as a means
to enlightenment: It is the identification of the one, true, universal
tradition. One finds this feature displayed prominently in the
“Traditionalist” school of René Guénon, and in C. G. Jung (both of
whom are given their own essays herein), among others.
6. “Transmission.” Esoteric teachings are “transmitted from master to dis-
ciple following a pre-established channel.” The validity of esoteric
knowledge somehow depends on this pedigree, and “initiation” into
certain paths is only possible through an unbroken line of transmission.13
Of course, any attempt to define esotericism (or any other subject, for that
matter) in terms of a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions will
never please everyone. There will always be some scholar eager to assert that
while we are quite willing to call x esoteric, it does not fit all the stipulated
criteria. But part of the problem here is that many academics are so lost in
minutiae and so wedded to ultra-fine-grained distinctions that they are often
unable to see the proverbial forest for the trees. Indeed, some are so averse to
generalizations that they brand any attempt to synthesize knowledge with the
shopworn postmodern smear “essentialism.” But it is the nature of the
human mind to seek the “essence” of things, by which I mean simply a
fundamental common trait, or set of traits. Speaking of essential traits is
problematic only when there are none, or when we have misidentified
them. (And postmodernists are oblivious to the irony of grouping their
opponents under the rubric of essentialism – as if, after all, they shared
some common essence.)
In the main, I think that Faivre’s methodology is sound – and at least gives
us a place to start.14 It is difficult to think of any esoteric currents discussed in
this book to which his four primary criteria do not apply. But in order to see
those currents as they were seen by the Enlightenment zealots who, in
Hanegraaff’s account, marginalized them and thereby created an esoteric
counter tradition, we have to go deeper.
13
Faivre, Access, 14–15.
14
Both Hanegraaff and Stuckrad have criticized Faivre’s approach. I am not altogether
persuaded by their criticisms, though I recognize that Faivre’s account has its flaws. As
will become apparent, I am using it as a means to reach what I regard as a deeper level of
analysis.
Editor’s Introduction xxiii
4 The Nature of Esotericism – A Synthesis of Approaches

If one considers Faivre’s first two criteria, “correspondences” and “living
nature,” one will realize that what is at work in both cases is a kind of
“qualitative” approach to understanding nature. For instance, the
Renaissance magus Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) believed in a spiritus mundi
permeating the entire universe, which human beings can draw on to improve
their lot. This activity is magic, and it consists primarily in attracting the
influences of particular planets through the use of various substances asso-
ciated with them: precious stones, animals, scents, colors, and so forth. To
draw on the influence of Jupiter, Ficino advises us to use “Jovial things” such
as silver, sugar, and white honey; to think Jovial thoughts; and to bear in
mind Jupiter’s association with certain animals, such as eagles and lambs.15
Thus, correspondences are based on qualitative identities: Though silver,
white honey, and eagles are quite different, they all possess a “Jovial quality”
(or, we could say, they are qualitatively related to Jupiter). At the basis of the
idea of “cosmic sympathies” is just this notion of qualitative ties. Needless to
say, this way of thinking is now extremely alien to us, precisely because it was
discarded in the modern period in favor of the quantitative approach to
understanding nature. According to the modern outlook, all qualitative
differences ultimately reduce to quantitative ones: to the combination and
recombination, in quantifiable patterns and proportions, of basic material
particles that are, in themselves, bereft of any of the qualities familiar to us
from experience. This quantitative approach is, of course, still very much
with us – and not just in science departments. It is at the basis of the modern
worldview itself: our way of looking at life, at value, at being as such. It is not
for nothing that René Guénon described modernity as “the reign of quan-
tity” (see the essay on him in this volume).16
The qualitative approach to nature is not just a feature of esotericism: One
finds it in what we normally categorize as ancient philosophy and science. So,
for example, Aristotle in On Generation and Corruption speaks of what has
come to be called the “four elements” – earth, air, fire, and water – but which
15
See Marsilio Ficino, ed. Angela Voss (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2006), 116.
16
We find earlier esotericists explicitly aware of the conflict between their approach and
modernity. To take but one example, Franz Josef Molitor (1779–1860) states: “Each really-
existent creaturely essence exists thus in a living form. However, in our current fallen
condition, it is no longer easily possible to know the inner qualitative essence of things . . .
which is possible via the holy language. We have become concerned only with the outward
‘objective,’ quantitative relationships among things; we have forgotten that the outer forms
or signatures of things reveal the world of their inner, spiritual qualities.” Quoted in Arthur
Versluis, Theosophia (Hudson, NY: Lindesfarne Press, 1994), 77.
xxiv Ed itor’s Introduction
would be more accurately described as the four material qualities: the cold
and dry, the hot and wet, the hot and dry, and the cold and wet. These four
elements were, of course, bequeathed to alchemy. And it is partly on account
of alchemy’s qualitative approach that it was gradually divorced from
chemistry.17 (There are other major reasons for alchemy’s marginalization,
which I will come to in a moment.)
Consider next Faivre’s category of “imagination and mediations.” Faivre
himself notes (as quoted earlier) that this way of thinking makes possible the
worldview that contains correspondences and cosmic sympathies. And to the
modern mindset, it is fatally and irredeemably “subjective.” In the modern
worldview, objectivity is virtually the same as measurability: Whatever
cannot be measured, for all intents and purposes, may be said not to exist.
Thus, the modern ideal of objectivity is inextricably tied to its emphasis on
the quantitative. And this makes modernity fundamentally “extraverted,” for
only the “out there” can be measured. The “in here,” my private world of
thoughts, feelings, and (above all) imagination cannot be measured in any
truly objective fashion. The idea that private intuitions, feelings, and imagi-
native reveries might be guides to truth is wholly anathema to the modern
worldview. For modernity, the subjective is a dark realm; a source of
falsehood and deception. Thus, any knowledge claims based on such sub-
jective sources are simply ruled out. Even in modern psychology, which is
supposed to be the science of subjectivity, strenuous efforts have been made
to banish subjectivity. Behaviorism, of course, is the most extreme example.
One can easily see that a tremendous amount of what we classify as the
esoteric is based on the subjective sources just described. After all, how did
Ficino (and the older thinkers he relied on) arrive at the idea that there was
some kind of sympathy between, for instance, the planet Jupiter and lambs? It
was through the use of imagination: through getting a certain “feel” for the
connections between things. Occultists such as Ficino will claim that others
following the same path, and with a similar openness and sensitivity, will
arrive at the same conclusions – and thus their assertions of correspondences
and sympathies are genuinely objective, by virtue of intersubjective agree-
ment. Needless to say, this position is not taken seriously by modern thinkers.
The same subjective element is to be found in alchemy – that is, the same
reliance on felt or intuited connections. The essay on alchemy in this volume
(by Lawrence Principe) discusses how the Jungian school, and others, have
emphasized the “spiritual” element of alchemy virtually to the point of
denying that laboratory alchemy took place. My own position is that
17
See Versluis, Theosophia, 97.
Editor’s Introduction xxv
alchemy was indeed a physical process, but inseparable – in the minds of most
alchemists – from a spiritual one. (Heinrich Khunrath, 1560–1605, and
Oswald Croll, ca. 1563–1609, are excellent examples.) This is arguably the
primary reason it was banished from the discipline we now know as
chemistry.
Needless to say, everything in esotericism that involves access to “higher
worlds” (whether through visions, “astral projection,” or what have you),
spirit-seeing, mediumship, “psychic healing,” precognition, telepathy, sym-
pathetic magic, and so forth all depends on claims that flow from the
authority of some supernormal aspect of subjectivity. This brings us directly
to Faivre’s fourth aspect of esotericism, “the experience of transmutation,”
which involves, as I have already quoted, “the passage from one plane to
another.” In the eyes of modernity, the greatest sin committed by esotericism
is not specifically the subjectivism I have just discussed but rather the claim to
have obtained (via special subjective powers) access to “other realities,”
which in principle cannot be reached by the empirical methods of modern
science. As noted earlier, for modernity what is not measurable “out there” –
directly or indirectly – is not real. There is not a single aspect of what is
treated in this volume as esotericism that does not explicitly or implicitly
challenge this modern conviction.
Finally, Faivre’s fifth and sixth aspects of esotericism, treated together,
bring us to a further and especially revealing insight into the unity of
esotericism, from the perspective of modernity. Faivre speaks, again, of
“the praxis of the concordance” and of “transmission.” The common
denominator of these two is reverence for the authority of tradition. And
this is arguably not only the key element involved in modernity’s rejection of
esoteric currents – it may well give us the key feature of modernity as such.18
Contempt for the authority of tradition is as central to the modern mindset as
the “reign of quantity.” For the esotericists, truth is to found in the oldest of
old things; the new and original are generally viewed with suspicion.19 For
the moderns, only the new and the original are worthy of respect; the past is a
record of mistakes, not a gold mine of eternal verities, and the more distant
the past the darker the gloom of ignorance and irrationality.
Modernity was born in the reaction against authority of all kinds. In
philosophy and the sciences, it was usually the authority of Aristotle, and
18
August Heumann (1681–1764), often cited as the founder of the modern discipline of the
history of philosophy, claimed that one of the worst sins of the esotericists was that they
appeal to tradition rather than to logic. See Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 131.
19
A notable exception to this is Paracelsus, who often attacked tradition. Many Paracelsians
did not follow him in this, however.
xxvi Ed itor’s Introduction
those who were taken (often erroneously) to be true to his thought. What is
interesting, however, is that Aristotle himself never appeals to authority. He
begins most of his works by explaining why his predecessors were wrong and
is universally quoted as having said “Dear is Plato, dearer still truth” (and
though no one can find this line in Aristotle’s writings, it is nonetheless true
to his spirit). Imagine, therefore, the outrage the fathers of modernity must
have felt when sitting in judgment on esoteric traditions that not only
explicitly appealed to authority in making truth claims but that – as per
Faivre’s praxis of the concordance – viewed the search for agreement among
the authorities as a method for discovering truth! (An appeal to the majority
of authorities, in other words.) Here, we have one of the principal factors in
the separation of alchemy from chemistry – or, we might say, the construc-
tion of the modern discipline of chemistry. Modern chemistry accepts no
appeals to authority, only testing, observation, and experiment. The alchem-
ical tradition, on the other hand, abounds in such appeals.20
We have now discovered four fundamental features esoteric currents have
in common, which led to their marginalization by the Enlightenment. Taken
together, these elements constitute the antithesis of the spirit of modernity:
1. A qualitative approach to understanding nature – as opposed to the
quantitative approach of modernity.
2. A reliance on subjectivity and subjective impressions of a highly rarefied
nature – as opposed to the rejection of the subjective in favor of what is
“objective” and measurable.
3. Knowledge claims regarding other aspects of reality (or other sorts of
beings) accessible only by those subjective means – as opposed to the
narrowly-defined empiricism of modernity.
4. Reverence for the authority of tradition as a source of truth – as opposed
to modernity’s rejection of tradition and insistence that history is the
record of our emergence from darkness into the light.21
20
See Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 202–207, for a discussion of how preoccupation
with the idea of recovering a lost tradition led to the marginalization of what we now call
alchemy and the sharp divide between alchemy as pseudo-science and chemistry as
legitimate science.
21
These four fundamental characteristics are not meant to supplant the analysis offered by
Faivre, but rather to deepen it. The four I have offered constitute an attempt to identify the
root assumptions or attitudes that make possible the four (or, rather, the six) discussed by
Faivre. Hanegraaff also perceives that what Faivre has offered as the characteristics of
esotericism constitute, in effect, a repudiation of the modern worldview. His observations
complement my own: “the notion of ‘correspondences’ is clearly an alternative to
instrumental causality, ‘living nature’ stands against a mechanistic worldview,
‘imagination/meditations’ implies a multi-leveled neoplatonic cosmology as opposed to a
Editor’s Introduction xxvii
Understood in terms of these four features, what we know today as the

different varieties of esotericism had to be rejected by the Enlightenment.
One of the interesting things that emerges from this analysis is the ease with
which one can identify the fundamental features of modernity (named as the
second element in each numbered item above) precisely in terms of what it
rejected (thus supporting Hanegraaff’s thesis that the modern identity was
partly constructed through what it disowned).
It would be far too simplistic, however, to say that these four character-
istics constitute the essence of the “pre-modern worldview.” Matters are
much more complex than that, regardless of what early modern authors may
have thought. As we have already seen, in certain ways Aristotle was much
closer to the moderns than they thought he was. Indeed, of the four
characteristics just summarized, only the first would be applicable to him,
and then only with certain qualifications. Aristotle would, in fact, have
vigorously repudiated claims to special, subjective revelations.22 Whereas
an argument can be made that Parmenides, though classed with Aristotle
among the philosophers, fits all four (see the essay about him in this volume).
In a certain sense, there have always been “ancients” and “moderns.”
Aristotle is much closer to the modern temperament than was, for example,
C. G. Jung, who nonetheless dressed up his thought in the garb of modern
science.
Still, while esotericism cannot be identified with the ancient worldview
simpliciter, Hanegraaff makes an excellent point when he suggests that the
“red thread” running throughout esotericism is paganism. He writes, “The
factor of ‘paganism’ has been neglected by modern scholars of Western
esotericism to an extent that seems amazing at first sight: While the impor-
tance of its specific historical manifestations (particularly hermetism) is
obviously recognized, it plays no structural role in how the field has been
constructed or defined.”23 The Protestant theologians who cast out all that
we now call esotericism due to its “un-Christian” qualities were certainly
bigoted, but they were not wrong. A little reflection on the esoteric topics
and forms of thought discussed herein will suffice to reveal either their origin
in the pagan, pre-Christian milieu, or their affinities with it. Astrology,
cosmos reducible to only matter in motion, and ‘transmutation’ implies the theosophical/
alchemical process of regeneration by which fallen man and nature are reunited with the
divine.” See Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 254. As noted earlier, however,
Hanegraaff is critical of Faivre’s approach. See especially pp. 352–354.
22
In the short treatise De divinatione per somnum, Aristotle expresses considerable skepticism
about prophetic dreams.
23
Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 369.
xxviii Ed itor’s Introduction
magic, and number symbolism (think Pythagoras), spiritualism (think sha-

manism and necromancy), and panpsychism are obvious examples. And one
has only to scratch the so-called Christians a bit – men such as Ficino, Pico,
Paracelsus, and Boehme – to find the pagan.
It seems, therefore, that the features of esotericism discussed earlier are
characteristic of a certain way of thinking that was indeed ubiquitous in the
ancient world – but that is also perennial. We lack a good word for it and
keep changing our minds. “Esotericism” is merely the term currently in
vogue – though it is no better a choice than “occultism,” and practically
means the same thing. Historians such as Hanegraaff are correct to note that
before modernity, and well into modernity’s infancy, what we call esoteri-
cism not only coexisted with what we now think of as science and philoso-
phy, but the lines between them were often unclear. Yet it is a fact that what
has been lumped together under the rubric of esotericism has discernible
common features that set it apart from the tendencies that were ultimately
victorious in the modern period.
The picture that emerges is that the tapestry of Western intellectual history
was woven out of a number of distinct and often antagonistic strands. But in
the distant past, the figures in the tapestry – not surprisingly – often did not
discern the individual strands themselves, or their antagonism. The effect of
the Enlightenment was not to “construct” esotericism but to reveal it as a
distinct current of thought, or worldview, with perceptible features. For the
first time, we became aware of esotericism as a discernible tendency of the
human spirit, when the stark contrast with the ideology of modernity finally
made its outlines clear. Ironically, the Enlightenment did a far more rigorous
job of delineating the nature of the esoteric than the Renaissance proponents
of the ancient wisdom narrative. In doing so, the Enlightenment also inad-
vertently offered to those who felt repulsed and alienated by modernity a way
to connect the dots between the different strains of archaic “irrationalism” to
which they felt a passionate and intuitive attraction.
We are now in a position to sum things up. “Esotericism” refers to a
number of theories, practices, and approaches to knowledge united by their
participation in a premodern, largely pagan worldview. Central to this
worldview is commitment to the idea of the unity of existence – that
existence is an interrelated whole in which seemingly dissimilar things exist
in qualitative correspondence and vibrant, living sympathy. The ruling
correspondence is “as above, so below”: The objects that surround us (and
their relationships) mirror, in a fashion that can be called “emblematic,” the
fundamental features of the universe as a whole. Most important of all, we
mirror those features in our own bodies and souls. These correspondences are
Editor’s Introduction xxix
discovered through the cultivation of supernormal aspects of human sub-

jectivity, especially of the imagination. Esotericists typically hold that such
knowledge can be utilized to effect changes in the world or in the self
through causal mechanisms that empiricism finds inexplicable (and, there-
fore, rejects as impossible). This commitment usually goes hand in hand with
the belief that the same supernormal aspects of the subject can reveal the
existence of other dimensions of reality, usually hidden from view. Further,
esotericists typically believe that the truths and practices just mentioned are of
the greatest antiquity – perhaps once widely disseminated and openly pro-
claimed, but now (and for a great many centuries) hidden and preserved by a
few special individuals or schools. Discovery in esotericism is almost always
rediscovery.
5 The Relation of Mysticism and Esotericism

The preceding account should already have alerted readers to points at which
esotericism and mysticism seem to converge. I have argued that a particular
worldview is at the root of esotericism, one that asserts that existence is an
interconnected whole shot through with correspondences and sympathies,
and that the most fundamental of these correspondences is that of macrocosm
and microcosm.
But this is precisely what I identified earlier as the core mystical teaching –
the “doctrine” that emerges when mystics attempt to convey in words what
the experience of gnosis has taught them. Thus, “esotericism” is founded on
“mysticism.” I have placed these words in quotes once again just to remind
readers that the words themselves are inadequate, and that analysis of their
literal meaning is not a reliable means to understand that to which they refer.
It would be much more accurate to simply state that esotericism is founded
on gnosis, either directly (when esotericists themselves have the experience of
gnosis) or indirectly (when esotericists put their faith in the testimony of those
who have had the experience). Everything treated in this book as esotericism
– alchemy, astrology, magic, number symbolism, visions of other worlds,
spiritualism, and so on – is founded in one way or another on the mystical
teaching of hen kai pan (One and all), and everything that it entails.
It is useful in this context to recall one of the expressions that has been
supplanted by the term “esotericism”: the “occult sciences.” This is normally
regarded as loose talk, as a quaint, makeshift way of referring to our subject
matter. But there is more to the term than meets the eye. Mysticism affords us
with a special experience (if we are fortunate) or with the next-best thing:
reports by those who have had the experience. The various items grouped
xxx Ed itor’s Introduction
together as esotericism, by contrast, mainly consist in techniques or practices

or specialized areas of investigation (in other words, “sciences,” to use the
term charitably). Mysticism is gnosis; esotericism is technē (technique or art).
And, as I have argued, this technē is founded on gnosis.
However, it would be highly misleading to gloss this as “mysticism is
theory, esotericism is practice.” When an astrologer creates a birth chart and
attempts to thereby predict the course of an individual’s life, this can certainly
be described as a technique or practice. However, it is founded on the
astrological theory that the stars exercise some kind of causal influence over
individuals and events. There is thus both astrological theory and practice.
However, the theory is founded on the deeper conviction that the universe is
one, and that everything is connected to everything else, including micro-
cosm to macrocosm. This conviction is the fruit of gnosis.
Believers in astrology will claim a kind of “empirical proof” for their art,
asserting that astrological predictions are borne out by events. If this were
true a significant amount of the time, it would constitute proof for astro-
logical theory – and we could say that it would also offer proof of the deeper,
mystical conviction of the unity of all things, and the correspondence of
macrocosm and microcosm. But those mystical convictions were not arrived
at as a result of observing the results of astrological practice, or as a result of
inferences drawn from any esoteric practice. Indeed, they are not the result of
inferences of any kind. The mystical worldview is the product of gnosis, and it
is the deep assumption that is brought to esoteric practices of all sorts, not
derived from them. Esotericism is founded on mysticism (i.e., esoteric technē
is founded on mystical gnosis), not the other way around.
Magic provides us with yet another example. As Hanegraaff makes clear in
the essay on magic in this volume, the term itself has been used and abused in
a great variety of ways. But setting aside the checkered history of the word,
when we use it today we are generally referring to a perennial phenomenon
found in all cultures throughout all of history: the belief that it is possible for
certain individuals, drawing on mysterious and supernormal powers of the
soul and using such means as spells, incantations, amulets, and talismans, to
manipulate cosmic sympathies or correspondences in order to effect changes
in themselves, in the physical world, or even in the powers governing the
universe.
Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, this use of the term “magic” is not
of recent vintage. Whereas for the Greeks mageia was generally associated
with the activities of Persian magoi (magi), for the Romans magia took on a
broad meaning more or less identical to our use of “magic.” In his Naturalis
historia, Pliny the Elder (23–79) uses the term magicae vanitates (“magical
Editor’s Introduction xxxi
vanities”) to refer to the casting of spells, the making of amulets and talismans,
and forms of divination. Understood in this way, magic is clearly a technē (as
reflected in the familiar expression “magical arts,” and in the literal meaning
of “witchcraft”). And it is a technē that depends, once more, on the world-
view that teaches that the universe is one, and that everything is related to
everything else through complex patterns of correspondence and sympathy
(thus, the species of sorcery scholars call “sympathetic magic”). Indeed,
magic depends especially on one of the key revelations of gnosis: the identity
of macrocosm and microcosm. In theory, magic is only possible through the
felt experience, in the practitioner, of a literal sympathy, connection, or even
identity with higher powers.
All of the foregoing should clarify why it makes sense to treat Western
mysticism and esotericism together in one volume (again, construing these
terms just in the senses stipulated earlier). Understanding esotericism leads us
back to mysticism, as the fundamental theoretical groundwork for esoteric
currents.24 Indeed, esotericism is virtually unintelligible without an appre-
ciation for its roots in mystic gnosis. And it can be plausibly argued that gnosis
leads to esoteric technē, to the development of the various occult sciences, and
the preoccupation with them. Thus, we frequently find mystics of all types
engaged in esoteric practices. An excellent example would be the kabbalists –
both Jewish and Christian – who, in addition to claiming to be recipients of
gnosis, also engaged in astrology, magic, alchemy, and gematria.
A further area for inquiry, too complex to explore here, is the role of
esoteric practices in leading one to gnosis. Western mystics are often quite
silent concerning the techniques they use to obtain gnosis. But we know that
this experience often led to the development of practices for repeating (or
deepening) the experience, and for leading others to it. It is also quite true
that some of the occult sciences, which depend ultimately on the wisdom
conveyed in gnosis, may in turn have served as propaedeutic to the actual
experience of gnosis itself.
Finally, I should note that there is a difficult philosophical issue surround-
ing the relationship between mysticism and esotericism – again, one too
complex to be elaborated here, but on which the reader should reflect.
Mystical gnosis typically has the effect of helping us accept reality as it is, of
bringing us peace. (I noted earlier that the typical mystical experience
involves the intuition of both the unity and rightness of existence.) So
24
I would argue that the exact same relationship between esotericism and mysticism holds true
for the non-Western equivalents of these. And, as already implied, I do believe that these
categories, as I have defined them, are universal and cross-culturally valid. The present
volume, of course, confines itself to their Western inflections.
xxxii Ed itor’s Introduction
much of esotericism, on the other hand, is concerned with changing reality:

gaining knowledge or powers that might enable us to alter or control objects,
situations, and events, either for selfish or selfless purposes. Magic, alchemy,
astrology, and all other forms of divination are obvious examples.
6 Methodological Considerations
As noted earlier, Western esotericism as an academic discipline is very young.
Consequently, at present there is a great deal of debate concerning metho-
dological issues. To put the matter as starkly as possible, scholars of Western
esotericism today are divided between those who see the careful study and
documentation of esoteric currents as a means to discover important truths
about the universe and human nature, and those who regard such an interest
as incompatible with scholarly objectivity.25 Some of the latter have
described themselves as “methodological agnostics.”26 They tend to refer
to the former approach, which they vigorously oppose, with the rather
infelicitous term “religionism.”27 The agnostics reject religionism not just
because they see it as an approach that tends to produce biased or inaccurate
scholarship, but also because some of them are committed to postmodern
relativism and historicism.
These issues are far too complex to be treated adequately in this
Introduction. I will therefore limit myself to the observation that a middle
ground between the religionist and methodological agnostic positions seems
possible. There can be no rapprochement between their guiding philoso-
phical assumptions: the conviction that there is timeless truth to be found in
mysticism and esotericism (or in anything else) is completely incompatible
with historicism. Nevertheless, I think it is possible to conceive of a meth-
odology that combines the virtues of both approaches.
One should investigate mystical and esoteric texts and traditions in as
unbiased a manner as possible, always with the willingness to abandon
one’s cherished presuppositions, if they prove untenable. But it is a non
sequitur to assert that any interest in discovering truth through those sources
makes scholarly objectivity impossible. After all, if it is truth that is sought
through the study of mysticism and esotericism, it does not help us at all if we
25
One can find the same difference among scholars of mysticism. But since esotericism is the
younger and less familiar field, I will concentrate on it in this section.
26
See Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, especially 357–358, for a description of this
position, of which he is one of the major advocates.
27
Major examples of “religionist” scholars of esotericism include Henry Corbin, Mircea
Eliade, and C. G. Jung.
Editor’s Introduction xxxiii
utilize (or generate) false historical claims or allow prejudice and wishful
thinking to cloud our judgment.
A useful model here might be academic scholarship on the history of
philosophy as it is practiced today, which can be seen as cutting just such a
middle course as I am advocating here. Scholars who research the history of
philosophy are all trained philosophers, teaching in university departments of
philosophy. They all have their own philosophical views, and many tend to
have very strong affinities for the historical figures and movements they write
about. Thus, Plato scholars tend to be Platonists, Kant scholars tend to be
Kantians, Hegel scholars tend to be Hegelians, and so on – all usually, it is
important to say, in some more or less qualified sense. (No one believes that
literally everything said by their favorite philosophers is true.)
All these scholars seek truth through the thinkers they study, but most are
not only capable of objectivity concerning those thinkers, they are in fact
their most perceptive critics. Thus, to take one example, Kantian Kant
scholars analyze, reconstruct, and critique his arguments, pointing out their
weaknesses and admitting when the great man’s writings become too
obscure for comment. Indeed, it is the Kantian Kant scholars who know
the weaknesses of the philosopher best – precisely because their affinity for
the spirit of the philosophy makes them especially attuned to the ways in
which the letter is inadequate to it.
Of course, no one can be entirely objective. But if some scholars today
have arrived at a point where they believe that objectivity demands we abjure
the love of wisdom, then surely they have taken a wrong turn. Indeed, it may
be the case that only a reflective or philosophical approach to esotericism will,
in the long run, succeed in provoking widespread interest in these currents
among serious thinkers. The simple reason is that such an approach can show
us that not everything in esotericism is rubbish after all, and that some
profound insights are to be found there. In other words, it can show us
why this subject is genuinely worth our time. (It is difficult to see how a
“purely empirical” approach such as that advocated by some, let alone a
historicist approach, can do this.28)
28
On methodological agnosticism as an empirical approach, see again Hanegraaff, Esotericism and
the Academy, 357; and Hanegraaff, “Empirical Method in the Study of Esotericism,” Method &
Theory in the Study of Religion 7:2 (1995), 99–129. As to historicism, it involves a troubling
paradox. Implicitly, its adherents claim to speak from a privileged, ahistorical perspective that
historicism itself declares impossible. They claim to stand on a higher level than, for example,
the Enlightenment intellectuals who marginalized esotericism, and to be able to discern
objective truths that they failed to see (e.g., that there is no such thing as objective truth).
Indeed, the historicists implicitly claim to stand at the summit of the mountain itself, and to be
able to make a judgment about the entire history of ideas – namely, that there is no truth to be
xxxiv Ed itor’s Introduction
One of the great virtues of the methodological agnostics is that they have
called for us to reassess intellectual history – to read, for example, the
Hermetica alongside the works of Plato, Boehme alongside Bacon, and so
on. We should do this, however, not just to have a richer and more complete
account of the history of ideas, but also to have a richer and more complete
understanding of ourselves and our world. Of course, we must separate the
wheat from the chaff. The reader will find, on delving into these essays, that
there are rather great differences between the truth claims made by esoteri-
cists. And some of what we classify as esotericism really is superstition and
illusion, and thus merely of historical interest.
The authors featured in the present volume do not represent any one
methodology or school of thought. The reader will find both “religionists”
and “methodological agnostics” among them, as well as some who would
reject both labels. Thus, there is a good deal of disagreement among the
authors (though sometimes this is not superficially obvious). The essays in
this volume are introductory and do not presuppose any prior knowledge of
their subject matter. Needless to say, providing readers with an introduction
to these subjects involves exposing them to differences of scholarly opinion.
Nevertheless, while these essays are introductory, they are anything but
conventional. Many of the authors in the volume are taking bold, original,
and controversial approaches to their subjects. Thus, readers will be intro-
duced to scholarship on Western mysticism and esotericism that is at the
cutting edge of research. This means that while the volume is primarily
geared toward students and others with no prior knowledge, even those
who are already well acquainted with these fields will find material here that
is surprising and new.
had in any of it, save the absolute truth of historicism. One way out of this paradox would be
for historicists to embrace the historical situatedness of their theory; to embrace, perhaps, the
thesis that it is simply the perspective of modern, secular, European academics disillusioned by
the carnage of two world wars and by the failure of progressivism. (And that, going a step
further, historicism is exactly the sort of philosophy one would expect to emerge in an age of
cultural decline.) Such an approach, which historicizes historicism, would see it merely as the
perspective of a particular population within a certain culture, forged under a unique set of
historical circumstances – and as simply one possible intellectual option among many. This
approach has the virtue of making the act of asserting historicism consistent with what it asserts.
But it also abandons any claim to the objective truth of historicism, thus inviting old-fashioned
lovers of wisdom to simply step over it and go on climbing upward toward the sunlight.
Finally, a specific difficulty for those methodological agnostics who endorse historicism is that
historicism is not “empirically verifiable.” On this point see Leo Strauss, “Natural Right and
the Historical Approach,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1989), 109–110.
Editor’s Introduction xxxv
A note about organization: The first four parts of the volume

(“Antiquity,” “The Middle Ages,” “The Renaissance and Early
Modernity,” “The Nineteenth Century and Beyond”) organize the essays
in rough chronological order. Some essays, however, cover currents or
schools of thought that span several historical epochs. In such cases, the
essay is grouped in the historical division representing the period in which
the particular current is thought to have originated or to have first come to
light. For example, the Jewish Kabbalah is a tradition that continues to this
day. However, as a distinct form of Jewish mysticism, it first appears in the
Middle Ages and is hence to be found in that section of the volume. Part V,
“Common Threads,” is devoted to a number of more or less perennial facets
of mysticism and/or esotericism, such as astrology, number symbolism,
magic, and gnosis.
Full citations of the major sources (both primary and secondary) for the
essays are given in footnotes accompanying each. Readers who wish to delve
more deeply into these topics should consult those sources, as well as the
material listed under “Suggestions for Further Reading” at the end of the
volume.
For readers coming to these subjects for the first time, exploring this
volume will be like discovering a lost continent of Western intellectual
history. I envy them.
CONTRIBUTORS
Daphna Arbel is Professor of Early Jewish Literature at the University of British

Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Egil Asprem received his Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of Amsterdam. He is the
author of The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric Discourse,
1900–1939 (2014) and Arguing with Angels: Enochian Magic and Modern Occulture (2012).
Gwenaëlle Aubry is Researcher in Philosophy at the CNRS (Centre Jean
Pépin, Paris-Villejuif). Her works include Plotin. Traité 53 (I, 1), introduction,
translation, commentary, and notes (2004); Dieu sans la puissance. Dunamis et
Energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin (2006).
Jean-Pierre Brach teaches the History of Esoteric Currents in Modern and
Contemporary Europe at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris. He is
coeditor of Politica Hermetica and has published on topics ranging from early
modern Christian Kabbalah and magic to number symbolism and contemporary
occultism.
Roelof van den Broek is Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity at
Utrecht University, The Netherlands. His works include Studies in Gnosticism and
Alexandrian Christianity (1996) and Gnostic Religion in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2013).
William C. Chittick is Professor of Religious Studies at Stony Brook
University. He is author and translator of many books and articles on Muslim
mystics and philosophers; the most recent is The Unveiling of the Mysteries (2015).
Anne Clark is Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont. She has
published two books on Elisabeth of Schönau and articles on medieval mystics,
gender, visual culture in medieval Christianity, and the use of cognitive theory to
explore religious experience and expression.
Chas Clifton is editor of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan
Studies, the only peer-reviewed journal in the field. His works include Her
xxxvii
xxxviii List of contributors
Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (2006) and, as coeditor,
The Paganism Reader (2004). He teaches at Colorado State University–Pueblo.
Adam Crabtree is on the faculty of the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy in
Toronto. He has published an annotated bibliography of animal magnetism and
early hypnotism and psychical research and is the author of From Mesmer to Freud:
Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (1993).
Jessica Elbert Decker is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State
University–San Marcos, where she teaches courses in the Philosophy and
Women’s Studies Departments. Her work has been published in Epoche: A
Journal for the History of Philosophy, Philosophia: A Journal of Continental Feminism,
and Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
April D. DeConick is the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professor of New
Testament and Early Christianity and Chair of the Department of Religion, Rice
University. She is founding joint editor of GNOSIS: Journal of Gnostic Studies and
author of The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says (2nd ed., 2009).
Antoine Faivre is Professor Emeritus, Germanic Studies, and École Pratique des
Hautes Études, Religious Studies (Chair of the History of Esoteric and Mystical
Currents in Modern and Contemporary Europe). He is the author of ten books
and more than one hundred articles in academic journals.
Peter Forshaw is Senior Lecturer in the History of Western Esotericism in the
Early Modern Period at the University of Amsterdam’s Center for the History of
Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents. He is editor in chief of Aries: Journal
for the Study of Western Esotericism.
Joscelyn Godwin is Professor of Music at Colgate University. He has written,
edited, or translated some thirty books on musical and esoteric topics, most
recently Atlantis and the Cycles of Time (2010), Upstate Cauldron (2015), and a
family memoir, The Starlight Years (2015).
Michael Gomes, Director of Emily Sellon Memorial Library, New York, has
authored a number of studies on Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and her
Theosophical movement, including abridgments of her major books Isis
Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. He is the recipient of Columbia University’s
Herman Ausubel Memorial Prize for historical achievement.
Cathy Gutierrez is Professor of Religion at Sweet Briar College, Virginia. She
has published Plato’s Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (2009) and
most recently edited the Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling (2015).
Olav Hammer is Professor of History at the University of Southern Denmark,
working in the field of history of religion. His main areas of research are new
religious currents and post-Enlightenment Western esotericism. His most recent
List of co ntribu tors xxxix
publication is Western Esotericism in Scandinavia (2016, coedited with Henrik

Bogdan).
Wouter J. Hanegraaff is Professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and
Related Currents at the University of Amsterdam, and a member of the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Sciences. He is the author or editor of twelve books,
including Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture
(Cambridge, 2012).
Lee Irwin is Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston, South
Carolina. He is vice-president of the Association for the Study of Esotericism
(ASE), coeditor of the peer-reviewed ASE book series on esotericism, and
author of seven books and numerous articles related to esoteric studies.
Glenn Alexander Magee is Professor and Chairman of the Department of
Philosophy at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University. He is the
author of Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (2001) and The Hegel Dictionary
(2011), as well as many articles on German philosophy and its connections with
mysticism and esotericism.
Matthew Mayock received his Ph.D. from Stony Brook University and is
Instructor of Philosophy at College of the Desert, Palm Desert, California. His
research explores the transition from religion to philosophy in Ancient Greece
and its effect on the roles of body and extension in archaic thought.
Robert McDermott, President Emeritus and Chair of Philosophy and Religion
at the California Institute of Integral Studies, was secretary of the American
Academy of Religion and a Fulbright and NEH grantee. His books include The
Essential Aurobindo (2001) and The New Essential Steiner (2009).
Bruce Milem is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New
York at New Paltz. He is the author of The Unspoken Word: Negative Theology in
Meister Eckhart’s German Sermons (2002), as well as articles on negative theology
and philosophy of religion.
Bruce Moran is Professor of History, University of Nevada–Reno. He is the
author of Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientific Revolution
(2005) and Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical
Cultures with Polemical Fire (2007).
Brian Ogren is the Anna Smith Fine Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies in the
Department of Religion at Rice University. He is the author of Renaissance and
Rebirth: Reincarnation in Italian Renaissance Kabbalah (2009) and editor of Time and
Eternity in Jewish Mysticism: That Which Is Before and That Which Is After (2015).
Lawrence M. Principe is the Drew Professor of the Humanities in the
Departments of the History of Science and Technology and of Chemistry at
xl List of contributors
Johns Hopkins University and author of The Secrets of Alchemy (2013) and A Very
Short Introduction to the Scientific Revolution (2011).
Mark Sedgwick is Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, Aarhus University,
Denmark. He is the author of Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the
Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (2009).
Jan A. M. Snoek is Emeritus Professor of the study of religions at the University
of Heidelberg. He is the author of Initiating Women in Freemasonry (2012) and
coeditor of the Handbook of Freemasonry (2014).
Charles Stein is a poet and independent scholar. His publications include Persephone
Unveiled (2006); a verse translation of The Odyssey (2008); and thirteen books of
poetry, most recently There Where You Do Not Think to Be Thinking (2015).
Kocku von Stuckrad is Professor of Religious Studies, University of
Groningen. He has published extensively on the themes of mysticism and
esotericism, with a special focus on astrology. His most recent book is The
Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800–2000 (2014).
Hereward Tilton has taught early modern German esotericism at the University
of Exeter, the University of Amsterdam, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-
Universität in Munich. His publications include The Quest for the Phoenix:
Spiritual Alchemy and Rosicrucianism in the Work of Count Michael Maier
(1569–1622) (2003).
Hugh B. Urban is Professor of Religious Studies at Ohio State University. He is
the author of nine books, including Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in
Modern Western Esotericism (2006) and New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious
Movements: Alternative Spirituality in Modern America (2015).
Arthur Versluis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at
Michigan State University and author of numerous books, including American
Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion (2014) and Magic and Mysticism:
An Introduction to Western Esotericism (2007).
Gerhard Wehr (1931–2015) was the author of numerous publications dealing
with mysticism and esotericism. He was editor of the works of Jacob Boehme
and of other Christian mystics. Wehr also wrote biographies of C. G. Jung,
Rudolf Steiner, Martin Buber, and other figures.
Jane Williams-Hogan, Professor Emerita, teaches sociology, religious studies,
and history at Bryn Athyn College, in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. A specialist on
Emanuel Swedenborg and his influence on individuals, movements, art, and
literature, she is the author of Swedenborg e le Chiese swedenborgiane (2004) and
editor of Swedenborg and His Influence (with Erland J. Brock et al., 1989).
I
Antiquity
M
1
ANCIENT MYSTERIES
Charles Stein
1 Introduction
The institutions known as “mysteries” in Ancient Greece consisted of rites of
initiation that offered individual access to the presence and power of the
gods. Some of the mysteries were celebrated as early as Mycenaean times but
had affinities with, and probable sources in, even earlier shamanic, goddess-
cult, and Neolithic practices. In the Classical age, we find mysteries of
Demeter and Persephone, The Great Mother, the gods at Samothrace and
Andania. The mysteries of Dionysus were performed throughout Hellas, as
were the mysteries of the ancient poet-prophet-hero Orpheus, probably in
private settings. Later, in the Hellenistic period, there were mysteries of Isis
and Osiris. And in Imperial times, mysteries of Mithras competed with
Christianity for spiritual hegemony in the Empire. By far the most well
known were the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone celebrated at
Eleusis outside of Athens.
The ancient Greek language has two words for “that which is not to be
spoken of”: arrheton and aporrheton. The first translates as “the ineffable”: that
which, in principle, cannot be brought to speech; the second refers to that
about which discourse is forbidden. The prohibition against speaking or
writing of the ineffable may be statutory, as in classical Athens, or self-
imposed, following from religious conviction.
The word “mysteries” (ta mysteria) comes to us directly from the Greek
mysterion, “a secret rite,” which derives from two linked verbs: myo and myeo.
Myo means to close up or conceal, as in closing the eyes and stopping the ears
or as when a flower closes itself at nightfall. Myeo means to initiate – for
example, to initiate someone into the mysteries. The mysteries in Ancient
Greece concealed initiatory secrets that were both incapable of being ren-
dered verbally and of which the initiate was forbidden to speak. The secret or
4 Charles Stein
secrets of each had to do with the experience of the deity. At Eleusis, it seems
that the celebration culminated in a theophany of Demeter and/or
Persephone, in which the celebrants participated.
2 The Eleusinian Mysteries

The Eleusinian Mysteries (or, more specifically, their culminating events)
occurred fourteen miles west of Athens on the Bay of Salamis and were
framed as a festival of Demeter and Persephone. They were held annually
until the Christian authorities destroyed all pagan rites and attempted to
eradicate authentic knowledge of pagan traditions. Initiation took place in
two phases: (1) The Lesser Mysteries, known as myeisis: initiation. Initiates
were called mystai (singular, mystes); (2) the Greater Mysteries, the epopteia:
“things seen.” Persons who had completed them were epopts.
Prospective initiates came from everywhere and every walk of life. Even
mythical personages such as Herakles were said to have sought initiation.
There were two conditions for participation: knowledge of the Greek
language and innocence of blood guilt. These conditions satisfied, all were
welcomed who could afford the fees charged by the Eleusinian officials and
the price of certain sacrificial animals.
What we actually know of the rites, beyond the archaeological remains,
derives from fragmentary remarks in speeches, poems, and plays and from the
writings of ancient scholiasts, Church Fathers, and philosophers. From these,
we can learn something of the circumstances surrounding the mysteries, their
mythology, and their history – along with a few tantalizing details about what
might have occurred during the rite in the Telesterion, the temple hall where
the epopteia took place. From hints, guesses, and hearsay remarks (by persons
not necessarily sympathetic to Eleusis such as early Christian heresiologists),
scholars have deduced that the Hierophant (the high priest) invoked the
presence of the goddesses by removing certain sacred objects from the
recesses of the temple, one of which was an ear of grain; that Persephone
had given birth to an infant (possibly Dionysus) in the Underworld; and that
at the decisive moment a special gong sounded, an enormous fire flared, the
Underworld opened, and apparitions of Persephone and/or Demeter rose in
the hall. All this transpired in an atmosphere of holy hush and pious expecta-
tion. We also know that in early Imperial times, as many as three thousand
mystai celebrated together, and that the potential epopts imbibed a potion
known as the kykeon.
It has been argued, with some plausibility, that the content of the kykeon
was a psychotropic agent derived from the ergot on rye grown in Demeter’s
Ancient M ysteries 5
honor and pharmacologically similar to lysergic acid diethylamide.1 An

attempt to challenge the plausibility of this hypothesis has been offered by
Walter Burkert in his Ancient Mystery Cults,2 and I have attempted to rebut
Burkert and restore its plausibility in Persephone Unveiled.3 In any case, some
synergy of mythic representations, physical exhaustion, fasting, dancing,
theophanic dramaturgy, consumption of entheogens, not to mention a
year and a half of training, would have made possible the transforming effect.
The most important single piece of evidence concerning the mysteries is a
poem from approximately the seventh century BCE, written in the same
poetic tradition as the Homeric texts and recounting the famous story of
Demeter and Persephone, including Demeter’s founding of the mysteries.
(I give a translation and exegesis of the Hymn in Persephone Unveiled.) The
founding of the mysteries appears toward the end of it, only after Demeter
has attempted to bestow immortality on the son of the king of the
Eleusinians. This fails when the king’s wife sees Demeter working her
magic on the child and fears for his life. Demeter interrupts the procedure,
rages at mortals for their incapacity to recognize the presence of a deity,
reveals herself as a goddess, and commands the people of Eleusis to build a
temple in her honor. The lesson seems to be that if there is to be commerce
between gods and humans, some special form of mediation must be devised.
The mysteries are instituted to allow the overwhelming experience of divine
immanence to occur without resulting in disastrous misunderstanding. As we
shall see, it may be that true contact with the divine subverts the very basis of
human values and must itself be contextualized so that it can be made to serve
human institutions.
The myesis, the Lesser Mysteries, were celebrated in Classical times, not in
Eleusis but in Agrai on the banks of the Illisos just outside of Athens. The
Greater Mysteries, culminating with the epopteia, were performed in the
Telesterion at Eleusis. The Lesser Mysteries were purificatory in character
and began the initiates’ training; to facilitate this, a mystagog (trainer) was
assigned to each initiate. A year and a half elapsed between the two phases,
during which time the mystes would have been occupied to some degree
with the issues, myths, beliefs, and practices connected with initiation.
The Greater Mysteries consisted of a week-long series of events at Athens,
followed by a procession on the Sacred Road to Eleusis, and finally the Holy
1
See Gordon R. Wasson, Albert Hoffman, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling
the Secrets of the Mysteries (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2008).
2
Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
3
Charles Stein, Persephone Unveiled: Seeing the Goddess and Freeing Your Soul (Berkeley: North
Atlantic Books, 2006), 104ff.
6 Charles Stein
Night during which the climactic teletai (the rites themselves) were per-
formed. The hiera, the holy objects, stored during the year in the Anaktoron,
the inner core of the Telesterion, were brought to Athens at the beginning of
the week and then returned to Eleusis in the ritual procession along the
Sacred Road. They were carried in mystical kistai or baskets on the heads of
the priestesses of the mysteries. During the week in Athens, each initiate
underwent special purifications and performed the sacrifice of a pig sacred to
Demeter. In the procession, at the end of the week, the initiates were led
back to Eleusis by Dionysus himself in the form of a wooden statue of
Iacchus. On the road to Eleusis, the initiates sang energetic sacred songs
and paid homage to various sacred sites along the way.
Just outside Eleusis, the procession crossed a long, narrow bridge over
the river Kephisos, thought to be haunted by Underworld spirits, who
assaulted the celebrants and attempted to impede their way to the temple
grounds. As part of the effort to ward off these entities, various comic
personages would accost the procession, relieving for a moment the solemn
mood. This part of the mysteries was known as “bridge jests” and deployed
a troop of actors impersonating and mocking well-known local dignitaries.
Among the jesters would be Baubo, a portly, impish creature with a face
painted on her belly, who ran about lifting her skirts and shouting lewd
jokes. The entire event, both terrifying and bawdy, served to open the
spirits of the celebrants to unimagined events to come. Their energy, piety,
and enthusiasm for initiation merged with abject terror as the mystai walked
along the haunted bridge. Then the initiates were further agitated by a spirit
of mockery and hilarity.
On arrival at the temple grounds, the initiates passed under arches and in
front of monuments, gazed at sculptures and painted scenes (depicting images
from Eleusinian mythology), and visited a small temple dedicated to Hekate.
The procession stopped at the Ploutonion, a shrine consecrated to Hades.
The Ploutonion was a cave in the hillside thought to be an access to the
Underworld and above which stood the citadel of Eleusis. Before entering
the Telesterion, the mystai participated in sacred dances – initiatic processes in
their own right, bringing the somatic energies of the mystai into both
mimetic and dynamic alignment with events to come. At some point in
these proceedings, the initiates imbibed the kykeon. After the dances, the
mystai entered the temple, passing first through the outer and then the inner
propylaea (monumental gateway). Within the latter were large statues of the
priestesses with the kistai on their heads as caryatids about the entranceway.
Once on the temple grounds, the identification of the mystai with mytho-
logical figures and stories sacred to the mysteries would have grown ever
richer and more compelling as image imitated image, and the concrete reality
of what the mystai enacted became still more complexly represented by what
they saw around them. Statues representing the timeless identities of the
bearers of the holy objects were seen by the initiates as soon as they began to
enter the inner chambers of the sacred precinct, each new entrance conduct-
ing them closer to the innermost recess of the Telesterion where the secret
itself (perhaps revealed as the inner meaning of the sacred objects) awaited
them.
Various other pedestals and friezes, some of which survive in fragments,
depicted the procession itself, so that the ceremonial space, replete with
such imagery, would have contributed to the identification of the mystai
with the meaning of the procession. At the end of the sequence of these
images would have been the two goddesses themselves, Demeter seated,
Persephone on a dark throne behind her, so that there would have been a
continuous flow of initiatory events leading directly to the goddesses. The
mystai moved ever closer to the place where the mystical manifestation of
the goddesses would occur, and this sense of approach would have been
reinforced by the celebrants’ relation to the imagery that appeared along
the way.
Although identification with the images would have reached a crescendo
of intensity in this manner, it is important to realize that it is not this
identification that constituted the secret. The ordinary identities of the mystai
were being exchanged for identities associated with the mysteries, so that, as
we shall see, at the culminating moment, identity as such could be released or
transformed.
We know something of the external events that induced this transforma-
tion from reports and surmises. The Hierophant, the leading official, whose
name means “the one who causes the holy things to appear,” is said to have
revealed the hiera, the secret objects sacred to Demeter. A mighty light is
reported to have arisen from the Anaktoron as a fire that could be seen for
miles around. Phantasmata – ghostly appearances – are reported to have
floated and trembled about the Telesterion, culminating in the phantasmic
appearance of Persephone herself. Persephone also appeared among the
flames with the infant Dionysus in her arms or with her mother, Demeter;
or Persephone and Demeter appeared as one. The Hierophant showed a
single ear of grain to the initiates. A special gong was struck, creating the
effect of deep-echoing thunder bellowing from the Underworld. The
Hierophant proclaimed in a high voice, “The Mistress has given birth to a
holy child. Brimo [The Strong One] has given birth to Brimos [The
Strong One].”
8 Charles Stein
Undergoing the epopteia left the epopt in a state of profound awe of the gods
and in some way possessed of a new confidence in his or her relation to
existence beyond the grave. When the initiate entered the space of the gods –
a world replete with divine figures, gestures, meanings, stories, attitudes – it
would have become possible for the secret to be experienced directly.
3 The Secret of the Eleusinian Mysteries

Any attempt to theorize about the “the ineffable secret” must necessarily be
highly speculative. Nevertheless, it is possible to formulate a reasonable
conjecture as to what may have been imparted at Eleusis, based on the
aforementioned testimonia, as well as knowledge of classical Greek thought
and culture. The only rules governing such a conjecture are that it must not
only accord with but also illuminate the available evidence – and it must offer
some account of the secret that can shed light on why so many of the ancients
found their experience at Eleusis to be profoundly life changing.
The Greeks, as is commonly known, valued clear forms in their art, clear
concepts in their philosophy, fixed prerogatives for their gods, and determi-
nate identities for themselves. “Count no man happy until he is dead,” said
Solon to Croesus, because the quality of one’s existence – what we would call
our true identity – could not be ultimately defined without the closure of
death. In the most explicit rendition of the afterlife from the Hellenic world –
the eleventh book of The Odyssey – we are shown a tableau of ghost-souls,
each of whom has a well-defined identity, but each of whom also finds this
condition an abject misery. The suffering of the dead is precisely the loss of
the open possibilities of life that are cut off by fixed identity.
The mysteries offered to their initiates an experience that alleviated the
fear of death. But what could this experience have been? Would it not have
had to offer something beyond the grim termination of possibilities that The
Odyssey so vividly portrays? The Eleusinian Mysteries culminated in a vision
of the divine, the seeing of which transformed the initiate. It cannot be far
from the mark to say that this seeing afforded a connection, even an identi-
fication, not simply with the figures of the Demeter/Persephone myth but
also with the numinous background of all existence, which some of the later
Greeks, in particular the Eleatic thinker Parmenides, knew as Being itself.
Carl Kerenyi in his major study of Eleusis imagined that such an experience
amounted to something like the Beatific Vision in Christian theology.4 In
4
Carl Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, trans. Ralph Manheim (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1967).
Persephone Unveiled, I develop the idea that the Parmenidean vision provides
us with a better model for understanding the Eleusinian experience.
In general, the prospective initiate approached initiation familiar with the
myths and provenances of the relevant gods. These myths would be quite
exoteric, that is, associated with public festivals. But initiates came from all
over Greece. Varying, contrasting, and contradictory versions of the myths
would have been current among them. Stories about Persephone, for
instance, existed in a plethora of variants; although participants would have
most likely known at least one of them, no one myth fit all. The Eleusinian
secret has been thought by some simply to have been the replacement of
these mythic variants by a single version unique to Eleusis. But even if it
could be proved that there was a unique Eleusinian myth (and it cannot), it
could not have been this that constituted the secret of Eleusis.
We have various testimonies that the experience within the Telesterion
involved great disorientation, to be alleviated only by the culminating
moment when the secret was revealed. Certainly confusion and perplexity
may have begun to be stimulated during the bridge jests and exacerbated by
ecstatic dancing and the imbibing of the kykeon. Add to this the fact that the
mythic imagery surrounding the initiate would have been unfamiliar to
many, that hallucinatory phantasmata and strange sounds would have filled
the darkened sacred temple interior. One can see that a state of spiritual
darkness, disorientation, and perplexity would have been induced. The
spiritual content of this perplexity would have involved both the nature of
the divine and the nature of one’s self, that is, the question of the identity of
one’s own being in relation to the gods would have been raised and brought
to a fevered pitch. Perhaps for the first time, the initiates would have felt an
unrelieved sense of inner darkness. This inner darkness would have corre-
sponded to the physical darkness in the Telesterion prior to the moment of
epopteia, and the confusion about the divine realm would have been empha-
sized by the dramatic, not to say chaotic events occurring there.
I wish to suggest that the essential sense of the initiatic darkness and
perplexity was the breakdown of a fixed sense of personal identity with
which the mystes would have entered the mysteries, and that the revelatory
experience of epopteia, induced in such a context of psychic confusion,
opened the initiate to the possibility of a state of being beyond fixed identity.
Given that Hellenic culture put such a high premium on the clear defini-
tion of character, the revelation of an experience beyond identity would have
introduced certain values beyond those that Hellenic culture in general
tended to affirm. It has often been asserted that Hellenic culture knew no
experience of “unitive mysticism”: the union of the individual soul with an
10 Charles Stein
all-embracing divine principle, such as is common in Indian religion and

even in some forms of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Initiatic secrecy
conceals an essential irony: The highest and most sacred experience offered
by Hellenic mystery cults was subversive of Hellenic culture’s principal
values. If this is the case, one need look no further for why the experience
of the mysteries had to be kept secret.
The mysteries also lent glory and legitimacy to the cities with which they
were associated. Athens financed Eleusis and provided political protection,
while Eleusis was allowed a free hand in all matters pertaining to the
celebration of its rites. Athens, in turn, enjoyed prestige for its sponsorship
of the rites. The numinous aura of the mysteries legitimized the Athenian
state and its gods. As long as no one was permitted to speak or write of it, the
holy character of the epopteia could benefit the very culture that it secretly
subverted.
4 Other Mysteries
Space forbids a detailed treatment of the other mysteries of the ancient world.
They were for the most part internally linked at least through the deities that
were celebrated in them, and by the two-phase rhythm that characterizes
their dramatic structure: one of veiling-dissolution-darkness, followed by
revelation-reconfiguration-illumination.
Four unique gods were celebrated at Samothrace, but Dionysus,
Hephaistos, Poseidon, and Demeter also had important roles. Dionysus
himself, as we saw, is possibly the figure that was revealed in the Eleusinian
epopteia. Samothrace seems to have involved an inversion of Eleusinian
practice: In Eleusis, those who had committed violent crimes and/or could
not speak Greek were excluded. Samothrace was founded by criminals, and
initiates had to swear an oath that they had committed crimes against the gods
and had to learn an indigenous tongue to participate in the mysteries. Thrace,
just north of Samothrace, played a role in both Dionysian and Orphic
mythology. Dionysian mysteries were celebrated throughout Greece and
involved, mythologically, the dismemberment and rebirth of Dionysus him-
self. Their rites featured forms of psychic disintegration and rebirth brought
on by inebriation probably associated with some pharmacological enhance-
ment of ordinary wine. Orphic theogonies elevated Dionysus himself to a
supreme divine principle and invoked concepts adopted from Persian
cosmologies, bringing them into contact with the later Mysteries of
Mithras. The Mysteries of Isis and Osiris were predicated on an assimilation
of the legends of Demeter and Dionysus, Isis being identified with Demeter
and Osiris with Dionysus.
The Mysteries of Orpheus deserve special mention. We know nothing of
the sites where they were celebrated. It was once thought that they were not
celebrated at all but came to us merely in the form of a latter-day literary
fiction. Contemporary scholarship disputes this but provides little to eluci-
date the actual context of their performance other than to indicate that they
were celebrated “privately,” without either state support or proscription.
Orpheus himself is the legendary poet-magus who served in the Classical
world as the archetypal author for cosmological poetry with possible
initiatory relevance. More than with other cults, the Orphic Mysteries
may have involved the study of poetic texts dealing with the origin,
structure, and soteriological function of the cosmos. Indeed, pseudepi-
graphic writing that claimed to reveal such matters routinely appeared
under the name of Orpheus. A series of such texts survive in later com-
mentary, most frequently in a Neoplatonic context. Orphic cosmology in
general is “solar” theology. Dionysus, Zeus, Helios, and a unique Orphic
being known as Phanes were compounded into a demiurgic figure at the
outer bounds of the cosmos. The human soul houses a struggle between
higher (Dionysian) and lower (Titanic) forces that propel the individual
through a series of incarnations and inter-incarnational periods, until,
through proper purgations, ritual discipline, and other practices, the soul
frees itself from bondage to the cosmic structure altogether and takes up its
proper place beyond the solar sphere. Although an actual performance of
these practices is no doubt indicated, I wish to suggest that the study of the
Orphic theogonies themselves may have played a decisive role in the
soteriological process.
The Orphic texts recapitulate, elaborate, and vary the Hesiodic theogony
with an emphasis on situations that abuse temporal and logical order.
“Night” precedes the generation of the anthropomorphic gods but is never-
theless generated by a specific divine pair. Dionysus precedes the creation of
the “Orphic Egg” but then comes into being inside it. In Greek accounts of
the gods, from Hesiod to Proclus, genealogical relations serve as metaphors
for causally and logically genetic sequences. Ancient genealogy stands in for
ontology: If X is the son of Y, this suggests that the principle that Y stands
for, say cosmic space, is the source of the being of X, say the earth. When
such arrangements are disordered, the mythologem suggests awareness of a
deep mystery in the genealogical, that is, ontogenic process. To disrupt the
order of temporal and logical sequence suggests a reality outside of time and
cosmic being. Such genealogies are paradoxical in a way that expresses a
12 Charles Stein
feeling for an enigma at the heart of things. It is quite as the Emperor Julian
remarked: “Concerning the myths of the Mysteries which Orpheus handed
down to us, in the very things which in these myths are incongruous, he
drew nearest the truth.”5 In the Orphic Mysteries, it may very well be as
Henry Corbin writes of Islamic esotericism, “the text itself is the secret.”6
5
G. R. S. Meade, Orpheus (London: John M Watkins, 1965), 40. Quoted from the Emperor
Julian, “Oration VII.”
6
Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1960), 33.
2
PYTHAGORAS AND PYTHAGOREANISM
Joscelyn Godwin
1 Life and Work of Pythagoras

The giant figure of Pythagoras straddles the borderline between history and
myth. As in the case of his approximate contemporaries Zoroaster, Mahavira,
Confucius, Lao Tse, and Gautama Buddha, his followers created an idealized
biography that cannot be checked against impartial sources.1 Even then, they
differ widely in their accounts, most of which date from the third century
CE, eight centuries after their subject. Consequently, we cannot confirm any
of the biographical data, nor even give firm dates for Pythagoras’s birth and
death.
Certainly his homeland was the Dodecanese island of Samos, and his birth
occurred between 580 and 569 BCE. According to Iamblichus and
Porphyry, he was born in Syria where his father Mnesarchus (a Phoenician
by origin) was trading. After many travels, he settled in southern Italy,
founding a school and community at Croton. Around 500 BCE, local
opposition destroyed the school, and if Pythagoras did not perish then and
there, he died in Metapontum during the following decade. This is the bare
outline with which modern scholarship has to be content.
Turning to the legendary life of Pythagoras as reported by the same
authors, we find him first studying with the Ionian philosophers Thales
and Anaximander, and with Pherecydes of Syros. Next came his voyages
to the Phoenician settlements in Syria, where he underwent mystery initia-
tions. The early witness of Herodotus confirms his long residence in Egypt.
1
Much of the source material is collected and translated in The Pythagorean Sourcebook,
compiled by Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie (1919–1920), revised and expanded by David
R. Fideler (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1987), including Iamblichus’s De Vita
Pythagorica. A clearer translation of Iamblichus, which divides his chapters by paragraphs, is
Iamblichus: On the Pythagorean Life, trans. Gillian Clark (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 1989).
13
14 Joscelyn Godwin
Having gone there on Thales’s recommendation, Pythagoras visited the

religious centers of Heliopolis, Memphis and Thebes and was admitted to
initiations never before given to foreigners. A fourth, involuntary journey
was to Babylon, as a captive following Cambyses’s conquest of Egypt (525
BCE), but Pythagoras turned it to good use by studying astronomy and
mathematics with the Magi. On his release, he returned to Samos but became
increasingly at odds with his compatriots. He made a tour of the oracular
centers of Delos, Samothrace, Eleusis, Grecian Thebes, Delphi, and Crete,
and he visited Sparta to observe the system of government. After emigrating
to Croton, he never returned to Samos.
Among the mythical aspects of Pythagoras’s life, as distinct from the
merely legendary ones, the third-century biographers report the Delphic
Oracle’s prediction of his birth; the golden thigh, which he sometimes
displayed; his conversations with animals; the hailing of him “in a deep,
penetrating voice” by the river Nessus; his descent into Hades and meeting
with the souls there; and his bilocation, teaching simultaneously at
Metapontum and at Tauromenium in Sicily.2 These are all commonplaces
of sacred biography, especially resembling events in the life of Apollonius of
Tyana (first century CE). This is not surprising since Apollonius was a neo-
Pythagorean and wrote a (lost) biography of the master, which served both as
a source for the third-century biographers of Pythagoras and as a model for
Flavius Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana.
More original are the claims that Pythagoras could recall his previous
incarnations, and that he could hear the Harmony of the Spheres.
Although these have become standard topoi with their own long histories,
they have no pre-Pythagorean traditions in the Greek world, nor does
reincarnation appear in the extensive Egyptian lore of the afterlife. The
transmigration of a single soul into different bodies was taught in Orphism,
but all that we know of Orphic teachings comes from the post-Pythagorean
period. Walter Burkert suggests that Orphism itself may have been a recon-
struction, claiming origin from its mythic founder but actually created by
Pythagoreans,3 just as the neo-Pythagoreans of the early centuries CE recon-
structed their master’s doctrines and biography. Burkert admits as a serious
possibility that the doctrine of reincarnation came from India.4
2
Chiefly Iamblichus and Porphyry, both of whom wrote a Vita Pythagorae (henceforth VP),
and Diogenes Laertius’s Vitae philosophorum.
3
Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. Edwin L. Minar, Jr.
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 128–130.
4
Burkert, Lore and Science, 133.
Pytha goras a nd Pytha gorea nism 15
The first literary evidence for the Harmony of the Spheres is in Plato’s
Republic (617 b-c), which depicts Sirens singing on the planetary rings. In
neo-Pythagorean and Neoplatonic doctrine, the soul hears this music as it
passes through the planetary spheres on its way down to earth and back again.
The harmony also has a metaphorical meaning that points to Pythagoras’s
achievement not as a mystic but as a proto-scientist. For if the planetary
spheres are perceived to be harmonious, it must be because, like musical
harmony, they obey the laws of number.
According to one of the best-known anecdotes, Pythagoras discovered the
connection of harmony with number after hearing four smiths whose ham-
mers rang on the anvil with different but consonant pitches.5 After suspend-
ing the hammers on strings and weighing them, he found their proportions to
be 12:9:8:6, namely those of an octave divided by its arithmetical and
harmonic means, and thereby arrived at the quantification of musical inter-
vals. (The fallacy in the experiment is mentioned later.) He thus anticipated
both the quantitative worldview that only came into its own with the
scientific revolution, and the experimental method inseparable from it, that
uses mathematics as its tool.
Pythagoras’s achievement in mathematics was to gather knowledge from
Babylon and Egypt, civilizations already in decline, and to plant it in a Greek-
speaking culture that was rising to intellectual prominence. Another possible
source was Abaris, a priest of Apollo from Hyperborea (the Land beyond the
North Wind), who traveled on a “golden arrow” and visited Pythagoras for a
mutual exchange of wisdom.6 Burkert, emphasizing the shamanic element in
Pythagoras’s character, interprets the arrow as a metaphor for the out-of-the-
body flights of a Central Asian shaman.7 Others think Abaris came from
Britain and associate him with the geographer Pytheas of Massilia’s report of a
thriving, musical cult of Apollo in a circular temple there.8 As Alexander
Thom’s research has shown, the megalithic temple builders of Britain used
“Pythagorean triangles” (right-angled triangles based on whole numbers) as
their principles of construction.9 The principles of the five “Pythagorean
solids” (later renamed “Platonic solids”) were also known there in Neolithic
times, as witness the many carefully carved specimens found in Scotland.10
5
Iamblichus, VP, ch. 26, para. 115–121.
6
Iamblichus, VP, 19, 90–93; 32, 215–218.
7
Burkert, Lore and Science, 150, 162.
8
Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, II, 3.
9
See Alexander Thom, Megalithic Sites in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 27,
77–80.
10
See Keith Critchlow, Time Stands Still: New Light on Megalithic Science (London, Gordon
Fraser, 1979), 131–135.
16 Joscelyn Godwin
For Pythagoras, numbers were the ultimate realities. While exoterically he

enjoined piety to the gods and made bloodless sacrifices to them, it was
against the esoteric background of a purely mathematical metaphysics. The
primary and sacred symbol of this metaphysics was the Tetraktys, a triangle
made from ten dots in rows of 1, 2, 3, and 4. The first ten numbers all carried
metaphysical meanings, being similar to what Plato would later style the
“forms” or “ideas” underlying all manifestation. The arithmetical series of
the Tetraktys could be extended indefinitely to the whole realm of the
limited or bounded (Gk. peras), as opposed to the unlimited or infinite
(apeiron). These are the first pair of opposites into which the Pythagoreans
divided the world of experience. Aristotle gives the list: Limited/Unlimited,
Odd/Even, One/Many, Right/Left, Male/Female, Rest/Motion, Straight/
Crooked, Light/Darkness, Good/Bad, Square/Oblong.11
Pythagoras’s ethical teaching took the form of brief sentences or maxims
and survives in three main collections: the “Symbols” (39 of which are
explained in Iamblichus’s Exhortation to Philosophy), the Golden Verses (pre-
served with a commentary by Hierocles of Alexandria, fifth century CE), and
the “Sentences” (451 of which are collected in The Sentences of Sextus).12
They range from statements such as “God dwells in the intellect of the wise
man” and maxims, for example “Possess those things that no one can take
away from you,” to gnomic sayings: “Do not poke fire with a sword” and
“Abstain from beans.” The latter prohibition, for which the Pythagoreans
were much mocked, has never been satisfactorily explained.
Although Diogenes Laertius reports that Pythagoras wrote several trea-
tises, none survive. His chief method of teaching was oral, adapted to the
various classes of listeners. The akousmatikoi or “auditors” assembled, perhaps
by hundreds, to learn elementary precepts proclaimed by Pythagoras from
behind a curtain. Five years of probation as silent auditors were required
before disciples could progress to the status of mathematikoi or “those devoted
to learning.” These, also called the esōteroi (“initiates into secret matters”) saw
Pythagoras and learned his mathematical, cosmological, and musical
principles.
Unusual for its time, the school was coeducational: Iamblichus names
seventeen “illustrious Pythagorean women.” The students lived a common
life under a regime of abstinence from animal food and wine except in
connection with sacred rites, the renunciation of fame and wealth, and sexual
restraint. As a family man, Pythagoras encouraged monogamous marriage
11
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 986a 25.
12
Translations in Guthrie, The Pythagorean Sourcebook, 159–165, 267–274.
and the eugenic breeding of children. He controlled the emotions of his

disciples by singing to the accompaniment of the lyre, adjusting the music to
stimulate, calm, or cure body and soul. Porphyry adds that he danced, too.
On occasion, he was able to avert disaster by knowing what kind of music
would turn a man away from violence. But much as these tales enchanted
later readers, it is impossible to disentangle Pythagoras’s own practices from
those of his later disciples, and difficult to distinguish reportage from
invention.
From all the likely and unlikely stories, there remains the central ideal of
the philosophic life, dedicated to the love of wisdom and to the benefits that
this brings to the whole world.
2 Pythagoreans in the Classical World

After the destruction of the school in Croton, some of the survivors settled in
mainland Greece and founded new schools. Others continued the tradition
in Italy, including Philolaus of Croton or Tarentum (born ca. 470 BCE), who
wrote the earliest surviving account of Pythagoras’s metaphysical and astro-
nomical teachings. Philolaus’s student was Archytas of Tarentum, whom
Plato visited in 388 BCE.
Plato’s dialogue Timaeus is the earliest large-scale monument to the
Pythagorean mentality, and the most lasting in its influence. In the
Republic, Socrates prescribes for the Guardians of the ideal state the study
of arithmetic, geometry (plane and solid, the latter called “stereometry”),
astronomy, and harmony, adding: “These sciences are closely akin, as the
Pythagoreans say, and we agree with them, Glaucon.”13 The Myth of Er at
the end of the same dialogue presents reincarnation, if not as a doctrine,
then as a plausible object of belief. According to Aristotle, the main
differences between Plato’s philosophy and that of “the Italians” (meaning
the Pythagoreans) were (1) that Plato regarded numbers not as ultimate
realities, but as intermediate between the sensible world and the forms and
(2) that Plato’s primary opposites were not the Limited and the Unlimited
(as with the Pythagoreans), but the One and the Dyad, the latter producing
all numbers.14 Plato was reproached, as was Empedocles before him, for
having disclosed the Pythagorean secrets, and he was excluded from the
school.15
13
Plato, Republic, VII, 530d.
14
Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 6, 987b.
15
Diogenes Laertius, VIII, 27.
18 Joscelyn Godwin
But were these secrets merely the mathematical disciplines just men-
tioned? Several recent researchers have given a glimpse of a formidable
intellectual structure mostly unsuspected by mainstream classical studies.
Musicologist Anne Macaulay (1924–1998), in a controversial work about
Pythagoras’s patron deity Apollo, analyses the Greek letters that make up the
name of that god as comprising a geometrical diagram of circles and
rectangles.16 Among other surprises, these yield proportions that are the
same as those of the seven strings of the cithara (large lyre). Macaulay thought
that the Greeks had adopted a musical-mathematical-astronomical complex
dating from megalithic times, which again recalls Abaris the Hyperborean.
David Fideler, following the Greek letter-number correspondences
known as gematria, shows in Jesus Christ, Sun of God that the numbers of
the names APOLLO (1061), ZEUS (612), LYRA (531), and HERMES (353)
are related as a musical twelfth, divided by its geometric and harmonic
means.17 Moreover, the word TETRAKTYS sums appropriately to 1234,
and PYTHAGORAS to 864 (25 × 33, divisible by the important cosmolo-
gical numbers 72 and 108). Such discoveries imply that the Greek alphabet
and the orthography of divine names and other important terms were
deliberately “rigged” to incorporate mathematical and musical theorems.
Ernest McClain, another musicologist, observes that “From a musician’s
perspective, Plato’s Republic embodies a treatise on equal temperament.”18 In
The Pythagorean Plato, he demonstrates that whenever Plato mentions a
number, it conceals a reference to musical intervals and tuning systems.
McClain traces analogous phenomena in Vedic, Babylonian, Egyptian,
Hebrew, and early Christian texts, and he explains, “In this sea of restless
change man discovered an island he could trust, the octave of ratio 1:2 – the
‘basic miracle of music’ – functioning as a matrix for all smaller intervals and
providing a metric basis for a tonal algebra.”19
The English polymath John Michell, in The Dimensions of Paradise,
approaches the Platonic myths from a geometric viewpoint. Having estab-
lished a connection between Greek gematria and the measurements of the
earth and moon in traditional units, Michell shows that Plato was conversant
16
Anne Macaulay, “Apollo: The Pythagorean Definition of God,” in Homage to Pythagoras:
Rediscovering Sacred Science, ed. Christopher Bamford (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1994),
245–270.
17
David Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God: Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism
(Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1993), 220–221.
18
Ernest G. McClain, The Pythagorean Plato, Prelude to the Song Itself (Stony Brook, NY:
Nicolas Hays, 1978), 5.
19
Ernest G. McClain, The Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music from
the R ̣g Veda to Plato (Stony Brook, NY: Nicolas Hays, 1976), 196.
with this secret system, which was passed on to the early Christians and
incorporated into the Greek Testament.20 Any of these discoveries, taken
separately, might be ignored, but taken together they alert one to the possible
existence of an early esoteric synthesis that demands further study.
As other philosophical schools came to prominence, the remaining
Pythagoreans probably cultivated the more mystical and occult pursuits,
such as resurfaced in the first neo-Pythagorean revival. Nigidius Figulus
(98–45 BCE), a Roman praetor and friend of Cicero, founded a neo-
Pythagorean order, which according to rumor practiced astrology and
magic, using child mediums and other means of divination.21 An under-
ground meeting hall or chapel at the Porta Maggiore in Rome, built in the
first century CE but only discovered in 1917, may have had some connection
with Nigidius’s order, and it certainly belonged to a kindred esoteric cult.
The Roman historian Jérôme Carcopino, interpreting its stucco decorations
as allegories of the soul’s journey, did not hesitate to call the building a
“Pythagorean basilica.”
In a different vein, Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–40 CE) applied
Pythagorean mathematical concepts to the interpretation of his native
Hebrew scriptures, making a synthesis of Jewish and Greek thought. For
Philo, it was Moses who heard the Harmony of the Spheres and composed
songs in every mode that replicated the heavenly motions, moving even the
angels.22 Philo’s work on the Creation story of Genesis (De Opificio Mundi)
celebrates the universal powers of the number seven in a way that comes as
close as his theology allows to its deification. Although not classed as a
kabbalist, Philo anticipated the later discipline of Kabbalah through his
esoteric and arithmological reading of the Torah.
In the early centuries CE, neo-Pythagoreanism was indistinctly blended
with Neoplatonism, with the Roman revival of the Orphic and Dionysiac
mysteries, and even with elements of Christianity. However, it was
Pythagorean mathematics, music theory, and metaphysics that had the
most staying power and imbued the entire Neoplatonic movement. In the
Middle Platonist period of the second century CE, Theon of Smyrna,
Nicomachus of Gerasa, and Numenius of Apamea all wrote handbooks on
mathematics and music in a Pythagorean vein. Of the third-century
Neoplatonists, Plotinus (205–269/70) was less Pythagorean, his successor
Porphyry (232/3–ca. 305) more so, and Iamblichus (ca. 250–ca. 325) most
20
John Michell, The Dimensions of Paradise: The Proportions and Symbolic Numbers of Ancient
Cosmology (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 33–35, 59–62, 101–106.
21
Magici pueri, according to Apuleius, Apologia, 42.
22
Philo, De Somniis, I, vi, 35; De Virtutibus, XI, 72.
20 Joscelyn Godwin
of all. Yet Plotinus’s ascetic leanings, his hierarchy of levels of being emanat-
ing from the One, and his own philosophic ecstasies continue typical
Pythagorean themes. Porphyry and Iamblichus both wrote treatises on
Pythagorean arithmetic; Porphyry also wrote lost works on geometry,
astronomy, and harmonics. Boethius (ca. 480–524) would later name the
four disciplines of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy the quad-
rivium (crossroads), and they would survive as the backbone – or straitjacket –
of scientific education into the Middle Ages and beyond.
Of the late Neoplatonists, Proclus (412–485) was a mathematician as well
as one of the most profound commentators on Plato. By his time, the
establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire had provoked an angry
reaction on the part of philosophers. They used Plato as the inspiration of an
alternative theology, polytheist and emanationist rather than monotheist and
creationist, and answered the need for religious experience through theurgy
(the summoning of the gods through ritual and meditation).
St. Augustine (354–430), who had been a Platonist before his conversion,
enthusiastically followed Philo’s example in applying arithmology to biblical
exegesis, and he validated elements of the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition for
the Christian intellectual world. Other late classical writers under
Pythagorean influence include Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Censorinus,
Aristeides Quintilianus, and Calcidius. Last of all come Damascius and
Simplicius, who emigrated to Persia in 529 CE when Emperor Justinian
forbade pagans to teach philosophy and closed the Athenian Academy.
A well-received theory proposed by Michel Tardieu, of the Collège de
France, states that Simplicius never returned to Athens but settled in Harran
(the Roman Carrhae, now in southeast Turkey).23 That would explain a
missing link in the Pythagorean chain, for it was in Harran that the myster-
ious Sabians maintained a pagan cult with Hermes Trismegistus as its prophet
and the worship of the seven planets as its principal rite. A century later, the
Brethren of Purity (Ikhwān al-Safa’) flourished in Basra (southern Iraq);
although no direct connection with the Sabians of Harran exists, there is a
suspicious community of interest. By the year 1000, the Brethren had
completed an encyclopedia in fifty-two volumes that is still read in the
Muslim world. The quadrivial disciplines play a large part in it, and the
volume on music is especially Pythagorean, treating both music’s influence
on body and soul and planet-tone correspondences.
23
Michel Tardieu, Les paysages reliques, routes et haltes Syriennes d’Isidore à Simplicius (Leuven:
Peeters, 1990).
3 Later Pythagoreans
The Church Fathers approved of Pythagoras for promoting universal love,
teaching the immortality of the soul, and founding the sciences of number.
The Royal Portal of Chartres Cathedral (ca. 1160) includes him among
ancient masters of the Seven Liberal Arts, and many manuscripts depict
him experimenting with the four hammers or sounding the monochord.
From this time onward, the dual Pythagorean themes of the Harmony of the
Spheres and the power of music became commonplaces of literature and
poetry.
The Florentine Platonists, with their access to Greek sources, could better
appreciate Pythagoras’s stature. Pico della Mirandola’s Conclusiones sive Theses
DCCCC (1486) contained fourteen extremely obscure “Pythagorean
Conclusions, after Pythagorean Mathematics,” mostly drawn from
Proclus’s commentaries on Plato. Marsilio Ficino included translations of
the Pythagorean symbols and Golden Verses in his much-reprinted anthology
of mystical and magical Neoplatonism.24 In Venice, the friar Francesco
Giorgi (1466–1540) wrote a tremendous work of kabbalistic and
Pythagorean arithmology, Harmonia Mundi (1525), and advised the architects
of the Venetian church of San Francesco della Vigna, whose plan is based on
the number nine.
Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) spurned arithmology but shared Giorgi’s
conviction that the keys to understanding the cosmos lie in geometry and
harmony. He had read in Pliny and Censorinus that Pythagoras measured the
planetary distances according to musical intervals; even if Kepler had more
accurate figures, he trusted the principle. Many years of calculation con-
vinced him that the planetary distances accord with the five Pythagorean
solids,25 and, after many more, that God had designed the planetary orbits so
as to create a splendid, ever-changing harmony.26
Kepler’s laws of planetary motion opened the path for the discoveries of
Isaac Newton (1643–1727), who revisited the story of the hammers and came
to a radical conclusion.27 As noted, the results of Pythagoras’s reported
experiment were false, for to produce tones in the ratio 12:9:8:6, the weights
hung on equal strings would have had to be proportioned as the squares of
24
Iamblichus de mysteriis [etc.], Venice, Aldus Manutius, 1497.
25
The subject of Mysterium Cosmographicum, Tübingen, 1596.
26
The subject of Harmonices Mundi Libri V, Linz, 1619.
27
For Newton’s text, from the Classical Scholia on the Principia Mathematica, see J. Godwin,
Harmony of the Spheres: A Sourcebook of the Pythagorean Tradition in Music (Rochester, VT:
Inner Traditions, 1993), 304–308.
22 Joscelyn Godwin
those numbers. But by applying this principle to the heavens, it revealed the
inverse square law of universal gravitation. Newton humbly concluded that he
had only rediscovered a law that the Pythagoreans had concealed in the story of
the hammers and the idea of the Harmony of the Spheres. In the field of optics,
Newton made his own quasi-Pythagorean discovery. Through experimenta-
tion with sunlight shining through prisms, he found that the colors of the
spectrum are related in the same proportions as the tones of the diatonic scale.28
After Newton, the Pythagorean current parted company with experimen-
tal science, because the latter no longer saw the cosmos as harmonized
through sacred number, nor nature as ensouled. Pythagorean arithmology
persisted in esoteric traditions, especially combined with Christian Kabbalah.
It also figured in Freemasonry, notably in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish
Rite, which treats arithmology in its twenty-eighth degree (Knight of the
Sun, or Prince Adept).
Toward 1800, self-identified Pythagoreans appeared in London and Paris.
The classical scholar Thomas Taylor (1758–1835) was notoriously neo-
pagan, vegetarian, and anti-Christian and lived an austere philosophic life.
He served English readers as Ficino had readers of Latin, by translating the
Platonic and Neoplatonic corpus. This included Iamblichus’s Life of
Pythagoras (1818) and a compilation on Theoretic Arithmetic (1816).
Taylor’s passion for his material affected the English poets, including his
friend William Blake. He was read and admired by the American
Transcendentalists, the Theosophists, the Shrine of Wisdom,29 and the circle
around the English poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine (1908–2003).30
Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1767–1825) is another example of a non-
Christian esotericist. He published a French translation of the Golden Verses
with long commentaries extolling the Pythagorean life and principles.31 His
posthumously published treatise on music is also thoroughly Pythagorean in
spirit.32 Toward the end of his life, he founded an esoteric order that taught
28
See Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 237–246, which also shows the fallacies in Newton’s
experiment.
29
An anonymous group based near Godalming, Surrey, which published a journal and a
number of translations of Neoplatonic and theosophic texts.
30
Founder of the Temenos Academy, London.
31
Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, Les Vers dorés de Pythagore, expliqués, Paris, 1813. English translation
by Nayán Louise Redfield, The Golden Verses of Pythagoras (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1913).
32
Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, La Musique expliquée comme science et comme art, Paris, Dorbon Ainé,
1928. English translation by J. Godwin, Music Explained as Science and Art (Rochester, VT:
Inner Traditions, 1987). (Later entitled The Secret Lore of Music.)
the immortality of the soul, the science of number and sacred geometry, and
the hierarchy of worlds and their inhabitants.33 The French occult revival of
the nineteenth century, strongly influenced by Fabre d’Olivet, saw many
attempts to explain the cosmos through the sciences of number and har-
mony. The present writer has gathered and analyzed these in his study Music
and the Occult.34 They culminated in L’architecture naturelle (1949) by the
pseudonymous author Petrus Talemarianus, which integrates
Pythagoreanism with elements of Taoism, Tantrism, Kabbalah, and alchemy.
The Traditionalist René Guénon (1886–1951), in his study of Dante, recog-
nized the importance for the poet of the quadrivium, and especially of arithmol-
ogy as a guiding principle of the Divine Comedy. Guénon writes: “Though this
symbolism [of numbers] is not uniquely Pythagorean, and can be found in other
doctrines for the simple reason that Truth is One, we may still entertain the
thought that from Pythagoras to Virgil and from Virgil to Dante, the ‘chain of
tradition’ was probably never broken on Italian soil.”35 Some believe that the
chain continued into modern times through ill-documented groups such as the
Pednosophers, the Priseurs, and the Tabaccologists.36
Certainly it was in Italy that the most vigorous modern revivals of
Pythagoreanism occurred, beginning around 1907 with the meeting of
Arturo Reghini (1878–1946), a mathematics teacher and keen Freemason,
with the musician Amedeo Armentano (1886–1966). Armentano initiated
Reghini into a secret Pythagorean order, the Schola Italica, which claimed
ancient roots. In 1909, the two of them founded the Rito Filosofico Italiano
(Italian Philosophic Rite) in an attempt to reform Freemasonry from the
inside, and in 1913 the Sodalizio Pitagorico (Pythagorean Association).
Reghini was an outspoken neo-pagan, rejecting both Christianity and pop-
ular occultism in favor of self-transformation through inner alchemy and
philosophic study. In 1927, he and Julius Evola (1898–1974) co-founded the
magical Gruppo di Ur, and Reghini was a main contributor to its journal
Ur.37 In later life, marginalized by Fascism’s alliance with the Catholic
33
See Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, La vraie maçonnerie et la céleste culture, ed. Léon Cellier (Lausanne:
La Proue, 1973).
34
Joscelyn Godwin, Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 1750–1950 (Rochester,
NY: University of Rochester Press, 1995). First published as L’ésotérisme musical en France,
1750–1950 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991).
35
René Guénon, L’ésotérisme de Dante, 4th ed. (Paris: Éditions Traditionnelles, 1957), 13.
36
See Joscelyn Godwin, The Real Rule of Four (New York: Disinformation Company, 2005),
120–126, for a summary in English of the relevant documentation.
37
Some of Reghini’s essays, writing as Pietro Negri, are included in Julius Evola and the
Gruppo di Ur, Introduction to Magic, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions,
2001).
24 Joscelyn Godwin
Church and the suppression of Freemasonry, he devoted himself to symbo-

lism and number theory.
Armentano had spent part of his youth in Brazil, where there was a
flourishing neo-Pythagorean tradition as a result of the influence of French
occultism and especially of Fabre d’Olivet. In 1909, Dario de Castro Vellozo
(1869–1937) founded the Istituto Neo-Pitagorico (Neo-Pythagorean
Institute) in Curitiba, enrolling many prominent members of society. It is
still active in that city, where it has a Doric-style Templo das Musas (Temple
of the Muses), and in other countries of South America.
Reghini and Armentano’s activity rekindled awareness among Italian eso-
tericists, hitherto more drawn to Theosophy or Anthroposophy, of their
peninsular as the chosen home of Europe’s first philosopher and his school.
The result is a strong neo-pagan strain in contemporary Italian esotericism,
vacillating between the two poles of adulation of ancient Rome and a more
inward, Pythagorean path. While the former owes more to Reghini and
Evola, the latter is strongly influenced by the Neapolitan Giuliano
Kremmerz (Ciro Formisano, 1860–1931). In 1898, Kremmerz founded the
Fratellanza Terapeutica Magica di Myriam (Magical Therapeutic Brotherhood
of Myriam), a non-Masonic group (hence, including women), whose main
purpose was healing through ritual magic and “Hermetic medicine.” The
branch in Bari, called Accademia Pitagora (Pythagoras Academy), was revived
in the 1980s. On a more intellectual level, the traditions of Reghini and
Kremmerz are maintained in the journal Politica Romana.
Pythagorean music theory has seen its strongest modern development in
German-speaking countries. The Prussian parliamentarian and jurist Albert
Freiherr von Thimus (1806–1878) influenced by the mythologist Georg
Friedrich Creuzer, had the insight that the one unifying symbolic factor
behind all ancient lore and learning might have been the discovery of the
harmonic series and its association with mathematics. He applied this to a
thesis of great density and erudition that embraced Chinese and Egyptian
philosophy as well as the entire classical and Western tradition.38 A main
pillar of his argument is the “Pythagorean Table” or “Lambdoma,” a grid or
lattice with the harmonic series along one axis, the subharmonic along the
other, and all tones, with their numbers, arranged in between. Among his
many asides, von Thimus explained how Pythagorean harmonics concealed
an esoteric knowledge of heliocentricity.39
38
Albert von Thimus, Die harmonikale Symbolik des Alterthums, 2 vols. (Cologne: DuMont
Schauberg, 1868, 1876); reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1972.
39
Translations of the relevant passages in Godwin, Harmony of the Spheres, 370–381.
Von Thimus’s work, ignored in his lifetime, was taken up by Hans Kayser
(1891–1964), who founded or, as he saw it, revived the essential Pythagorean
science of Harmonik (Harmonics).40 In his many writings, he applied the
Lambdoma to such varied fields as architecture, anatomy, botany, crystal-
lography, violin construction, composition, and, most importantly to him,
theology and metaphysics. Of all the modern attempts at a “grand unified
theory” on esoteric principles, Kayser’s is the most wide ranging and the least
infected by self-elevating claims to higher knowledge. It was continued by
Rudolf Haase (b. 1920), who became a professor at the Vienna Hochschule
für Musik und darstellende Kunst and in 1968 founded there the Hans-
Kayser Institut für harmonikale Grundlagenforschung (Hans Kayser institute
for research into harmonic principles). Haase’s institute tests Kayserian
Harmonics against recent developments in the natural sciences, hoping for
a fruitful mutual exchange via the Pythagorean principles that (1) all is
number and (2) number is best understood through the phenomenon of
harmony.
40
See Hans Kayser, Lehrbuch der Harmonik (Zurich: Occident-Verlag, 1950). English
translation by Ariel Godwin, Textbook of Harmonics, n.p., Sacred Science Institute, 2006.
3
PARMENIDES AND EMPEDOCLES
Jessica Elbert Decker and Matthew Mayock*
1 Introduction
To know the early Greeks, we must understand the lens through which we
see them. That lens was powerfully shaped by later Greeks, foremost among
them Plato and Aristotle, who developed the methods of ordered inquiry and
formal argument that are foundational to Western rationalism. In the eyes of
Plato and Aristotle, the works of their predecessors were fruitful but primi-
tive, as they relied just as heavily on artful speech as they did on self-conscious
argumentation, thereby demonstrating their inability to comprehend the
difference. Thus, their notion of truth was contaminated by rhetoric. As a
result, it became the distinct and primary task of the philosopher to explain
how inquiry was to be purified from the irrationalities that plagued early
Greek thought.1
This newfound concern marked a profound shift in mentality among the
Greeks, giving rise to the faculty of critical distance (in contrast to the poetic
association of images) as the accepted standard in making claims of truth.2
While this development undeniably advanced the clarity and organizational
power of the Western intellect, it also perpetuated a myopic view of the early
Greeks by placing their works within a historical narrative that culminated in
the achievements of rationalism.3 Consequently, major features of their
works were pushed aside, while others were disproportionately emphasized
*
The authors would like to thank Peter Manchester for his helpful comments and suggestions
on an earlier version of this article.
1
Cf. Plato, Republic 601–602 on “imitators” of wisdom.
2
Jean Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1988),
218–226.
3
Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, “Quality, Structure and Emergence,” Proceedings of the Boston
Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 2 (1987), 127–194; see especially 127–128.
26
Parme n ides and E mped ocle s 27
to accommodate the view that the earlier Greeks had been trying – and
failing – to accomplish the same ends as the later Greeks.
Given this context, the task of reading Parmenides and Empedocles must
address certain distortions, foremost among them the long-standing dictum
that all religious or poetic content in their works was extraneous to their true
concerns. Such conceptual partitioning, however, comes from an external
agenda that caused such a restriction in focus among early readers that large
sections of Parmenides’s and Empedocles’s poems were inadvertently left
unpreserved for future generations.4 The resulting damage to their works is
extensive but fortunately does not preclude a more faithful reading, the goal
of which would be to refrain from importing concepts – such as Plato’s rigid
distinction between reason and sense experience – that disrupt the natural
flow of the texts. It is necessary to see how the materials conventionally
deemed “peripheral” shed a tremendous amount of light on the “core”
doctrines of these texts. Later Greeks sought to extract and embed these
doctrines in a new conversation, which (in addition to the loss of meaning
mentioned earlier) also stripped away any semblance of concord between
Parmenides and Empedocles, painting them instead as dialectical
adversaries.5 Thus, the antithetical terms “monism” and “pluralism” classi-
cally serve to define their relationship, masking a tacit agreement that was too
literary and esoteric for later philosophers to acknowledge.
In fact, there is significant evidence in the extant fragments that
Parmenides and Empedocles were prophets of a mystical tradition endowed
with a unique set of practices transmitted esoterically. This evidence is
difficult to present simply, as it forms a complex web of symbolism, allusion,
and intentional ambiguity spread throughout their writings. It is, therefore,
best to begin by outlining the standard approaches to each figure to distin-
guish them from the “mystical” interpretation to follow. It is also necessary to
show that the key passages containing their core doctrines may be presented
in a way that does not conceptually insulate them from other material in the
texts – material that is crucially important but has long been deemed merely
peripheral. Then, it will be possible to introduce additional details, like
spokes around the hub of a wheel, to extend the doctrines beyond the limits
normally imposed on them. Lastly, it may be argued that, contrary to
conventional intellectual history, Parmenides and Empedocles were solidly
aligned with each other to the extent of forming an esoteric tradition.
4
David Gallop, Parmenides of Elea (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 4. Gallop
estimates (p. 5) that as little as one-third remains.
5
G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 285.
28 Jessi ca E lbert D ecker and Matthew Mayock
2 Parmenides
Parmenides was born approximately 515 BCE in Elea on the western coast of
present-day Italy, a colony belonging to the Phocaeans, who originally lived
on the coast of present-day Turkey and were widely known for their mastery
of seafaring.6 Parmenides’s cultural affiliations illuminate the setting in which
his doctrines had currency and, therefore, something of the form of the
knowledge he sought to impart. The Phocaean emphasis on sea exploration,
navigation, and travel cultivated an aptitude for supreme practicality, an
alertness to the needs of the moment perhaps best described as “resourceful-
ness” or “cunning.”7 This particular brand of intelligence correlated with the
Phocaeans’ self-identification as seals (the Greek phoce means “seal”), since
these amphibious mammals embodied the ambiguity and graceful agility
needed to slip between worlds, under the surface and back again. In accor-
dance with these defining virtues of Parmenides’s culture, it is not surprising
to find that his single work depicts a perilous journey beyond the surface of
this world as we know it, one possible only through a divine level of
resourcefulness. In this journey the kouros (boy, initiate8) is allowed to slip
past the guardian of “the gates of Night and Day” (B 1.11), beyond the limits
of mortality to the abode of an unnamed goddess who awaits a guest worthy
of receiving her instruction on the “routes” available to thought.9
This initial journey comprises the mysterious Prologue to a poem in three
parts and is followed by “The Way of Truth” and “The Way of Doxa
[opinion].” Traditional readings focus exclusively on the arguments of
“The Way of Truth,” as they are deemed the earliest monument to “explicit
and self-conscious argumentation”10 in Western literature, but such efforts to
embed Parmenides within a linear narrative of emergent Greek rationality
often sacrifice historical and textual accuracy. The overarching and culturally
vital theme of divine resourcefulness (which the Greeks called mêtis) as well as
many philologically salient details are sidelined from conventional studies of
6
Herodotus, 1.164–168. Cf. Peter Kingsley, Reality (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Press,
2003), 17.
7
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society,
trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), passim. Cf. Kingsley, Reality,
passim.
8
Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Press, 1999), 71–76.
9
Diels’s ordering adopted for all quotations of original text. Cf. Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente
der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed, revised by W. Kranz (Berlin: Weidmann, 1951). The abbreviation
“B” is a standard convention indicating that the numbering of the fragments follows that of
Diels-Kranz.
10
Gallop, Parmenides of Elea, 3.
the philosophical arguments that traditionally occupy center stage. A more

hermeneutically faithful reading would allow the concept of “resourceful-
ness” to inform the whole of the text, not only as subject matter but as a
virtue expected from the reader, thus correcting the biases of an overly
rationalistic approach.
To give one example, the journey in the Prologue is classically depicted as
an upward ascent to the heavens where the clear light of reason is bestowed
on the kouros, but closer scrutiny and comparison with Homeric and
Hesiodic traditions strongly suggest that the direction the kouros travels is
not toward the celestial light, but rather the opposite: into the darkness of the
Underworld.11 This long-standing error is partly due to poetic ambiguities in
the text but more importantly reflects the perennial philosophical paradigm
that equates light and ascent with dialectical reason and sound understanding,
so famously set forth one century later in Plato’s allegory of the cave and his
tale of the charioteer in the dialogue Phaedrus. The journey of Parmenides’s
kouros, however, is governed by a wholly different set of virtues and stipula-
tions. These include the exploratory daring for which the Phocaeans were
renowned; the power of cunning and trickery needed to circumvent tradi-
tional laws and make full use of ambiguities in expression; and, finally, a
corporeal intelligence that does not abstract from the body in search of higher
truths but plunges wholeheartedly, intuitively, into its physical surroundings
and locates there a subtlety beyond that of the ratiocinative faculty. To draw
from the symbolism of this example, Parmenides must be approached
through a different paradigm that emphasizes practical urgency over aca-
demic argument and enables the recognition and cultivation of a “chthonic”
(rather than “uranic”) intelligence.12
At his destination, the kouros meets an unnamed goddess – most likely
Persephone, in accordance with traditional piety and symbolism – who
delivers an uncompromising logical exposition on a mysterious eon (“it”)
that “cannot not be” (B 2.3).13 Thus begins the celebrated “Way of Truth”
section (eighty-two out of roughly five hundred lines14) that has received the
bulk of attention from commentators. The logic of “Truth” asserts that “what
11
Gallop, Parmenides of Elea, 7. Cf. Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides (Las
Vegas, NE: Parmenides Publishing, 2007), 15.
12
Kingsley, Reality, 26–48. See also M. Laura Gemelli Marciano, “Images and Experience: At
the Roots of Parmenides’ Aletheia,” Ancient Philosophy 28 (2008), 21–48.
13
Cf. Kingsley, Reality, 43. “Eon” is the controversial subject of the poem; it is a participle of
enai and can be translated as “what-is” or “whatever-is,” thus many commentators translate
it as “Being.” See Gallop, Parmenides of Elea, 42. Mourelatos, Route of Parmenides, treats eon as
equivalent with aletheia; for his textual argument see pp. 74–78.
14
Gallop, Parmenides of Elea, 29.
is” must be absolutely one (without parts) and eternal (without beginning or
end) and complete (without lack) and motionless (without destination) and
alone (without partners or associations of any kind), for all these “possibilities”
would rely on the existence of “what is not” (or nothing) – which cannot
exist. Mortals, explains the goddess (B 6.5), live in a fabricated world because
they are unable to recognize or accept the radical krisis (decision) of this
logic.15 Instead, they choose a backward-turning (palintropos) path of com-
promise that attempts to combine the “what is” with the “what is not,”
because they consider them to be “both the same and not the same” (B 6.8–9).
But such a combination misunderstands the nature of each: There cannot be a
relation of sameness or dyadic pairing between them, for this would violate
the definition of both members of the pair. There is nothing outside of “what
is,” and “what is not” cannot exist: A pairing or opposition between them is
illusory. To underscore this truth, it is precisely the world of oppositions – of
day and night, and so on – that has been left far behind by the kouros in his
journey to the goddess.
The corruption of the goddess’s logic is natural and inevitable for the
whole of mortals who “ply an aimless eye and ringing ear” (B 7.4) along this
habitual path, as they lack the alertness and resourcefulness to realize what
they are doing. She demands that the kouros, on the other hand, accept the
strife of her logic that what is cannot not be, nor what is not ever come to be.
While she is conventionally construed as saying that the kouros ought to
“judge by reason” (krînai de logoi), it has been noted that the Greek word logos
did not take on the meaning of discursive rationality until the writings of
Plato; in Parmenides’s time, it was closer in meaning to “words spoken.”16
The goddess is essentially saying that the kouros has no choice but to accept
what she is giving him. The context bears this out: She presents three paths as
if to satisfy the mortal craving for choice, only to say that one does not exist
and another folds back on itself. The third does not “go” anywhere as it is the
unchanging eon, but she still ironically offers “a tale of a path” for it. In doing
so, she mockingly requests consent while enforcing absolute obedience.
A note of irony and humor persists throughout the poem, reaching its peak
at the goddess’s announcement: “Here I stop my trustworthy speech to you
and thought / about truth; from here onwards learn mortal beliefs (doxas), /
listening to the deceitful ordering of my words” (B 8.50–52). Thus begins
“The Way of Doxa,” the third section that exists now only in fragments, a
15
Kingsley, Reality, 177, 184–187.
16
For krinai as “select,” see Kingsley, Reality, 140; on elenchos and pathlessness, see Kingsley,
Reality, 149–156.
tragedy understandable in light of the philosopher’s dismissal of “mere”

appearances. The problem with such dismissal in this context, however, is
Parmenides’s explicit announcement of his doxa as doxa, which creates a
situation of instructive irony when reading them. The concept of irony has
been almost universally neglected in studies of the third section of
Parmenides’s poem despite the fact that it explains perfectly the relationship
between the second and third sections.17 By humorously imitating the beliefs
of mortals in “Doxa,” the goddess “reveals the tension and conflict in their
collective mind. For they cannot help feeling the presence of the eon: as a
goal, as an intention, as an implicit commitment, as a half-forgotten memory
of the ancient covenant with reality. Yet the terms they use are ambiguous in
every case. If pressed they turn back on themselves.”18 The “Doxa” is thus a
portrayal of their self-deception that undeceives by showing how the irony of
their condition operates. It also creates a double audience: a community of
those who understand, as well as a community of those unable to escape the
irony of their condition because they insist on corrupting the logic of
“Truth.” Parmenides employs the path of irony or humor as a clue to
ontological truth, since it is the nature of these devices to collapse on
themselves suddenly and yield to a unity that bursts onto the scene. The
prevalence of these textual devices suggests that they convey an experience
analogous to realizing the nature of the eon, and thus that “The Way of
Truth” depicts a revelatory event rather than a philosophical thesis.
There is no dialectical process of methodically arriving at the pure singu-
larity of “what is.” The interpretation that Parmenides intends us to “judge
by reason” reflects a program of reading him that insists on limiting his focus.
Beyond the fact that there was no such conception of “reason” in
Parmenides’s time and that reason only operates through a dialectic of “is”
and “is not” that defies the logic Parmenides advances, this reading asserts
that he consigns appearances to the category of “is not,” an unacceptable
outcome as it would eliminate the world of experiences in which we live and
move. Nevertheless, the classical depiction of Parmenides’s radical monism
makes this assertion and can be traced back to Plato’s reading in Sophist,
which set the precedent of exclusively focusing on “Truth” without the
surrounding context that would allow it to be recognized as the endpoint of
irony. Having artificially banished appearances from Parmenides’s account of
what is, Plato retroactively generates the need to restore them to a role in
philosophical inquiry, which he accomplishes by asserting them to be a
17
Mourelatos, Route of Parmenides, 223.
18
Mourelatos, Route of Parmenides, 226.
mixture of “is” and “is not.” The irony in all this is that Plato ostensibly
“saves” the appearances from Parmenides when it is the latter, in actuality,
who gives them a higher ontological status by weaving them into his account
of the eon. It would be absurd for Parmenides to say that sense experience “is
not,” while maintaining that what “is not” cannot be experienced, recog-
nized, or pointed out. But Plato’s interpretation prevailed, ensuring that the
scope of what counted as a reading of Parmenides was all but permanently
narrowed, and additionally that Empedocles could now only be seen as
someone who tried – and failed – to resolve the problem generated by the
Platonic reading of Parmenides.
3 Empedocles
In fact, the interpretation of Empedocles (born roughly 495 BCE in the city
of Acragas in present-day Sicily) has never truly stepped out of the shadow of
this false problem. His doctrine is conventionally seen as a compromise
intended to rescue the natural world of change and motion from
Parmenides’s formidable challenge, while attempting to preserve the plenum
(impossibility of void) and certain features of permanence from his prede-
cessor’s doctrine. From this perspective, which depicts their relationship in
terms of a dialectical conflict, Empedocles appears to grossly misunderstand
Parmenides’s position, violating the stipulation of oneness (by positing multi-
ple primary substances: earth, air, fire, and water), the stipulation of indivi-
sibility (by asserting the Parmenidean sphere19 to be a blend of them), and the
stipulation of motionlessness (by having this sphere come together and
separate endlessly).
Two forces accomplish the convergence and divergence of Empedocles’s
four elements: Love (the power of harmony, friendship, and creation) and
Strife (the power of discord, enmity, and destruction). Empedocles is criti-
cized for not providing arguments to justify his revision of Parmenides, as
well as for not providing a principle that would explain why his cosmic cycle
continues, and why all things must conform to it. The cycle is simply posited
and expounded and appears to transfer theological forces onto the material
plane and set them going with the same “givenness” that characterizes myth.
He is also accused of naïvely mixing disciplines by rhetorically infusing
natural philosophy with mystical significance. Later commentators follow
Aristotle’s judgment that Empedocles irrationally attempts to combine the
19
At B 8.43, Parmenides compares the eon to a sphere.
incompatible: the role of the natural philosopher, on the one hand, and that
of the religious prophet, on the other.20
Empedocles is open to charges of being dialectically primitive; he does not
appear interested in making arguments for his doctrine. The dialectical
deficiency of his writing, however, is explained by an altogether different
intention. While the cosmic cycle appears as a primitive attempt at scientific
explanation, a study of its poetics reveals that Empedocles, like Parmenides,
strategically employs misdirection to reveal that various cosmic forces and
events, including his own speech, have a far wider significance than is
immediately apparent.21 To begin with, the canonical reading has largely
overlooked Empedocles’s announcement that his account conforms to themis
(propriety), which should put readers on their guard. He describes death as
“miserable fate” (B 9.4), while adding that he only obeys convention in so
describing it, since there is truly no such thing as birth or death (B 11). The
bulk of his poetry, however, is devoted to biological descriptions of how
things are born and die! He describes Love as “balance” and “harmony,” the
force responsible for “flourishing life,” but he also calls it “Aphrodite,”
goddess of Love, and urges the listener not to be put “in a daze” by her
seductive charms (B 17.21). Her deceitfulness was legendary among the
Greeks.22 When Empedocles labels her creation thauma idesthai (a wonder
to behold), he alludes to prominent instances in Greek literature where the
power of beauty conceals extreme danger.23
The force of Strife also plays a more ambivalent role than conventional
interpretation admits.24 The overwhelming majority of commentaries on
Empedocles have unequivocally labeled Strife as “evil” and Love as “good,”
following the reading of Aristotle.25 Recently, however, these monolithic
descriptions have been challenged with regard to a key section where
Empedocles speaks about placing his trust in “mad Strife” (B 115.14). This
ill-advised trust in “evil” (the standard reading holds) explains why
Empedocles – who presents himself as an exile from the company of the
gods trying to earn his way back to them – was banished and sent to wander
the earth until he purifies himself (presumably through acts of Love). This
standard interpretation has been disputed, however, on the grounds that his
20
Aristotle, Rhetoric 1407a 31–39.
21
Kingsley, Reality, 323.
22
Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Kingsley, Reality, 377–391.
23
B, 35.17. Kingsley, Reality, 90; Hymn to Demeter 427.
24
Kingsley, Reality, 370–371. For convention, cf. Kirk et al., The Presocratic Philosophers, 290.
25
Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.4, 984b32–985a10. For criticism see Harold Cherniss, Aristotle’s
Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), passim.
word for “trust” (pisunos) has the widespread connotation in Greek literature
of trusting in something dangerous to get out of a difficult situation: “In
short, he is not saying he is an exile because he trusted in Strife. He is saying
the exact reverse, that he trusts in Strife because he is in exile.”26 Ironically,
the conventional views of Empedocles’s cosmic forces reverse the truth in
accordance with propriety – just as he predicted through his observance of
themis.
Empedocles is not a moralist. He does not ascribe a normative value to
Love or Strife but views them objectively as the respective forces of binding
and unbinding.27 His ultimate purpose is to liberate the soul by destroying
mortal habits and fixations that impede its renewal on a higher level. For this,
something more powerful than the moral precept is needed: He wishes to
transmit to his student the direct experience of an eternal reality that cir-
cumvents the need for prescriptions of any kind, to lead the student to a self-
sufficient awareness of the proper role of the human being within the cosmos
(B 112.10–12). Consequently, he must alter perception on every level. His
method is the subtle language of the cosmic cycle, which is not a mechanism
for scientific explanation but rather a means for portraying the nature of the
exile (and homecoming) of the soul. This is able to occur through the
magical principle of the attraction of “like to like” (B 109), as the attraction
of a thing to its opposite is only accomplished by the deceptive power of
Love. Left to its own devices, everything desires to return to its home among
the purity of its kind. Mortal beings are mixtures of the four elements, which
are themselves divine powers (B 6). If Love is able to lure reluctant divinities
from their lofty state to become mortal beings, then she has no trouble
convincing mortals that their lives, as they live them, are desirable and
natural. In the midst of this pleasing illusion, however, the substance of life
itself seems to yearn for something unattainable and unnameable. This vague
longing tugs at mortals throughout their lives, producing an inexplicable
feeling of exile – but they never imagine that this yearning for home
originates not from them but from the primary substances of the cosmos
itself.28
To awaken this vision, Empedocles taught a discipline of conscious
participation in returning the divine roots to their homes, a service to the
divine meant to restore the soul to its original stature, function, and capacity
to lead others to the same realization, which is what Empedocles meant when
26
Kingsley, Reality, 432. Cf. Kingsley, Reality, 588–589.
27
Kingsley, Reality, 446–449.
28
Compare Parmenides’s use of thumos (longing) at B, 1.1. cf. Kingsley, Reality, 27.
he referred to himself as a daimon, or divinity (B 23.11). It calls for a specific

way of being within the natural world, since nature is the repository for each
immortal element – earth, air, fire, and water – and, therefore, provides the
site for the exchange between mortal and divine. For Empedocles, this
occurs through the act of perceiving the world consciously (B 106, B 110),
since the perceptual faculties are none other than the active powers of the
immortal roots.29 In our daily experience, we are presented with a thor-
oughly convincing world of external objects, given all at once. To perceive
each and every detail is tantamount to splitting perception into its original
components, witnessing how they combine to form what we conventionally
take for granted. Love’s cosmos (illusion) continuously changes and thus
offers no permanent rest or home for the things within it; yet, Empedocles
hints that an elusive stillness (reminiscent of Parmenides’s eon) is to be found
at the heart of this motion, if perception can keep up with the changes
(B 17.9–13). It is here that his complicity with Parmenides begins to be
apparent.
4 The Tradition of Parmenides and Empedocles

For both men, stillness is the culmination of movement, a paradoxical truth
that must be experienced to be understood. Their language is infused with a
subtlety that demonstrates the necessary resourcefulness for this event to take
place. Returning to the Prologue of Parmenides’s poem, we find a depiction
of a swift chariot ride to the Underworld, where absolute motionlessness is
revealed to be the truth. The language of the Prologue especially emphasizes
the constant revolution of wheels and the turning of the pins in the Gates as
they open the way. There is a marked repetition of the word “carry,” and the
conspicuous use of assonance throughout the Prologue conveys a sense of
continuous motion generated by the text itself.30 Recent studies of the
poetics of the Prologue provide parallels with other magical texts of
Parmenides’s time and show that its verbal strategies correlate exactly with
the known examples of incantatory poetry that aim to produce an altered
state of consciousness.31 The motions of the language of the Prologue were
intended to lead directly to an experience of motionlessness that is precisely
the nature of the eon depicted in “Truth.” Thus, only by following the
poetics of the Prologue can the goddess’s logical demonstration yield its
29
Cf. Kingsley, Reality, 510–513.
30
Kingsley, In the Dark Places, 127–133.
31
Marciano, “Images and Experiences,” 5; Kingsley, In the Dark Places, 109.
proper sense. The decontextualization of the latter by Plato and later philo-
sophers left an impoverished (albeit intellectually stimulating) shell of a
doctrine that has ever since mystified readers as to the identity of the “it is”
that it depicts.
A statue of Parmenides was unearthed in 1962 from a buried building in
Elea. The inscription on this statue is striking evidence that Parmenides was
the founding figure in a lineage of healers who served Apollo and whose
method was “stillness” (hesychia).32 One manifestation of hesychia was the
practice of “incubation,” which entailed lying down in total stillness for
extended periods to await contact from the divine.33 In this context, the
journey of the Prologue may be recognized as an account of an incubatory
experience that yielded the revelation of “oneness” seen in “The Way of
Truth.” The association with Apollo is significant because the god’s widely
recognized cosmic function, to be the intermediary between gods and
mortals, is noticeably served by the text. Just as Apollo was the god of
mysterious prophetic utterance, Parmenides’s and Empedocles’s use of lan-
guage is similarly bivalent, interfolded with depth and texture, employing a
language of doubleness that was not simply expository but rather enacted a
transformation on the listener; both of them refer to their words as a muthos
(myth, or, more literally, speech-event), a genre of language over which
Apollo notably presided.34 Apollo’s peculiar power to neutralize antitheses
and escape constraints corresponds exactly to the nature of awareness they
sought to teach. They are all liminal figures capable of crossing borders that
conventionally remain closed.
For Apollo, escaping bonds was natural; for mortals to escape similar bonds
and breach the laws of the cosmos, flawlessly constructed by Love, a counter-
vailing acuity (which the Greeks called metis) needed to be developed.35 For
both Empedocles and Parmenides, mortals are defined by their lack of metis
such that “helplessness in their chests steers their wandering minds as they are
carried along in a daze, deaf and blind at the same time,” “totally persuaded
by whatever each of them happens to bump into while being driven one
way, another way, all over the place.”36 The cultivation of metis fittingly lies
32
Kingsley, Reality, 42. For the conventional rendering of “the quiet life” of contemplation,
cf. Gallop, Parmenides of Elea, 4.
33
Kingsley, In the Dark Places, 59, 77, 82, 139,142.
34
Gregory Nagy, “The Name of Apollo: Etymology and Essence,” in Apollo: Origins and
Influences, ed. Jon Solomon (Tucson-: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 4.
35
Detienne and Vernant, Cunning Intelligence, passim; Kingsley, Reality, 334–341. The epithet
polumetis is applied throughout Homer to Odysseus, who also makes a rare journey to the
Underworld.
36
Parmenides, B 6.5–7, Empedocles, B 2.5–7.
in the background of their doctrines but serves as a defining thread in the

tradition they jointly represent. Their texts are designed to provoke an
awareness that could detect the subtle enchantments of Love, who proffers
ten thousand items each moment to snag the attention and blunt the cares of
mortals (B 110.7), and undo them in service to the divine. But this awareness
does not struggle against the current of illusion. It works inside this current,
slipping under the surface and returning in a way that thwarts rational
expectation. Unlike the discipline of philosophy that appropriated parts of
their works one century later, Parmenides and Empedocles do not dualisti-
cally contrast appearances with reality. Their continued relevance lies in their
ability to unravel this distinction and present us with something fresh,
entering inexplicably from beyond the borders of human thought to restore
a vibrancy and resourcefulness for welcoming the sacred.
4
PLATO, PLOTINUS, AND

NEOPLATONISM
G we n a ël l e A u b r y
1. Introduction
Kant distinguishes between two philosophical schools: one in which knowl-
edge is the fruit of rational labor and the other in which it is rather a kind of
ecstasy, the mysterious “apotheosis” of intuition. It is in Plato that he finds the
origin of the latter – referring to him as a “Mytagogue,” the founder of a sect,
addressing himself only to initiates.1 The truth is that the “Greek light” is not
the same as Kant’s “Enlightenment”: It is not a brightness gradually winning
the battle against darkness, but rather a flash, a sudden and powerful
illumination.2 This model certainly governs the Platonic tradition. It is for
this reason that the question is not whether one can speak of mysticism and
esotericism in relation to Platonism, but rather of how to do so.
It is well known that “mysticism” comes from the Greek term mysteria,
which refers to the mystery cults, mystes meaning “initiate.” But this linguis-
tic fact leaves room for different inflections, depending on which aspect of the
mysteric experience (i.e., the experience linked to mystery cults) is empha-
sized: the initiation, the revelation, the union with the divine, or the secret.
These various inflections are precisely what we try to highlight. Thus, when
Plato uses the “mysteric model,” it is mainly as a model of the initiation, that
is, of the break with ordinary ways of life and thought that philosophy both
provokes and requires. We may, then, wonder whether Plato’s philosophy is
actually influenced by the mystery cults, and by the figures and trends of
thought related to them (especially Orphism and Pythagoreanism). And we
1
Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie, in Kants Werke, Vol. 7 (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter & Co, 1968).
2
See Pierre Aubenque, “La découverte grecque de la rationalité” in La naissance de la raison en
Grèce, ed. Jean-François Mattéi (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), 407–417.
38
P l a t o , P l o t i n u s , a n d N e o p l a t o n is m 39
also have to ask whether Platonic philosophy is itself homologous to this

tradition, insofar as it might be based on an esoteric teaching.
From Plato to Plotinus, the inflection changes: What prevails in the model
of Neoplatonism is not so much the initiatic scheme, as the union with the
divine. Indeed, Plotinus’s philosophy proceeds from a founding experience –
the union with the One-Good – and develops as an inquiry into the condi-
tions of its occurrence and recurrence. It is in this manner that the philosophy
of Plotinus inherits the mysteric tradition and also has a decisive influence on
what is commonly called the “mystical tradition,” particularly the Christian
one. For this reason, we must also ask to what extent the mystical, in the
modern sense of the term, derives from (or departs from) the original
mysteric model.3
In any case, the transmission is anything but linear; from Porphyry and
(especially) Iamblichus onward, the Neoplatonists are divided as to the
conditions and means for achieving union with the divine. In opposition
to the “long road” of Plotinus, involving spiritual exercises and discursive
procedures, stands the “short road” of theurgy: ritual magic intended to
invoke the presence of the divine. This theurgical turn in Neoplatonism
coalesces with a theological turn. In terms of the mysteric model, it is the
dimensions of revelation and secrecy that are here reactivated. This is
accompanied by an appeal to some texts supposedly containing this revela-
tion (e.g., the Chaldean Oracles), by a reading of Plato that connects him to
Orpheus and Pythagoras, and finally by an effort to systematize these doc-
trines. Thus, it is as though the mysteric and esoteric model was received in
an increasingly literal sense, and as though the Platonic project of transposing
the mystical into the philosophic became transformed, in late Neoplatonism,
into their integration.
2 Plato
In the Symposium, Diotima offers Socrates what she calls an “initiation.” The
outcome of this is uncertain, however: “The final and highest mystery” (ta de
telea kai epoptika) may remain beyond reach.4 While the mysteric reference and
vocabulary here are explicit, Plato nonetheless dissociates initiation from reve-
lation. The mystical discourse actually governs a double demystification: that of
Eros and that of the figure of the philosopher shaped on the model of Eros.
3
It is well known that the term “mystic” was substantivized only in the seventeenth century.
This is why Michel de Certeau can write that “the mystic” is an invention of the modern
ages. See “Mystique,” in Encyclopaedia universalis t. 15 (Paris, 1989), 1031–1036.
4
Plato, Symposium, 210a.
40 G w e n a ëlle Aubry
Eros is not a great god (as claimed, for instance, in the Orphic theogonies5),
but a great daimon, an intermediary between the mortal and the immortal,
mixing poverty and plenty. Like him, the philosopher is an intermediary
between knowledge and ignorance. He is no more a superior being, sharing
arcane knowledge, than Eros is a god. He is animated simply by a desire that is
both a rupture with the common world and a passage to another. The
projection of the figure of Eros onto that of Socrates indicates above all the
atopia, the strangeness of the philosopher.6 In the same way, Plato’s reference
to the mysteries aligns philosophy not so much with revelation of the final
truth as with the dynamic of initiation. In initiation, it is the double dimen-
sion of rupture and passage that matters: rupture with doxa (opinion) and
with appearance and passage to the intelligible forms (eidē), the basis of true
knowledge.
In the Phaedrus, however, the mysteric model is associated with the actual
contemplation of the forms, rather than merely the desire for such knowl-
edge. True beauty is not presented as the goal of a journey that may never be
completed but as the object of recollection. He who partakes of it is “always
being initiated into perfect mysteries” and becoming himself perfect, even
though he looks suspect, ridiculous, or insane in the eyes of the many.7 Thus,
the reference to the mysteries here associates the scheme of initiation with
that of revelation.
Both are also simultaneously displayed in the allegory of the cave in the
Republic, Book VII, which represents the passage from the sensible to the
intelligible world as a journey from darkness to light. In this Platonic
distinction between two worlds, which finds here its most famous illustra-
tion, some have seen a “transposition into rational terms of the antithesis
between the visible and the invisible that is a feature of mythical thought.”8
The theory of forms could thus be seen as a remnant of the archaic mentality,
with which it would share some fundamental features, such as belief in the
participation of natural realities in a supernatural (or pre-natural) world, as
well as belief in the possibility of mystical contact with it.
But Plato’s intelligible world is not a “supernature” filled with mysterious
forces or influences. It is the place of true being and identity and can only be
5
Cf. Claude Calame, “Eros initiatique et la cosmogonie orphique,” in Orphisme et Orphée, ed.
Philippe Borgeaud (Genève: Droz, 1991), 227–247.
6
See Pierre Hadot, “La figure de Socrate,” in Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris:
Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987).
7
Plato, Phaedrus 249d.
8
Yvon Lafrance, “Mythe et raison dans la théorie platonicienne des Idées,” in Mattéi, La
naissance de la raison en Grèce, 315.
reached through rigorous rational procedures, such as the passage from the
particular to the universal or from the many to the One in the practice of
definition. This intellectual discipline (and the ethical discipline it has as its
condition) establishes a strict distinction between philosophical reason and
ordinary modes of being and thought. The logic of distinction and definition
is precisely what constitutes the difference between rational and mythical
thought, the latter governed for its part by a logic of ambiguity and
equivocity.9 This ontological distinction is also an epistemic one: Indeed,
in the “divided line” of the Republic, Book VI, we find Plato sharply
delineating the cognitive states proper to the apprehension of the sensible
and the intelligible, from eikasia to noesis.10
At this point, the question of the exact meaning of noesis must be raised.
The traditional interpretation sees it as nonpropositional knowledge, or
intellectual intuition. This intuitionist reading of Plato often goes together
with a mystical one that assumes that noesis will involve an actual experience
of ultimate reality, which Book VI of the Republic identifies with the Good.
However, certain commentators have noticed that the experience of the
Good is not explicitly associated by Plato with noesis, and that the identifica-
tion of this term with intellectual intuition is not as clear in him as it will be in
Neoplatonism.11
The experience of the Good could therefore only be termed “mystical” in
the mysteric sense of the word, so long as it is described as a “dazzling vision”
similar to the epopteia, the secret vision in which the initiatic journey of
Eleusis culminated. But, even if this truth were considered an intellectual
intuition, Kant’s criticism of it is not well founded. Far from being immedi-
ate, it can only be received at the end of a philosophical and ethical journey,
depicted in the images of the divided line and the cave. And far from being
reserved only for initiates, according to Plato it must become the basis for a
shared practice and a new political model, since those who reach it are
destined to govern the just city. Finally, its condition, nature, and effects
are no longer consigned to secrecy since they are the very object of the
investigation carried out in the dialogues.
Beyond the echoes of the mysteric model, we must also examine the
influence on Plato of certain trends of thought related to it, starting with
9
As stressed by Jean-Pierre Vernant in his introduction to Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs (Paris:
Editions La Découverte, 1988), 12.
10
Plato, Republic VI, 509d–511e.
11
See, for example, Julia Annas, Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991); Francesco Trabattoni, “L’intuizione intellettuale in Platone. In Margine ad alcune
recenti pubblicazioni,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 3 (2006), 609–719.
Orphism.12 According to Olympiodorus, Plato “everywhere borrows from

Orpheus.”13 This statement is characteristic, as we shall see, of late
Neoplatonism. Orpheus is the legendary source of a group of writings,
some of which, such as the Rhapsodies, were probably not composed prior
to the first and second centuries CE. It is probable that the notion of Orphism
was a vague one for the Greeks themselves. Aside from these writings, the
term referred to the practices they founded, shared by some sectarian groups
and constituting a kind of “alternative culture.”14
Orphism involves first of all a complex account of the origin of the gods,
peculiarly linked to an account of the origin of man.15 This is grounded in
the myth of the murder of Dionysus by the Titans: Man is made up partly of
the ashes of the Titans struck by Zeus’s lightning and partly of a divine spark
of the Dionysian soul. It is as a consequence of this original murder that the
soul finds itself locked up or buried in the body and caught in the cycle of
rebirth, which it can escape only through purificatory practices such as
fasting, vegetarianism, and abstaining from blood sacrifices.
Allusions to these ideas can be found in Plato. In the Cratylus, the word
“body” is linked etymologically to “prison” and “grave.”16 In the Phaedo, we
are told about the necessity of purification,17 about reincarnation or the
becoming of the soul after death,18 and we are referred to an “ancient
tradition.”19 For this reason, some modern historians have attributed to
Orphism a decisive influence on Plato. More precisely, they have seen him
as heir to a trend of thought born in the late seventh and early sixth centuries
12
About the link between the name of Orpheus and the Mystery Cults (particularly those of
Phlya and Eleusis), see Luc Brisson, “Orphée et l’Orphisme à l’époque impériale.
Témoignages et interprétations philosophiques, de Plutarque à Jamblique,” in Aufstieg und
Niedergang der Römischen Welt II, 36.4, ed. by Wolfgang Haase (Berlin–New York: W. De
Gruyter, 1990), 2867–3931.
13
On Plato’s Phaedo 7 §10.141 in The Greek Commentaries on Plato’s Phaedo, Vol. 1,
Olympiodorus, ed. Leendert G. Westerink (Amsterdam; New York: North-Holland
Publishing, 1976).
14
Cf. James Redfield, “The politics of immortality,” in Borgeaud, Orphisme et Orphée,
103–117.
15
A description of it can be found in Brisson, “Orphée et l’Orphisme”; see also Alberto
Bernabé and Fransesco Casadesus, Orfeo y la tradicion orfica. Un reencuentro (Madrid: Akal,
2008).
16
Cratylus, 400c; see also Phaedrus 250c2–4 and Phaedo, 62b; 83a–c, with the notes ad hoc of
Monique Dixsaut, Platon. Phédon, présentation et traduction (Paris: Garnier Flammarion,
1991), 327–328, 356.
17
Phaedo, 69c–d.
18
81a; 107d; see also Epistle VII 335a.
19
Phaedo, 70c. This “ancient tradition” might as well be referred to Empedocles or Pythagoras;
see Dixsaut, Platon, 339–340.
and associated with the semi-legendary, semi-historical figures of the “Seven

Wise Men”: Orpheus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Aristeas, Abaris,
Hermotimus, and Epimenides. These are supposed to have brought to
Greece a kind of shamanism: practices aimed at freeing oneself from the
particularity and limitation of the body.20 This interpretation is now con-
sidered dubious, so much so that Pierre Hadot speaks of a veritable “myth of
shamanism.”21 However, the fact remains that a new conception of the soul
was developed at this time, a complete departure from the Homeric one: The
soul was no longer considered as the life of the body, but rather as a distinct
power, able to survive the death of the body, and recovering, through this
separation, its own true identity.
Plato no doubt inherits this conception, but it could be attributed to
Empedocles or Pythagoras as much as to Orpheus. Aside from the fact that
it can be linked to an actual historical figure, Pythagoreanism differs from
Orphism in its ethical and political dimensions, as well as in its marriage of
magic and science, in particular mathematics.22 Plato’s doctrine of recollec-
tion is often associated with Pythagoreanism: It is well known that the
Pythagoreans performed exercises to enhance memory and increase the
soul’s power of concentration. However, Platonic recollection did not aim
at the remembrance of other incarnated lives but at the recovery of the
knowledge of the forms present to the soul before (or outside) any
incarnation.
Thus, far from being direct and linear as some late Neoplatonists and also
some modern historians claim, Plato’s relation to Orphism and
Pythagoreanism is both mediated and problematic. Plato transforms the
doctrine of the duality of soul and body into one that understands it not in
terms of an original stain but in terms of the ontological division of the
intelligible and the sensible worlds. Plato’s aim is not really the salvation of
the soul but the liberation of thought. Moreover, this is not the result of
exterior obedience to a certain way of life (to prescriptions and prohibitions)
but rather the result of conversion to the power of the intellect. It is perhaps
in this sense that one must understand the sharp criticism in the Republic of
those charlatans who claim to have power over the gods and those who
20
This is why Henry Joly can call Socrates “the last shaman and the first philosopher” in Le
renversement platonicien (Paris: Vrin, 1974), 67; see also Eric Robertson Dodds, The Greeks and
the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), ch. 5; Vernant, Mythe et pensée
chez les Grecs, 123–125, 387–391.
21
Pierre Hadot, “Shamanism and Greek Philosophy,” in The Concept of Shamanism: Uses and
Abuses, ed. Henri-Paul Francfort and Roberte Hamayon (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado,
2001), 389–401.
22
See the tribute paid by Plato to the Pythagoreans in Republic VII, 530d.
present “a bushel of books by Musaeus and Orpheus,” mistaking purification

for a “pleasant sport.”23 Nevertheless, Plato’s appropriation of Orphic-
Pythagorean ideas transposes into philosophical discourse the powerful stran-
geness and enigmatic beauty of this ancient tradition. Moreover, it retains its
essential core: rupture with common life and sense and striving to approach
the divine. The philosophical transposition of the mythic and the mystical
also appears in Plato’s employment of Orphic and Pythagorean elements in
his eschatological myths.24 This goes together with a desire to persuade, to
make the intelligible truths accessible to the many. This political use of the
myth shows all the ambivalence of Plato’s relation to esotericism, since, by
employing it in his dialogues, he breaks with its essence: the secret. However,
the question then remains of whether the Platonic doctrine is not itself built
on an esoteric teaching. The specialists are divided on this point, but it is
worth noting that even those who uphold the esotericist interpretation refer
it to an initiatic scheme corresponding to progress in philosophical training.
3 Plotinus
Damascius (sixth century CE) sums up the complex relationship of Platonic
tradition to mysticism and esotericism in the following way: “To some,
philosophy is primary, such as with Porphyry and Plotinus and a great
many other philosophers; to others, it is hieratic practice, as with
Iamblichus; Syrianus, Proclus, and the hieratic school generally.”25 Plotinus
(205–270) is here unambiguously associated with philosophy, as opposed to
the “hieratic,” that is, the observance and practice of sacred rituals. However,
his philosophical style is very different from Plato’s, in particular because he
systematizes what in the latter is still expressed in the play of irony and image.
Thus, we find in Plotinus a narrative in the first person of the experience
depicted in the myth of the Phaedrus: that of the soul’s ascent to the
intelligible.26 This experience is presented as proper to noesis, which is itself
clearly identified with intellectual intuition, as opposed to dianoia (discursive
knowledge). It can be called “mystical” in the sense that it has no proposi-
tional content but also because it is the experience of a union in which the
distinction between subject and object vanishes.
23
Plato, Republic 364b–365b. On this text, see F. Casadesus Bordoy, “Orfeo y el orfismo en
Platon” in Bernabé and Casadesus, Orfeo y la tradicion orfica, 1239–1279.
24
For a detailed description, see again Bernabé and Casadesus, Orfeo y la tradicion orfica, 1239–
1279.
25
On Plato’s Phaedo. I, §172. 1–3 Westerink, The Greek Commentaries on Plato’s Phaedo.
26
Enneads IV, 8 [6], 1, 1–11.
However, this experience is only the first mystical one for Plotinus. He
also admits the possibility of a union with the very source of the intelligible
and of the whole of reality, the One-Good. The One-Good radically
transcends both being and the intellect. As such, it has no common feature
with what proceeds from it, and thus no quality can be attributed to it,
making it ineffable. Nevertheless, for Plotinus the One-Good can be the
object of a certain sort of experience. Following Pierre Hadot, one can
enumerate its main features. The experience is that of an ektasis (ecstasy),
brief but dazzling. It consists in the feeling of a presence and is compared
sometimes to a luminous vision, sometimes to a blind touch. It is a union in
which every distinction between soul and the One-Good vanishes; however,
this absorption produces the feeling not of being destroyed, but of being
expanded.27
Hadot has compared these characteristic features of the Plotinian experi-
ence to those of the Christian mystics.28 However, we must ask whether one
can legitimately speak of a Plotinian “mysticism” and, more precisely,
whether such a designation does not amount to annexing Neoplatonism to
Christianity, making it into a pagan forerunner.29 The fact is that the word
mustikôs appears only once in the Enneads, as a designation of the secret
language and hidden meaning used in the mysteries and initiations – not as a
description of a certain kind of experience.30 It remains that Plotinus,
although he does not apply the word mustikôs to the experience of the
One-Good nor of the intellect, nonetheless utilizes expressions and images
that evoke, sometimes explicitly, the mysteric model: that of purification,
initiation, sanctuaries, the secret, and vision.31
Thus, the mysteric model actually is at work in Plotinus as it already was in
Plato. However, it does not suggest only the dynamic of initiation but also its
outcome as a union with the generative power of reality. And it is the nature
of this experience that allows us to call it “mystical”: One can indeed
recognize in it the essential core of every mystical teaching, whether pagan
or Christian. This is why we can admit a limited and legitimate use of the
word “mystical,” by which it would designate the direct and unitive experi-
ence of the principle of being. Such a use, nonetheless, leaves room to
27
Cf. Pierre Hadot, Plotin. Traité 38 (VI, 7) (Paris: Cerf, 1987), 58–66. See also Plotin. Traité 9
(VI, 9) (Paris: Cerf, 1994), 44–53.
28
See Hadot, Plotin. Traité 38.
29
Cf. Luc Brisson, “Peut-on parler d’union mystique chez Plotin?” in Mystique: la passion de
l’Un, de l’Antiquité à nos jours, ed. Alain Dierkens and Benoît Beyer de Ryke (Bruxelles,
Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2005), 61–72.
30
Enneads III, 6 [26] 19, 26.
31
Cf. Enneads I, 6 [1], 6. 1–5; 7. 1–11; 8. 1–6; en VI, 9 [9], 11; V, 3 [49] 14.
distinguish between different kinds of mystics, insofar as the conditions and

the object of this experience can be conceived in various ways.
There is another essential core element in the Plotinian mystical experi-
ence: The union with the principle of being is also an escape from and
transcendence of the ordinary self and ordinary consciousness. However,
this supraconscious state is simultaneously the feeling of a presence and
coincidence with one’s true self.32 Plotinus, when describing this state,
formulates a paradox that can be considered paradigmatic of mysticism and
is found again, for instance, in Meister Eckhart: It is when one does not belong
anymore to oneself that one is most oneself.33 This mystical paradigm certainly
owes something to the mysteric model because this new identity occurs at
the end of a process of purification modeled on the initiatic scheme.
However, this process also shows that the Plotinian path is indeed a
philosophy, and not only a form of mysticism, insofar as this process of
purification is an arduous intellectual and ethical path – an effort of conver-
sion of consciousness, aimed at diverting it from the living body and turning
it toward the “separate soul.” Plotinus believes that the soul, in its essence,
remains in the realm of the intelligible: Something in us (in fact, the essential
part of ourselves) is always contemplating, in an unchanging, autarchic, and
serene act, and that cannot be troubled by the tumult of the body. Plotinus’s
philosophy, then, appears as an inner journey, which, at its end, substitutes
one identity for another: The immediate identification with the body must
give way to the consciousness of the inward presence of the separate soul and,
finally, to the identification with this soul.34 Thus, while proceeding from a
mystical experience, Plotinus unfolds it into a philosophy which, in order to
elucidate the conditions for the possibility of that experience, constructs a
new concept of the nature of the subject, as well as of the structure of reality.
4 From Porphyry to Damascius

Although he was counted by Damascius as a philosopher rather than a
hieratic, Porphyry, the editor of Plotinus’s Enneads, stands at the origin of a
new evolution of Neoplatonism: the infusion into it of the Chaldean Oracles.
This is a collection of texts from the second to third centuries CE, whose
32
Cf. Pierre Hadot, “Les niveaux de conscience dans les états mystiques selon Plotin,” Journal
de psychologie 2–3 (1980), 243–266.
33
Cf. Gwenaëlle Aubry, “L’impératif mystique: notes sur le détachement de soi chez Plotin et
Maître Eckhart,” in Maître Eckhart (Les Cahiers d’Histoire de la Philosophie), ed. Julie
Casteigt (Paris: Cerf, 2012).
34
See Gwenaëlle Aubry, Plotin. Traité 53 (I, 1) (Paris: Cerf, 2004).
redaction has been attributed (uncertainly) to Julian the Theurgist.35 One

finds in them, in an oracular form, a theoretical content very much influ-
enced by Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism. But this metaphysical con-
tent mingles with ritual and liturgical prescriptions, presented as so many
ways to reach the divine.
The Chaldean Oracles thus precipitate both a theological and a theurgical
turn in Neoplatonism. The Oracles play the role of a revealed text, so much
so that one may see in them the “Bible” of post-Plotinian Neoplatonists36:
From Porphyry to Damascius, all will try to conciliate the content of the
Oracles with the doctrines of Plato and Plotinus. This theological turn is also
a theurgical one, for now rituals aiming at union with the divine come to the
fore. In short, a new path to the mystical experience is introduced, distinct
from the inner conversion prescribed by Plotinus.
It is with Iamblichus (240–325) that theurgy will make its claim as the
exclusive path. This internal scission of Neoplatonism partly rests on a
disagreement as to the nature of the soul. Iamblichus believes, as Aristotle
did, that the soul is nothing else than the life of the body. He refuses to accept
the idea of a separate soul whose power one would have to activate in oneself.
Theurgy does not require any sort of human aptitude; rather, it is a kind of
“technique of passivity,” whose aim is to make oneself totally receptive to
divine power. The theurgical turn of Neoplatonism, therefore, goes together
with the dislocation of the peculiar conjunction between rationalism and
mysticism, which appeared in the philosophies of both Plato and Plotinus.
It is also accompanied by a rereading of Platonism, intended to associate it
not only with the Chaldean Oracles but also with the figures of Orpheus and
Pythagoras. Iamblichus constructs a lineage from Orpheus to Pythagoras to
Plato. He grounds it on a real philosophical myth, which all the
Neoplatonists after him accept: that of Pythagoras’s initiation into the
Orphic Mysteries.37 The result of such a construction is to ground philoso-
phy in the Mysteries, so that it should finally appear as dependent on a
revelation. In this way, Neoplatonism’s theological and theurgical turns
can be justified. In both cases, philosophy is taken away from human
power (or from what, in man, is potentially divine) and made dependant
35
For a clarification, see Pierre Hadot, “Bilan et perspectives sur les Oracles Chaldaïques,” in
Plotin, Porphyre. Etudes néoplatonicienne (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999), 89–114.
36
Cf. Pierre Hadot “Philosophie, exégèse et contresens,” in Hadot, Etudes de philosophie
ancienne (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998), 3–11.
37
Cf. Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life, §145–147; see Brisson, “Peut-on parler d’union
mystique chez Plotin?” 118–125.
on divine power, “since it was originally handed down from the gods and can
be understood only with the gods’ help.”38
Iamblichus’s reconstruction of the Platonic tradition would be developed
by the Neoplatonist school of Athens into a remarkable work of system-
atization. Even though Proclus (410/412–485) follows Iamblichus in his
rejection of Plotinus’s doctrine of the separate soul and in his adherence to
theurgy, he nonetheless integrates Plotinus into the lineage of the initiated,
describing this lineage as a “divine chorus” progressively rising up to the
“mystical truth” concealed by Plato’s writings.39 Such a mysteric reading of
Plato’s philosophy presents it not only as the end of an initiation, as was
already the case for Plotinus and Porphyry, but as the product of a revelation.
It also dovetails with a theological reading, which, in particular, considers the
second part of the Parmenides as a treatise of formal theology, by which the
interpretation of the other dialogues should be guided. Plato’s philosophy
can then be ranked – along with Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and the
Chaldean Oracles – as one of the four sources of revelation. More precisely,
Proclus’s aim is to show the correspondence between the Chaldean and the
Orphic revelations, insofar as the latter includes Pythagoras’s and Plato’s
teachings.40 Space does not permit a discussion of how this project unfolds
with Proclus as well as with Damascius, who will integrate Homer and
Hesiod into the Neoplatonic system, in addition to Orphic theogonies,41
and also revive the connection between mysticism and rationalism that was
already at work in Plotinus.
38
Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Life, §1.
39
Théol. Plat. I 1, p. 6.16–7.8 Saffrey-Westerink.
40
Cf. Pierre Hadot, “Théologie, exégèse, révélation, Ecriture dans la philosophie grecque,” in
Hadot, Plotin, Porphyre, 27–58.
41
Cf. Luc Brisson, “Damascius et l’Orphisme,” in Borgeaud, Orphisme et Orphée, 157–209.
5
HERMETISM AND GNOSTICISM
R o e l o f v a n d e n Br o e k
1 Introduction
The religious currents that are usually called Hermetism and Gnosticism
flourished in the Greco-Roman world of the first centuries of our era, but
their impact on Western culture is still being felt today. Both proclaimed a
salvific spiritual knowledge (gnosis) about God, the world, and man meant
only for an elite (i.e., those who were worthy of receiving it). Accordingly,
both currents showed distinct esoteric features, but that did not prevent their
adherents from writing numerous books propagating these ideas. Although
their views on the origin and destiny of human beings have much in
common, there are also considerable differences, especially regarding the
nature of the material world and the manner of salvation. To a certain extent,
Gnosticism shows a radicalization of ideas that are also present, though not
dominant or structural, in Hermetism.
2 Hermetism
Late Antiquity left us an extensive literature attributed to Hermes
Trismegistus. It consists of magical, astrological, and alchemical texts (the
so-called technical or practical Hermetica) and philosophically inspired reli-
gious treatises (the philosophical Hermetica).1 In the Greek world, Hermes
Trismegistus was considered a sage of the remote Egyptian past, but origin-
ally he was the Egyptian god Thoth, the god of writing, culture, cosmic
order, and magic. Already in the fifth century BCE, the Greeks identified
1
On Hermes, hermetic literature, and Hermetism: Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes. A
Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd ed.,
1993); Roelof van den Broek, “Hermes Trismegistus I: Antiquity,” “Hermetic Literature
I: Antiquity,” “Hermetism,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter
J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 474–478, 487–499, and 558–570.
49
50 Roel of van d en Broek
Thoth with their god Hermes, who faintly resembled the Egyptian god. The
predicate “Trismegistus” (“Thrice-Great”) derived from the Egyptian man-
ner of expressing the superlative “greatest,” by repeating the word “great”
three times.2
There is no reason to assume that the technical and philosophical
Hermetica once belonged together as successive parts of one great hermetic
teaching program. But the adepts of religious-philosophical Hermetism
had no objections to making use of magical practices and astrological
calculations. The main sources for our knowledge of Hermetism are the
following:
1. The Greek Corpus Hermeticum (= CH), a collection of seventeen treatises,
of which CH I (Poimandres) and XIII (On Rebirth) are the most interesting.
2. The Latin Asclepius, the only complete hermetic text that was known
during the Middle Ages. Some fragments of the Greek original have been
preserved in later authors, and its final hymn is known from a Greek
magical Papyrus. There are also Coptic translations of chapters 21–29 and
of the final hymn, found in Nag Hammadi Codex (= NHC) VI.
3. A great number of hermetic Testimonia, literal quotations of now lost
hermetic works and references to hermetic traditions, preserved in Greek
and Latin authors of Late Antiquity.
4. The Coptic Discourse on the Ogdoad and the Ennead, a work that was
completely unknown before its discovery in NHC VI. It shows that
there was no strict borderline between the technical and the philosophical
Hermetica, because it contains distinctly magical prayers (among other
things, the seven vowels as the hidden name of God) and instructions
with respect to the astrological constellation under which the treatise has
to be preserved for future generations.
5. The Definitions of Hermes Trismegistus, a collection of short, often aphor-
istic summaries of the main points of hermetic doctrine, preserved in
Armenian and partly in Greek.3
From Antiquity until the beginning of the seventeenth century, the
hermetic treatises were generally thought to transmit authentic, ancient
2
Patrick Boylan, Thoth, the Egyptian Hermes. A Study of Some Aspects of Theological Thought in
Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922); Dieter Kurth, “Thot,” Lexikon der
Ägyptologie VI (1986), 498–523; Jan Quaegebeur, “Thot-Hermès, le dieu le plus grand!” in
Hartwig Altenmüller et al., eds., Hommages à François Daumas (Montpellier: Institut
d’Égyptologie–Université Paul Valéry, 1986), 525–544.
3
Text editions and translations are given in the Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of
the volume.
H e rme ti sm a nd Gnos ticis m 51
Egyptian ideas.4 In reality, however, the philosophical Hermetica were all

written in the first centuries of our era, under a strong influence of Greek
philosophy and Jewish and Egyptian mythological and theological specula-
tion. In the twentieth century, the strong emphasis on the Greek philoso-
phical background led to an almost complete denial of any Egyptian
influence on the Hermetica, but this has changed since the discovery of the
Discourse on the Ogdoad and the Ennead.5 This text put the question of the
Egyptian roots of Hermetism on the scholarly agenda yet again, because it
can only be explained within the context of the cultural and religious climate
in Alexandria in the centuries around the beginning of our era.6
The basic doctrine of Hermetism is the idea of an indissoluble interrela-
tionship between God, the cosmos, and man, which implies the unity of the
universe. God is the source of being that encompasses everything that exists:
“God is within himself, the world is in God and man in the world”
(Definitions 7, 5; also CH VIII, 5; X, 14). The hermetists shared the Stoic
idea that the beauty and perfection of the world prove the existence of a
perfect creator. At the same time, however, they were convinced that true
knowledge of God was only possible though divine illumination (CH V, 2;
VI, 14; Asclepius 32). They were not primarily interested in abstract philoso-
phy but rather in a pious and practical form of theology. In Asclepius 12,
Hermes even declares that true philosophy “consists solely in the desire to
know the deity by frequent contemplation and holy piety.”
According to CH V, 9, God’s essence exists in eternally creating every-
thing; otherwise, he himself would not exist eternally. As such he is “com-
pletely filled with the fecundity of both sexes” (Asclepius 20), which means
that he is an androgynous being (also CH I, 9 and 15). The final hymn of the
Asclepius, in chapter 43, speaks about the creative activity of God in strong
bisexual language, and its original Greek text says of the Father that he is
4
Martin Mulsow, Das Ende des Hermetismus: Historische Kritik und neue Naturphilosophie in der
Spätrenaissance. Dokumentation und Analyse der Debatte um die Datierung der hermetische Schriften
von Genebrard bis Casaubon (1567–1614) (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 2002).
5
Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings which contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings
Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, 4 vols., ed. Walter Scott (London: Dawsons 1924–1936);
André-Jean Festugière, La révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste, 4 vols. (Paris: Gabalda, 1944–1954).
See also Corpus Hermeticum, 4 vols., ed. A. D. Nock and A.-J. Festugière (Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1945–1954).
6
Egyptologists have always defended the Egyptian origin of the hermetic ideas; see François
Daumas, “Le fonds égyptien de l’Hermétisme,” in Gnosticisme et monde hellénistique, ed. Julien
Ries (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, Institut Orientaliste, 1982), 3–
25; Jan Zandee, “Der Hermetismus und das alte Ägypten,” in Die hermetische Gnosis im Laufe
der Jahrhunderte, ed. Gilles Quispel (Haarlem/Birnbach: Rozekruis Pers/DRP Verlang,
2000), 98–176.
eternally “pregnant” (patros kyēphorountos). The idea of God as an eternally

creating androgynous being was closely connected with the view that God
had been born out of himself. According to Lactantius, Hermes called God
not only “without father” (apatōr) and “without mother” (amētōr) but also
“his own father” (autopatōr) and “his own mother” (automētōr).7 There is a
general scholarly consensus that the idea of a primal, androgynous, self-
created creator is not Greek but Egyptian, and the same holds for the bold
sexual language to describe the process of creation.8
According to hermetic anthropology, the human being has a twofold
nature: earthly and mortal, due to his body, but also divine and immortal,
due to his possession of a rational soul or mind (int. al. CH I, 15; Asclepius 6
and 8; Definitions VI, 1). This leads in some cases to a negative evaluation of
the material world in general and of the body and procreation in particular.
Thus, the Definitions say: “Who behaves well towards his body, behaves
badly towards himself” (IX, 5), and the Poimandres teaches that a mindful
person understands everything if he knows “that he himself is immortal and
that sexual desire is the cause of death” (CH I, 18). According to the latter
text, all living beings had originally been created in androgynous bodies. It
was only after a cycle of time had passed that they “were parted asunder
together with the human being and part of them became male, part likewise
female.” However, the Asclepius voices a more positive view of the human
condition: “Man is a great wonder (magnum miraculum est homo), a living
being to be worshipped and honoured” (Asclepius, 6). The same text declares
the sexual union of a man and a woman (which is accompanied by “the
greatest affection, pleasure, gaiety, desire, and heavenly love”) to be a divine
mystery reflecting not only the fecundity and androgynous unity of God but
also leading man and woman to the experience of their own original
androgyny (Asclepius, 21).9
All hermetic writings aim to bring the reader to an intuitive, spiritual
knowledge of himself, the world, and God, which is experienced as a divine
7
Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones I, 7, 2; IV, 8, 5 (Nock-Festugière, Corpus Hermeticum, IV,
106–107; 112–113).
8
This is already found in Scott, Hermetica, III, 135–138; Daumas, “Le fonds égyptien,” 17–20;
Jan Zandee, “Der androgyne Gott in Ägypten: Ein Erscheinungsbild des Welschöpfers,” in
Religion im Erbe Ägyptens: Beiträge zur spätantiken Religionsgeschichte ze Ehren von Alexander
Böhlig (Ägypten und Altes Testament, 14), ed. Manfred Görg (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz,
1988), 240–278; Zandee, “Der Hermetismus und das alte Ägypten,” 120–125.
9
Roelof van den Broek, “Sexuality and Sexual Symbolism in Hermetic and Gnostic Thought
and Practice (Second–Fourth Centuries),” in Hidden Intercourse. Eros and Sexuality in the
History of Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal (Leiden-Boston:
Brill, 2008), 3–11.
gift and leads to the praise and worship of the supreme deity. The ultimate
hermetic aim, however, is to become one with God, a goal that can be
reached during one’s lifetime through initiation into the divine mysteries,
and definitively after death. In this respect, the most relevant texts are CH I
(Poimandres), CH XIII (On Rebirth), and NHC VI, 6 (Discourse on the Ogdoad
and the Ennead). CH XIII deals with the spiritual rebirth of Tat, Hermes’s son
and pupil. Under the guidance of his father, Tat eventually experiences
union with the whole of creation, a cosmic omnipresence. He exclaims: “I
am in heaven, in earth, in water, in air; I am in animals and plants, in the
womb, before the womb, after the womb, everywhere” (CH XIII, 11).
CH I and NHC VI, 6 describe quite another kind of initiation, a visionary
ascent through the seven spheres of heaven to the eighth and the ninth
spheres. In CH I, 25–26, this heavenly ascent is pictured as a post mortem
event, which brings the soul into the ninth sphere where it merges with God:
“This is the final good for those who have received knowledge (gnosis): to be
made God (theōthēnai).” NHC VI, 6 describes the same experience, but this
time happening to a hermetic pupil during his lifetime, with Hermes acting as
mystagogue. After a preparatory initiation of seven grades, the pupil comes to
the vision of the divine powers in the Ogdoad and of God himself in the
Ennead: “I see the Ogdoad and the souls that are in it and the angels singing a
hymn to the Ennead and its powers. And I see him who has the power of
them all” (NHC VI, 59, 24–60, 1). The experiences described in CH XIII
and those of CH I and NHC VI represent two quite different forms of
hermetic initiation, not, as has been argued, the successive stages of one and
the same initiatory process.10
The hermetic texts not only speak about initiation with prayers and hymns
but also about a brotherhood of initiates and sacred vegetarian meals, which
suggests the existence of hermetic communities in Late Antiquity. In earlier
scholarship, these references were mostly interpreted as merely literary
devices without any basis in actual life. But since the discovery of the
Discourse on the Ogdoad and the Ennead, this view has become untenable.11
There is no reason to assume that the ancient world knew some kind of
10
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Altered States of Knowledge: The Attainment of Gnōsis in the
Hermetica,” The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 2 (2008), 128–163.
11
Jean-Pierre Mahé, “L’hymne hermétique: une propédeutique du silence,” in L’hymne
antique et son public, ed. Yves Lehmann (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 275–289; Roelof van
den Broek, “Religious Practices in the Hermetic ‘Lodge’: New Light from Nag Hammadi,”
in From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme: Gnosis, Hermetism and the Christian Tradition, ed. R. van
den Broek and C. van Heertum (Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 2000), 77–95; A. van den
Kerchove, La voie d’Hermès. Pratiques rituelles et traités hermétiques (Leiden: Brill, 2012); see
also Hanegraaff’s remarks on this point, “Altered States,” 159–161.
hermetic “church” or a network of quasi-masonic groups. But there is also

no reason to doubt that there were hermetic mystagogues who initiated their
pupils into a visionary experience of unification with the divine, which at
least presupposes small groups of hermetic devotees. The hermetic writings
aimed to evoke similar experiences in their readers.
3 Gnosticism
Texts can be labeled “gnostic” if they express or presuppose a concept of
salvation in which the possession of a specific, partly secret, spiritual knowl-
edge (gnosis) is thought to be indispensable.12 If used in this sense, the terms
“gnosis” and “gnostic” are applicable to all ideas and currents that stress the
necessity of esoteric knowledge. The term “Gnosticism,” however, if used at
all, should only be employed as a neutral term encompassing the various
gnostic systems that flourished in the first centuries of our era.13
Until the middle of the twentieth century, our knowledge of the gnostic
movement in Antiquity depended for the most part on anti-gnostic polemics
by early Christian writers, such as Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 180), Hippolytus of
Rome (ca. 225), and Epiphanius of Salamis (ca. 375).14 They described the
many gnostic mythological systems they knew of and tried to refute them.
Despite their biased approach, these works remain indispensable, even
though we now have a great number of original gnostic works at our
disposal. These sometimes transmit a complete Greek gnostic treatise, for
instance Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora on the Old Testament, in Epiphanius,
Panarion 33, 3–7, or an extensive collection of literal quotations, such as the
Excerpts from Theodotus by Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200).
Almost all complete gnostic works have been preserved in Coptic. Already
in the eighteenth century, two Coptic gnostic codices were discovered, the
Codex Askewianus (or Askew Codex; British Library, London) and the
12
For more extensive discussions of gnostic literature, see Birger A. Pearson, Ancient
Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007) and Roelof van den
Broek, Gnostic Religion in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),
25–125.
13
Michael Allen Williams in Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious
Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) has argued that the terms “Gnosis,”
“Gnosticism,” and “gnostic” should be avoided, because they have lost any specific
meaning; also Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press, 2003), 213–216. Discussions of the problem of definition (and a rejection
of Williams’s proposal) in Pearson, Ancient Gnosticism, 8–12, and van den Broek, Gnostic
Religion in Antiquity, 1–12.
14
Werner Foerster, Gnosis: A Selections of Gnostic Texts, vol. I: Patristic Evidence (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1972).
Codex Brucianus (or Bruce Codex; Bodleian Library, Oxford). The former
contained the Pistis Sophia, the latter the Books of Jeû and the so-called Untitled
Treatise. These works only became accessible in the second half of the nine-
teenth century and received little attention. At the end of that century, new
gnostic texts were found in the Berlin Papyrus Codex 8502 (Berlin State
Museums), of which the Gospel of Mary and the Apocryphon of John are the
most important (published in 1955).15 It was, however, the discovery in 1945
of a jar with thirteen Coptic codices near Nag Hammadi in Egypt that gave a
new impetus to the study of the gnostic movement in Antiquity. The find
contained fifty-one texts (and some unidentified fragments), of which forty
had been completely unknown before.
Not all these texts are originally gnostic, but most of them are – and they
must all have been of great interest to the gnostics who had the codices made.
The diverse contents of the codices cannot be discussed here. The publica-
tion of the texts not only provoked an immense scholarly literature16 but also
aroused great public interest in the phenomenon of gnostic religion in
general and in some texts in particular, for instance the Gospel of Thomas
(NHC II, 2; the “hidden words” of Jesus), the Gospel of Truth (NHC I, 3; a
Valentinian meditation on the meaning of Christ) and the Apocryphon of John
(NHC II, 1; III, 1; IV, 1, and the Berlin Codex; the basic text of gnostic
mythology). The most recently published Coptic gnostic codex is the Codex
Tchacos (2007). It contains four writings, of which the Gospel of Judas is the
most interesting.
Gnostic myths show a bewildering variety and complexity, but their
message is simple. The human mind or rational soul originally belonged to
a divine world of light, but it got entangled in the evil world of matter and
became ignorant of its divine origin. Salvation is only possible through gnosis,
that is, knowledge of one’s origin, present situation, and destination, which is
mediated by one or more divine revealers. Gnosis, therefore, is knowledge of
God and self-knowledge in one. The True Testimony formulates what can be
seen as a definition of gnosis: “When a person comes to know himself and
God, who is over the truth, that person will be saved and crowned with the
unfading crown” (NHC IX, 44, 30–45, 6). Clement of Alexandria quotes
gnostics who said that gnosis means to know “Who we were, what we have
become. Where we were, into what place we have been thrown. To what
15
On the Coptic gnostic codices found before 1945, see M. Tardieu and J.-D. Dubois,
Introduction à la littérature gnostique, I (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986), 63–138.
16
David M. Scholer, Nag Hammadi Bibliography 1948–1969 (Leiden: Brill, 1971); Scholer, Nag
Hammadi Bibliography 1970–1994 (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Scholer, Nag Hammadi Bibliography
1995–2006 (Leiden: Brill, 2009).
place we are hastening, from what we have been saved. What is birth, what
rebirth” (excerpts from Theodotus, 78, 2). And in the Book of Thomas, the
Savior Jesus says that he who does not know himself knows nothing, “but
[he] who knows himself has also acquired knowledge about the depth of the
All” (NHC II, 138, 16–18).
The origin and early development of the gnostic myths are matters of
dispute, but the literary evidence leaves no doubt that they already existed
around the middle of the second century in all their variegation. The anti-
gnostic writers complain that every gnostic teacher, even if he belonged to a
specific school, taught his own brand of gnostic religion, a fact that is
confirmed by the authentic texts. It is telling that not a single one of the
Nag Hammadi writings completely fits the doctrines and schools that are
described by the Church Fathers. Nevertheless, the great myths show a
common pattern that recurs, or is presupposed, in many texts: the unknow-
able, completely transcendent God unfolds into a great number of personi-
fied divine entities, called “aeons,” which together constitute the divine
“Fullness” (Plerōma).
The highest divine beings are described as Father, Mother, and Son (in the
Apocryphon of John and many other texts)17 or as Man and Son of Man (e.g.,
Monoimos in Hippolytus, Refutatio VIII, 12–15) to which sometimes is
added the Son of the Son of Man (Eugnostus: NHC III, 3; IV, 1) or the
female Spirit (Ophites in Irenaeus, Against Heresies I, 30, 1).18 Valentinus
(ca. 140) and his followers taught that the highest divine principle, character-
ized as Depth and Silence, developed into a Plerōma of thirty aeons that are
arranged into four, five, and six pairs.19 Much more complex pleromatic
systems were propagated by some gnostics who were active in the school of
Plotinus around 250 CE. According to Porphyry, they appealed to such
gnostic works as Zostrianos and Allogenes, which have been rediscovered in
the Nag Hammadi Library (NHC VIII, 1; XI, 3). Plotinus sharply criticized
them, just because they introduced such a great number of levels of being,
whereas he only accepted three (the One, Mind, and Soul), and also because
of their negative view of the material world (Enneads II, 9). His pupil Amesius
17
Alastair H. B. Logan, Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy: A Study in the History of Gnosticism
(Edinburg: T&T Clark, 1996); Karen L. King, The Secret Revelation of John (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2006).
18
Hans-Martin Schenke, Der Gott “Mensch” in der Gnosis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1962); Jens Holzhausen, Der “Mythos vom Menschen” im hellenistischen Ägypten.
Eine Studie zum “Poimandres” (CH I), zu Valentin und dem gnostischen Mythos (Bodenheim:
Athenäum-Hain-Hanstein, 1994).
19
Einar Thomassen, The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the “Valentinians” (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
even wrote forty books against Zostrianos, which, unfortunately, have all
been lost.20
The observation that some elements of the gnostic myth as told in the
Apocryphon of John and the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit (NHC III, 2;
IV, 2) recur in a number of other gnostic works has led to one of the most
influential theories in modern gnostic scholarship: the thesis that these works
testify to the existence of a specific gnostic group, called “Sethians,” who
adhered to a fixed set of doctrines called “Sethianism.” The group’s name
derives from the figure of Seth, who in only some of these works plays a role
of importance.21 That certain elements of the basic gnostic myth recur in a
number of texts is a correct observation, but that does not necessarily point to
the existence of Sethianism as a specific gnostic current in Late Antiquity,
comparable to that of Valentinianism. According to another, more recent
theory, the Sethian texts were in fact the sacred writings of a specific group of
gnostic Christians, called “the Gnostics.”22 It should be observed, however,
that in many of these writings the influence of typically Christian ideas is only
superficial or even completely absent.
The classic gnostic myth of the Apocryphon and that of the Valentinians
gave different accounts of the origin of evil and the creation of the material
world and human beings. But both agreed that it was Sophia (Wisdom), the
lowest aeon, who had triggered the course of events that eventually led to the
incarceration of the divine principle of man in the carnal body. She disturbed
the tranquility and peace of the Plerōma by a reckless act against the will of the
Father, which resulted in the birth of an abortion that she pushed outside
the divine realm. This imperfect being became the Demiurge, the creator of
the material world, who in the gnostic texts is often identified with the God
of the Old Testament. It was this distinction between the unknown, trans-
cendent God, revealed by the Savior, and the lower, imperfect, or even evil
biblical creator that roused the greatest resistance from the non-gnostic
Christians.
Through the intermediary of the Demiurge, who unconsciously blew
something of his mother’s spirit into their bodies (Genesis 2, 7), human beings
possess a divine spark. However, they are kept in ignorance through the
20
Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 16.
21
Hans-Martin Schenke, “The Phenomenon and Significance of Gnostic Sethianism,” in The
Rediscovery of Gnosticism, II: Sethian Gnosticism, ed. Bentley Layton (Leiden: Brill, 1981),
588–616; John D. Turner, Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition (Quebec and Louvain:
Les Presses de l’Université Laval/Éditions Peeters, 2001).
22
Alastair H. B. Logan, The Gnostics. Identifying an Early Christian Cult (London and New
York: T&T Clark, 2006); David Brakke, The Gnostics. Myth, Ritual and Diversity in Early
Christianity (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2010).
bonds of matter and the passions of the body. Nevertheless, from the begin-
ning the pleromatic world launched a counterattack by sending one or more
(often female) envoys to lift the veil of ignorance from those who were able
to accept the salvific gnosis (already in Genesis 3, 1–7). In Christian gnostic
texts, Jesus Christ is the revealer and Savior par excellence. The redemption
delivered by the gnostic Christ is not the remission of sin but the deliverance
from ignorance. For that reason and also because of their low esteem of the
body, the gnostics ascribed almost no salvific meaning to the suffering, death,
and resurrection of Jesus.23 The Valentinians developed a rather complex
doctrine of salvation, which distinguished between three Christs who
imparted the salvific gnosis to three realms: the pneumatic Christ to the
Plerōma, the Savior Jesus to the fallen Sophia in the psychic realm, and Jesus
Christ to the spiritual seeds that had been sown in the world of matter. They
were convinced that the pneumatics, who contained this spiritual seed,
would be united after death with their heavenly counterparts, their “angels”
in the divine Plerōma.
However, there were also gnostic systems in which Christ was not men-
tioned at all. In the Paraphrasis of Seëm (NHC VII, 1), it is a certain Dedekeas
who fills the role of the Savior. In the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit
(NHC III, 2; IV, 2), the real Savior is Seth, who after several earlier incarna-
tions was clothed with “the living Jesus” (NHC III, 64, 2; IV, 75, 16–7). The
gnostic ideas about salvation had a strong impact on early Christianity, but
the gnostic current was not an exclusively Christian phenomenon, let alone a
typically Christian heresy. There were gnostic myths outside the sphere of
Christian influence, for instance, in Mandaeism.24 Moreover, gnostic ideas
have always spontaneously emerged in Western culture, independent of early
Christian Gnosticism.
23
Van den Broek, Gnostic Religion in Antiquity, 198–205.
24
Kurt Rudolph, “Mandaeans,” in Hanegraaff, Dictionary of Gnosis, 751–756.
6
EARLY JEWISH MYSTICISM
Daphna Arbel
1 Introduction
In recent decades, attention has increasingly been paid to the shifting and
multifaceted meanings of the “mystical” in a variety of cultural, historical,
and linguistic contexts and discourses. As a result, scholars largely agree that
the term “mysticism” can neither be uncritically imposed on ancient texts
nor commonly utilized to connote a single, universal, timeless
phenomenon.1 With this in mind, this essay adopts a contextualized per-
spective and aims to elucidate the manner in which distinct notions,
embedded in early Jewish sources, can be categorized as “mystical.”2 I discuss
this topic with a focus on one heuristic model: the Merkavah mysticism of
the Hekhalot literature.
2 Merkavah Mysticism of the Hekhalot Literature

Merkavah mysticism developed out of exegesis of, speculations on, and
expansion of the vision of God’s celestial chariot-throne (the Merkavah/
‫ )מרכבה‬in Ezekiel 1, 10, as well as Daniel 7. Variants are found in diverse early
Jewish sources, such as Qumranic texts, earlier apocalyptic and gnostic
sources, the Talmud, and other rabbinic writings. The Hekhalot corpus
includes its first developed expression. This literature derives its name from
the Hebrew word for palaces or temples (Hekhalot/‫)היכלות‬. This name
corresponds with one of its key themes: the ascent of humans through divine
celestial palaces or temples, and their visions of God and his chariot-throne.
1
For a recent discussion, see Peter Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2009), 1–33.
2
Here, “early Judaism” refers broadly to the Second Temple and Talmudic periods to Late
Antiquity.
59
60 Daphna Arbel
The Hekhalot corpus is distinctively multifaceted, composed of several

pseudepigraphic compositions written primarily in Hebrew and Aramaic,
and attributed to early rabbis of the second century CE. The precise historical
date, provenance, social context, textual boundaries, and transmission of
these compositions are ambiguous. The literature contains traditions from
the Second Temple period and has strong connections with Qumranic,
apocalyptic, rabbinic, and gnostic sources. However, it evolved through a
long process of writing, editing, and redacting and is commonly assumed to
have been formed in Babylonia and Palestine between the fourth and ninth
centuries CE, perhaps even later. Despite its collective title, the Hekhalot
literature is fluid and diverse, including a variety of texts, themes, practices,
topics, and literary genres.3
3 A Paradigmatic Model
For a number of interrelated reasons, this remarkable cluster of writings
serves as a highly suitable paradigm for the present investigation of early
Jewish mysticism. Most scholars regard the Hekhalot corpus of Late
Antiquity as embodying the first full-fledged and unchallenged manifestation
of Merkavah mysticism (recognized as the first mystical movement within
early Judaism).4 Further, the Hekhalot literature is not a homogeneous body
3
Hekhalot manuscripts from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries have been found in
medieval Europe. Additional fragments, from the ninth century, have been found in the
Cairo Geniza. Peter Schäfer and his team published several manuscripts in the Synopse zur
Hekhalot-Literatur (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1981) and in the Geniza-Fragmente zur
Hekhalot-Literatur (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984), which form the primary textual basis
for current scholarship. On the Hekhalot literature and its scholarship, see Ra’anan S.
Boustan, “The Study of Heikhalot Literature – Between Religious Experience and Textual
Artifact,” Currents in Biblical Research 6 (2007), 135–167.
4
On notions associated with mysticism in the Hekhalot literature, see the following studies,
which have been consulted throughout this article: Philip S. Alexander, Mystical Texts: Songs
of the Sabbath Sacrifice and Related Manuscripts (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 122–125; Vita
Daphna Arbel, Beholders of Divine Secrets: Mysticism and Myth in the Hekhalot and Merkavah
Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Ra’anan S. Boustan, From
Martyr to Mystic: Rabbinic Martyrology and the Making of Merkavah Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2005); James R. Davila, Descenders to the Chariot: The People Behind the Hekhalot
Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Joseph Dan, The Ancient Jewish Mysticism (Tel Aviv: MOD
Books, 1993); April D. DeConick, “What Is Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism?” in
Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, ed. April D. DeConick (Atlanta:
Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 1–24; Rachel Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence
of Jewish Mysticism (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004); Ithamar
Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 1980); David J. Halperin,
The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
1988); Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (New York:
E a rl y Je wi sh M y sti cis m 61
of writings. Rather, it contains a wide array of overlapping traditions and

outlooks. These probably emerged in various circles throughout several
historical phases of early Jewish history and were incorporated into its literary
framework. Of course, Merkavah mysticism of the Hekhalot literature
certainly does not represent all early Jewish mystical traditions. However, it
incorporates (and develops) models of thought, terms, themes, practices, and
reported experiences that emerged in other contexts in early Judaism, both
prior and contemporaneous. Among these are select apocalypses and
Qumranic sources that are particularly important for this discussion.
4 Mysticism in the Hekhalot Corpus

Scholars have often adopted specific preconceived definitions of mysticism
and thus included or excluded certain material from the category of the
“mystical.” Here, I embrace the wide-ranging and uncontroversial under-
standing of mysticism as broadly relating to attempts at bridging the gap
between human beings and God. Rather than categorizing the Hekhalot
material according to a strict, predetermined taxonomy of mysticism, it is
necessary to approach the Hekhalot corpus without such preconceptions.
Consideration of the parallel ways in which diverse Hekhalot descriptions
and claims – both major and minor – convey this notion of overcoming the
gap between the human and the divine provides a wider and more flexible
view of the ancient tradition itself.
Oxford University Press, 1993), 29–46; Rebecca M. Lesses, Ritual Practices to Gain Power:
Angels, Incantations, and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism (Harrisburg: Trinity Press
International, 1998); Christopher Morray-Jones, A Transparent Illusion: The Dangerous
Vision of Water in Hekhalot Mysticism (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Andrei A. Orlov, The Enoch-
Metatron Tradition (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005); Christopher Rowland and Christopher
Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament (Leiden: Brill,
2009), 219–339; Peter Schäfer, The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Early
Jewish Mysticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); Schäfer, The Origins of
Jewish Mysticism (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009) 243–350; Gershom Scholem, Major Trends
in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken 1941; reprint, 1974), 40–79; Scholem, Jewish
Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York: Jewish Theological
Seminary, 1960; reprint 1965); Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports
about Christianity and Gnosticism (Leiden: Brill, 1977), 365–382; Segal, “Describing
Experience” in With Letters of Light: Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Early Jewish
Apocalypticism, Magic, and Mysticism in Honor of Rachel Elior, ed. Daphna V. Arbel and
Andrei Orlov (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 365–382; Michael D. Swartz, Scholastic Magic:
Ritual and Revelation in Early Jewish Mysticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish
Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 74–124; Wolfson, “Mysticism and
the Poetic-Liturgical Compositions from Qumran: A Response to Bilhah Nitzan,” Jewish
Quarterly Review 85 (1994), 185–202.
62 Daphna Arbel
At the outset, several issues must be acknowledged. First, the Hekhalot

literature does not convey the bridging of the human and the divine in a
methodical, comprehensible fashion. Rather, this idea is described through a
layered tapestry of goals, spiritual stances, practices, and reported experi-
ences. Further, these claims are presented in both theoretical or exegetical
and experimental or practical terms, in varying degrees of detail.
Accordingly, several descriptions refer to what may be actual ritual practices
aimed at cultivating visions and experiences. Other segments include theo-
retical stances and theosophical speculations conveyed through exegesis,
narratives, and conventional formulas. Collectively, these interrelated claims
articulate principles and beliefs characteristic of early Jewish mysticism.
Finally, the Hekhalot literature often voices its mystical outlook in its
language, imagery, and models of expression by employing and underscoring
the import of several concepts: the ascent to heaven, ritual practice, visions of
God and the Merkavah, participation in angelic liturgy, transformation into
angelic form, attainment of divine secrets, and the performance of temple
rituals in the celestial sanctuaries. While each notion is thematically and
conceptually distinct, they all relate to the principal mystical idea of bridging
the gap between humans and God.
a The Ascent to Heaven

In principle, the Hekhalot literature conveys the notion of crossing the
boundary between the human and divine not by employing the model of
unio mystica (union of the human soul with the divine), which scholars often
treat as the essential characteristic of mysticism, but through the idea of
human ascension to heaven. Accordingly, Hekhalot segments include
diverse accounts of journeys to heaven, aimed at partaking in the celestial
realm of God’s chariot-throne, the Merkavah. This type of ascent (para-
doxically, often referred to as “descent”) involves a “round trip” from earth
to heaven and back during the person’s lifetime.
Several Hekhalot segments present the ascent as an accepted practice
resulting from human initiatives and deeds. Accordingly, a number of
descriptions portray the ascent as a viable option for all people. Other
Hekhalot segments further emphasize the ascent’s effortless and uncompli-
cated nature (e.g., §199: “It is like having a ladder in one’s house and being
able to go up and down at will”). Others present the ascent as the ultimate
goal not only of the adepts, the “descenders to the chariot,” but also of God
(e.g., §218: “Tutrusiai, the Lord of Israel, longs and keeps watch, when will he
descend, [the adept] who descends to the Merkavah?”). This material stands
E a rl y Je wi sh M y sticis m 63
in sharp contrast both to standard biblical and rabbinical traditions – which

typically disapprove of human attempts to cross such boundaries – and to
apocalyptic traditions, which characteristically envision human ascension as
initiated by God.
On the other hand, certain segments limit the ascent to select individuals
who must prove their abilities and qualifications – for example, through
knowledge of magical aids (seals, names), religious knowledge, dedication,
ethical and moral behavior, and sometimes distinguished familial lineage. For
example, §199: “This may be done by anyone who is pure of idolatry, sexual
offences, bloodshed, slander, vain oaths, profanation of the Name, imperti-
nence and unjustified enmity, and who keeps every positive and negative
commandment.” Moreover, several segments discourage unqualified adepts
from attempting the ascent, emphasizing the terrifying dangers and devastat-
ing obstacles awaiting them on the journey to celestial palaces. For example,
§213: “At the entrance to the seventh palace stand and rage all heroes, lordly,
powerful and hard, frightening and terrible.”
Most Hekhalot segments do not assume a clear separation between body
and soul, and thus they portray the ascents as corporeal experiences taking
place in celestial sites. Accordingly, these segments represent adepts as asking
for directions in geographical locations and estimating distances in the
celestial landscape (e.g., §546: “How many bridges [are there]? How many
rivers of fire? How many rivers of hail?”). In contrast, some passages intro-
duce the ascent as an inner, mental experience that capable adepts undergo
on earth while focusing their minds upon heaven. Further, they present the
mental and concrete journeys as inherently connected (e.g., §544: “Who is
able to contemplate the seven palaces, and to ascend, and behold the heaven
of heavens?”). Both models, however, reveal a fundamental view that vali-
dates human attempts to reach God and partake in his innermost sacred
realm.
b Ritual Practice
The ascent to heaven – and the experiences and revelations it entails – is often
associated with ritual practices. These are frequently introduced as prepara-
tory methods aimed at inducing experiences that, in turn, lead humans to
transcend their limits and attain divine visions and revelations. Because the
only data available to us are Hekhalot texts in their present redacted form, it is
impossible to either confirm the real effect of certain practices or validate the
authentic nature of the experiences and revelations that adepts are said to
have cultivated. Nonetheless, in this context it is impossible to disconnect an
64 Daphna Arbel
experience from its literal context, as the Hekhalot descriptions detail a wide
array of ritual practices explicitly introduced as technical methods for attain-
ing divine visions and revelations.
These practices involve techniques ranging from the magical to the con-
templative. In fact, several segments seem to function as manuals, providing
instructions and practices that may lead to revelatory experiences – for
example, adopting specific postures, following fasts and special diets, repeat-
ing hymns, uttering prayers and incantations, pronouncing divine names,
reiterating sounds and letters, actively visualizing, and employing “magical”
formulas, seals, and incantations.
Needless to say, terms such as “trance” and “altered states of con-
sciousness,” which might explain, in modern terms, the impact of ritual
practices, are never mentioned. Nonetheless, these concepts seem to be
indirectly recognized, particularly in descriptions underscoring the effect
of specific practices on human consciousness and the capacity to behold
divine visions, experience the celestial realm, and acquire revelations. For
example, §591: “Everyone who prays this prayer in all his power catches
sight of the splendor of the Presence.” And §81: “What is the meaning of
the hymns that one must chant when he desires to gaze into the vision of
the Merkavah?”
c Visions of God and the Merkavah

One of the main goals of the ascent is attaining visions of God in all his
splendor and beauty, as well as visions of his celestial entourage and chariot-
throne. This goal is often expressed in terms such as “ascend to heaven and
behold the king in his palace,” “gaze upon the vision of the Merkavah,”
“look at the Shekhinah,” “view a glimpse of the chariot,” “catch sight of the
Mighty One,” and “behold the King in His beauty.”
Most accounts do not provide many details about what adepts actually see
when they encounter the image of God and his Merkavah. Nonetheless, in
various segments the act of beholding is perceived as the culminating stage of
the journey toward the divine. This goal is presented theoretically through
general descriptions but is also grounded in personal experience and pre-
sented in first-person statements of individual adepts (e.g., §556: “I saw the
King of the Kings sitting on a high and exalted throne.”). The import of the
vision is particularly accentuated in several segments in which adepts are
required to report what they saw above to people on earth (e.g., §169:
“Heavenly decree [shall befall] you, you who descend to the Merkavah, if
you do not . . . testify what you have seen.”).
d Participation in Angelic Liturgy

The Hekhalot literature envisions another way of narrowing the gulf
between the human and the divine: joining the angels in their performance
of the celestial liturgy and worship. Accordingly, several descriptions portray
humans crossing the boundaries of space and time, becoming part of the
heavenly realm, and participating in the angelic choir that sings hymns and
utters praise before God in his heavenly palace.
Some segments depict adepts as standing before the throne of God and
observing or joining the angelic liturgy – for example, §557: “Happy is the
man who stands in all his power and brings songs before the cherubim of
Adonai God of Israel . . . and sees all things that they do before the throne of
glory.” Other segments imagine the heavenly and earthly liturgical worship
as mirroring each other and further portray the worshipers in their earthly
houses of prayer partaking in the celestial temple rituals and praising God in
unison with the ministering angels (e.g., §179: “When they [the angels] hear
the sound of hymns and praises which Israel speaks from below, they begin
from above.”).
e Angelification
Several segments suggest that select individuals employing specific practices
can ascend to heaven, partake in the celestial reality, and also be transformed
into angelic or divine beings. This certainly constitutes a dramatic vision of
closing the divide between human and divine. In these segments, the celestial
journey culminates in the enthronement of adepts either on the chariot-
throne itself or on a throne alongside the throne of glory. This enthronement
alters the being of the adepts and changes them into angels or, alternatively,
into divine beings. In turn, this angelification or deification enables them to
behold divine visions normally withheld from both angelic and human
beings.
A primary example of this metamorphosis is in the account of Enoch ben
Yared (originally mentioned in Genesis 5:24), who was transformed into the
supreme angel Metatron. In heaven, Enoch is said to have received a throne
“like the throne of glory,” as well as other divine attributes. He is even
endowed with God’s holy name, being entitled “the lesser YHVH.” The
description does not employ a model of unio mystica. Yet, the distance
between human and God is minimal, since Enoch is depicted as a deified
figure who then becomes godlike: “All mysteries of the world and all
the orders of nature stand revealed before me as they stand revealed before
the Creator” (§14). In several other texts, adepts are said to be enthroned in
66 Daphna Arbel
the seventh palace before God. This enthronement could imply angelifica-
tion, consequently resulting in visions of God and his chariot.
f Revelations
Several segments further propose that the gap between human and divine can
be bridged by gaining esoteric knowledge of divine origin. This knowledge,
normally hidden or inaccessible, is said to encompass diverse matters, such as
astronomical, cosmological, and calendrical issues, matters related to primor-
dial and eschatological times, the mysteries of the Torah, the names of God,
and the secrets of wisdom, as well as information pertaining to God’s ever-
lasting accessibility and love for Israel.
Accordingly, in several descriptions, divine secrets concern, for example,
the “letters by which the heaven and earth were created,” “the curtain of the
Omnipresent One on which are printed all the generations of the world, and
all their deeds whether done or to be done,” or “all the mysteries of wisdom,
all the depths of the perfect Torah, and all the thoughts of human hearts”
(e.g., §§ 14, 16, 59–68). In other descriptions, the attained divine mysteries
include knowing the dimensions and, especially, the appropriate names of
the limbs of God’s gigantic body and, consequently, the magical use of these
names – for example, §948: “I will tell you how great is the measure of the
body of the Holy One . . . the height of his soles is three thousand myriad
parsangs: the name of his right sole is PrmsyyhAtyarkny and the name of the left
is Agtmz.” Still other segments present the revealed knowledge as pertaining
to God’s continuous presence in heaven and his care for Israel. These
segments further emphasize the responsibility of those who made the celestial
journey to disclose this knowledge to “God’s children” – the earthly com-
munity – for example, §163: “I have no joy in the entire world that I created
except at the hour in which your eyes are raised to my eyes and my eyes are
raised to your eyes.”
g Temple and Priestly Rituals Above

Several segments also envision a peculiar link between the celestial and
earthly realms, through transforming the ritual world of the destroyed
earthly temple in Jerusalem – the focus of holiness and sanctity – into the
heavenly sanctuaries. Accordingly, these passages describe the heavenly
temple with architectural details of the earthly temple, presenting the
various heavens (which adepts cross) as the hekhalot, the sanctuaries
therein, and the highest heaven, wherein God resides, as the Holy of
Holies.
Re-creating the priestly ritual of the destroyed or defiled Jerusalem tem-

ple, several passages further link the heavenly ritual of the angels with the
earthly rituals of the priests. These segments align the earthly temple and its
priests with the heavenly temple and its angels and describe a hierarchical
group of celestial priests or angels as conducting temple worship in heaven:
performing temple liturgies, uttering the Kedusha, presenting offerings to
God, reciting thanksgivings and glorifications, and pronouncing the ineffable
name of God, just as the high priest does on the day of atonement. Moreover,
some descriptions present qualified adepts as partaking in these rituals them-
selves (e.g., §151: “Rabbi Ishmael said: Once I was offering a burnt-offering
upon the altar, and I saw Akhatriel YH YHWH of Hosts.”).
5 Conclusion: Multiple Expressions of “Mysticism”

in Early Judaism
Unlike more dogmatic and orthodox sources, in which views were typically
formulated to express a coherent message of a single authoritative group,
different writers and redactors shaped the Hekhalot literature within separate
and changing sociohistorical contexts in early Judaism. Consequently, the
interest in moving beyond human restrictions toward the divine was con-
ceptualized through different, but parallel methods: ascending to heaven,
practicing rituals that lead to experiences and revelations, attaining visions of
God and the Merkavah, participating in the celestial angelic liturgy, trans-
formation resulting in angelification and visions, and reconstructing temple
rituals in the heavens.
It would be misleading to claim that the same mentality and objectives that
lie behind all the Hekhalot layers also motivate other traditions in the larger
landscape of early Judaism. Yet, several of the Hekhalot eclectic notions are
not altogether unique. Rather, they cohere and resonate with a number of
views embedded in other Jewish traditions, both earlier and contempora-
neous. Distinct traditions found in Qumranic and apocalyptic sources, such
as the ascent apocalypses (e.g., Similitudes of Enoch, the Book of the Watchers,
the Testament of Levi, 2 Enoch, the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, the Apocalypse of
Abraham, the Ascension of Isaiah, and 3 Baruch), as well as the Self Glorification
Hymn, the Thanksgiving Scroll (the Hodayot), and the Songs of the Sabbath
Sacrifice from Qumran are particularly relevant.5 Without claiming direct
5
There are close relationships between the Hekhalot literature and other early Jewish sources,
such as rabbinic traditions and the philosophical writings of Philo from Alexandria. Specific
apocalypses and Qumranic texts, however, particularly share several mystical characteristics.
See Alexander, Mystical Texts; James R. Davila, “The Ancient Jewish Apocalypses and the
68 Daphna Arbel
links or an evolutionary continuity between Hekhalot mysticism and these

sources, or harmonizing their idiosyncratic and sometimes ambiguous infor-
mation, one can see verbal, thematic, and conceptual affinities between
them. This is particularly noticeable in descriptions treating the idea of
closing the gap between the human and the divine, and in how this idea is
expressed, either implicitly or explicitly.
There is no doubt that distinct historical-cultural circles in early Judaism, as
well as the literature they produced, reveal major ideological or theological
differences as well as diverse attitudes, beliefs, and presuppositions. Yet, they
all demonstrate a persistent interest in the attempt to transcend human
boundaries and experience God during this lifetime. It is just in this broad
sense that the ambiguous modern term “mysticism,” can be effectively and
critically employed to characterize these dimensions of early Jewish religious
life and experience.
None of these early Jewish writings puts across mystical ideas in an orderly
and comprehensive manner. Likewise, these writings do not comprise a
unified mystical tradition. On the contrary, different sources throughout
several historical phases in early Judaism present diverse models that can be
characterized as mystical. These include undertaking the extraordinary jour-
neys and undergoing the remarkable transformations and visions described
earlier. While these paradigms have not evolved into a clear synthesis, they
are all vital components of early Jewish mysticism. Beyond this, they are an
expression of the perennial ideal of bridging the gap between the human and
the divine.
Hekhalot Literature,” in Paradise Now, 105–125; Davila, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and
Merkavah Mysticism,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls in Their Historical Context, ed. Timothy H.
Lim, Larry W. Hurtado, A. Graeme Auld, and Alison Jack (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000),
249–264; Elior, The Three Temples; Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, All the Glory of Adam:
Liturgical Anthropology in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Gruenwald, Apocalyptic and
Merkavah Mysticism; Martha Himmelfarb, “Heavenly Ascent and the Relationship of the
Apocalypses and the Hekhalot Literature,” Hebrew Union College Annual 59 (1988), 73–100;
Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven; Carol Newsom, “Merkavah Exegesis in the Qumran Sabbath
Shirot,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (1987), 11–30; Orlov, The Enoch-Metatron Tradition;
Schäfer, The Origins of Jewish Mysticism, 53–153, 243–355; Rowland and Morray-Jones, The
Mystery of God, 307–342; Michael D. Swartz, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and Later Jewish Magic
and Mysticism,” Dead Sea Discoveries 8 (2001), 182–193.
7
EARLY CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM
Ap r i l D. D e C o n i c k
1 Introduction
Early Christian mysticism customarily has been understood as a relatively late
Platonic philosophical product of patristic theology, marked particularly by
Denys the Areopagite (also known as Pseudo-Dionysius, he is thought to
have written ca. 500 CE). Denys taught the apophatic way, in which the soul
escapes the world to unite with the Unknowable God. The first generations
of Christians and their foundational narratives are often casually brushed aside
as “background” to a mysticism arising later from Christianity’s fusion with
Neoplatonism.
Although it is true that a particular strand of Christianity fused with
Neoplatonism produced the type of mysticism taught and practiced by
Denys, it is also true that long before Denys lived, there was already a rich
tradition of Christian mysticism, which grew out of even older Jewish
traditions.1 When historians of Christianity talk about mysticism, they
usually define it narrowly in terms of the medieval Christian monastic
tradition, in which the devotee, through spiritual practices, gradually purges
darkness from the soul, experiences a spiritual death, and ascends to union
with a God described as “love.” Yet comparativists, studying mysticism
across religions, have a less culturally restrictive definition. For example,
they define mysticism as the direct experience of Ultimate Reality. I suggest
that we set aside the monastic definition of mysticism and examine, as
comparativists might, those claims to direct premortem experiences of God
found in the foundational Christian sources. We will find that this approach
1
For a treatment of the major characteristics of early Jewish and Christian mysticism, see April
DeConick, “What Is Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism?” in Paradise Now: Essays on Early
Jewish and Christian Mysticism, ed. April D. DeConick (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature,
2006), 1–24.
69
70 April D. Deconick
allows the texts themselves to define the phenomenon of early Christian

mysticism.
2 Apocalyptic Experiences
To describe their immediate, premortem experiences of God, the early
Christians did not use the word “mysticism,” which derives from the
Greek word myeô, “to be initiated.” Although they do sometimes speak of
the revelation of “mysteries” (mysteria), the first Christians call their direct
immediate experiences of God “apocalypses” (apocalypseis) or “revelations.”
The most famous examples are the visions of the heavenly realm and the
descriptions of eschatological events given to John of Patmos. These are
described as “the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Rev 1:1). The Book of
Revelation mimics the form of other contemporary Jewish apocalypses, in
which the otherworldly journeys of seers are described, focusing on the
premortem journey or vision, and the revelation of secret knowledge of
world events and cosmic endings.
Among the early Christians, the claim to apocalyptic experience reaches
far beyond the production of a “new” Jewish apocalypse such as Revelation.
In Galatians, Paul writes that his gospel was not received from another
person, but “through a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal 1:11–12). He bases
the authority of his apostleship and mission on this experiential claim. In
another letter, Paul describes a typical Jewish mystical ascent in which “a man
in Christ fourteen years ago” ascended to the third heaven where Paradise is
located and heard secrets that cannot be told. Paul introduces the story as an
example of the ongoing “visions and revelations of the Lord,” which he
boasts of for himself (2 Cor 12:1–4, 7).
Ephesians mentions the revelation of Christ the Power, the fullness of God
beyond measure – a mystery that had been hidden until it was revealed to the
Apostles and prophets via the Spirit. This revelation occurs between the
believer and God and involves the inner workings of the Spirit that effect
the indwelling of Christ and his love. It is a profound mystery because it
means that Christ and his church are wedded lovers. This testimony from
Ephesians aligns with Paul’s claim that his revelatory experience was one he
thought all Christians would ultimately share. Paul sees this shared revelation
as immediate and ongoing, as well as prescient and eschatological. These are
constant gifts of the Spirit given to the community, and Paul understands
himself to be a servant of Christ and a steward of the mysteries of God.
In the Synoptics, the mystery of God’s kingdom is given only to the
believer, while the unbeliever sees without perceiving and hears without
E a r ly C h r i st ia n My s ti ci sm 71
understanding. The idea that the mystery is “revealed” to Christians and kept
from unbelievers appears to have been a very old and prominent teaching
known also to Paul. Only the believer is able to behold the Glory of the Lord
face-to-face and gradually be transformed into that Glory, while the unbelie-
ver stares absently at a veil concealing its splendor. This transformation is a
mystery that will be completed at the eschatological moment when death is
swallowed up in victory upon Jesus’s return. Thus, in the Pauline traditions,
the eschatological return of Jesus was framed as the last apocalypse, when
Jesus would be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels. This teaching,
like the revelation of what is hidden to believers, coheres with the words of
Jesus that on the day when the Son of Man is revealed, God’s fiery judgment
will rain down from the heavens. His revelation in the other Synoptic
narratives is described as a vision of the Son of Man coming on the clouds
of heaven in power and glory. A vision of the coming Kingdom of God is also
anticipated.
In 1 Peter, the experience of Jesus Christ takes a backseat to the eschato-
logical revelation. Under the influence of the Holy Spirit the church leaders
already had taught believers “the things that angels long to have a glance at,”
but it is only at the eschaton (the end of time) that believers will be able to
possess their immortal fate, when Jesus is revealed to them in the skies (1 Pet
1:3–13). These mystical experiences were understood by the early Christians
to guarantee the authority, legitimacy, and authenticity of the teachings of
their leaders, a point that the Pauline author of Colossians tries to sink at least
in terms of the visionary claims of his Christian-Jewish opponents. At the
same time, the Christian-Jewish traditions preserved in the Pseudo-
Clementine corpus, which understand Paul to be the Apostate, contain
polemics against Paul’s claims to visions and an authority based on them.
When we track early Christian testimonies about premortem experiences
of God, we discover that these experiences were thought to be effected via
the indwelling Spirit, and to be eschatological and visionary. They were
perceived to be an effect of the power of Christ, and to transmit the mystery
of immortal life.
3 The Appearances of Jesus

Jesus’s postmortem “appearances” are a common feature in the literature,
although even the vision of him before his death (as the Glory) is preserved in
the transfiguration stories and allusions to them. The Christians also pre-
served traditions of apostolic visions associated with Jesus’s call to the dis-
ciples, his prayer in Gethsemane, and his crucifixion. Paul transmits the
earliest tradition of postmortem visions and speaks of his own ecstatic

experiences as “visions and revelations of the Lord.” There are also a number
of secondary descriptions of Paul’s initial revelation that provide embellish-
ments Paul himself never mentions.2 The early Christian literature is filled
with similar claims to waking and dream visions of the postmortem Jesus.
The words of the postmortem Jesus delivered in visions serve several
functions. They give authority to the leaders of various Christian commu-
nities. They are used to correct opinions that some Christians did not like,
and to rebuke unwanted behaviors. They are also used to inculcate certain
beliefs that were proving a challenge for conversion or adherence.
Christological indoctrination seems to have been a priority. The words of
Jesus delivered in visions are also words of comfort, particularly relevant at a
time when the imminence of the eschaton and Jesus’s return were being
questioned. Jesus’s words also sometimes reveal mysteries to those perceived
worthy of them. In these cases, Jesus often delivers sectarian teachings as
postmortem sayings and mythological instruction.
4 Christocentric Mysticism
The main object of the mystical experiences of God reported by the early
Christians is the afterlife Jesus. When his appearance is described it is variable,
often even shifting in the same vision. In some cases, these descriptions of
Jesus are highly stylized, keying old scriptural passages to Jesus’s appearance in
order to make even more specific Christological statements. What is most
significant about the Christocentric nature of these visions of Jesus is that they
were understood to function as the visio dei. While God the Father remains
shrouded and invisible, the afterlife Jesus appears in his stead. This
Christology, in which Jesus’s appearance stands in for God’s, is particularly
developed in the Johannine material, and by second-century Christian
theologians fond of it.
This understanding of Jesus as the visible body of God on earth was built
upon two related scriptural complexes. One complex includes a number of
passages about the manifestation of YHWH, called his Glory (MT: kavod;
LXX: doxa), particularly Exodus 33:20 and Ezekiel 1:26–28. A number of
other passages associate the revelation of the Kavod with the future restora-
tion of Israel and God’s Judgment.3 The complex that emerges is one focused
2
See, for example, 2 Cor 12:1–4; 1 Cor 9:1. Acts 9:3–9; cp. Acts Thom 27: The Lord
“appears” to a group of initiates, but they only hear his voice because they were not able
to bear his light; Acts 22:6–11, 17–21; Acts 26:16.
3
Isa 42:8; 43:6–7; 48:10–11; 58:8; 59:19; 60:1–3; Ezek 28:22; 39:13, 21.
on the hiddenness of God. Direct viewing of God will bring death to

creatures who attempt to gaze upon him, so he manifests himself in a bodily
form that is luminous, even angelic. The Glory and the Lord himself were
indistinguishable, and God manifests as his Glory enthroned in heaven and
seen by the prophets. The Glory will be revealed when God’s Judgment
comes on the world. The second scriptural complex includes a number of
passages mentioning the Angel of YHWH as the humanlike divine being
who bears the Name YHWH.4 Like the Kavod, the YHWH angel was
understood to be interchangeable with God or operating with God’s
power and authority and was associated with Judgment.
With reference to these scriptural complexes, Jesus was associated with the
Glory. He was framed as the anthropomorphic manifestation of God and the
Angel of the Lord, who bore God’s Name and Image. It was in this way that
Jesus became understood as the visible image of the invisible God. Thus,
visions of Jesus were powerful mystical experiences of God himself, experi-
ences that were understood by the early Christians to be life altering.
5 (Apo)theosis
Although the visions of Jesus appear to have fulfilled a number of social and
religious functions, at the heart of the “revelation of Jesus Christ” was a
soteriological assertion. The mystical encounter with Jesus transfigured the
seer. Paul embraces the vision of Jesus Christ as life altering. He writes in 2
Corinthians 3:16–18 that at conversion a veil is lifted off the convert’s face.
With unveiled faces, Christians look into a mirror and see that their own
reflections are being transformed into God’s Image by degrees of glory. Paul
says (1 Cor 13:12) that this gradual transformation into the Glory is made
possible through the power of the Spirit of the Lord, who dwells in the
faithful.
Since Paul had identified God’s Spirit as the spirit of Jesus Christ, he
understood Christians as those who were possessed by his spirit and had
thus taken on “the same form as the Image of his Son” (Rom 8:29; cf. Gal
4:6). He addresses the struggling Galatians as a congregation he is suffering
with “until Christ is formed in you” (Gal 4:19). Paul claims that because
Christ dwells in him, he has been crucified with Christ. “It is no longer ‘I’
who live,” he says, “but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). He applies this
same rationale to other Christians, explaining that if the Spirit of Christ is in
them, their bodies may be dead due to sin, but their spirits are alive due to
4
Exod 23:20–21.
righteousness. Paul commands people to be transformed by remaking their

minds. This gradual, ongoing process of (apo)theosis via Christ will not be
completed until the eschaton, when the glorified body will replace the flesh
as the fulfillment of the promise of resurrection. The glorified body was the
body resurrected: the Image of the man from heaven, Jesus Christ.
The ongoing (apo)theosis that Paul experiences is possible not only because
the visionary is identified with the Glory at which the faithful peer in the
mirror. A possessive dynamic is also involved, in which the embodiment of
the spirit of Jesus results in identification with him. Since he is YHWH-
Manifest, the Glory of the Lord, and the Image of the invisible God, the
indwelling of his spirit has a powerful transformative effect on the possessed.
Its presence within the believer works to transfigure him or her into the same
Image of God. The believer is glorified by degree, until the glorification is
fully actualized at the eschaton, with the final transfiguration into a spiritual,
resurrected body.
Even though the Johannine tradition features different emphases, it is very
similar to the Pauline in understanding Jesus as God manifest on earth. While
Paul emphasizes that Jesus is the manifestation of God, the Johannine tradi-
tion emphasizes that Jesus is the manifestation of God. This difference in
emphasis has caused some confusion in scholarship and the advancement of
the flawed view that Paul is advocating “Christ mysticism,” centering on
Christ as distinct from God the Father, while John is focusing on “God
mysticism,” which makes no such distinction.5 This is not the case, however.
For Paul, the most significant part of the Kavod Christology is that Jesus is
where God has been manifested and localized. If we conform ourselves to
Jesus, we experience a similar (apo)theosis and localization of God. The
Johannine author wants to stress the second half of that equation: Jesus is
God revealed on earth. Because of this emphasis, he is quite explicit that during
the lifetime of Jesus, the historical vision of him was the vision of God (John
14:7). Even the angels in heaven must descend to earth to see the manifesta-
tion of God in the historical Jesus! According to John, as a visio dei the vision
of the historical Jesus was immortalizing.
But how does one go about “seeing” Jesus after he is dead when the author
of John is clear that flights to heaven are prohibited? Like Paul, the Johannine
author understands that the Spirit of Jesus plays a role in the Christian
community. Since Jesus is gone, the Spirit or Paraclete replaces the historical
Jesus as God’s manifestation on earth. At the end of the Johannine gospel,
5
See Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery
(Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Jesus blesses with eternal life those who have “not seen” but “believe” (John
20:29–31). Throughout the gospel, the concept of faith in Jesus is repeatedly
linked with the visionary experience, so that faith replaces vision and func-
tions as a form of transfiguration. This concept is developed in the Johannine
epistles, which make clear that Jesus’s appearance at the end of time will result
in our ultimate transfiguration.
The type of mysticism that is developed in the Johannine literature appears
to be directly responding to and critiquing another form of mysticism familiar
to the author of the Gospel of Thomas. Thomasine mysticism was that of an
“open heaven,” which encouraged the faithful to ascend to heaven and gaze
on the Living God and his Son before death in order to achieve immortality.
The Syrian Christians who wrote the Gospel of Thomas transmitted tradi-
tions about the ascent through the spheres, the enjoyment of Paradise,
visionary meetings with heavenly doppelgangers and the Living God and
his Son, and transfigurations into the primordial Man. In order to commune
with the Living God and his Son, these Syrian Christians combined this
open-heaven mysticism with a call to self-discipline that would control the
body of passions. The result was a practical theology that taught that the man
or woman in whom the Spirit dwells could conquer the body of passions, and
through righteous living re-create in its place the virtuous body of Adam
before the Fall. It was believed that one could ascend and reside in Paradise
and elicit visions of Jesus and God through a regime of self-discipline and
meditation. Eventually this would bring one face-to-face with his or her own
God-Image, a vision that restored the soul to its original glorious state. This
form of mysticism is a precursor to that which pervades later Eastern
Orthodoxy.
6 The Democratization of the Mystical

One of the most fascinating aspects of early Christian mysticism is the
“democratization” of the mystical via the establishment of sacraments that
make the presence of God available to all believers. Baptism, anointing, and
the Eucharist were all understood to effect the transformation of the soul, and
the integration of the Spirit and/or the Christ within it. As early as Paul, these
rituals were understood to reintegrate the person into the being of the divine.
Baptism washed one clean and made one righteous; it provided sanctification
through the indwelling of the Spirit and the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul develops this old baptismal theology by ruminating on the implica-
tions of being possessed by Christ’s Spirit, which he understands to be the
“transcendent power belonging to God.” If we have Christ’s Spirit in us and
have become part of his body, then we have experienced everything that he
experienced, including his death and resurrection. This is why Paul says
(Rom 6:3–5) that when the faithful are baptized into Jesus Christ, they are
baptized into his death, but they are also resurrected to walk a new life
glorified. Accordingly, we carry within our bodies “the death of Jesus” so
that “the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (2 Cor 4:7–12).
Paul has a similar interpretation of the Eucharist. He understands that drink-
ing the blood of Christ and eating his body effect union with him, on the
principle that the person who eats the meat of the sacrificed animal is united
with the god to whom that sacrifice was offered (1 Cor 10:14–22).
The Johannine author knows that baptism and Eucharist are powerful
mystical experiences that bring God’s presence to the faithful, in the
absence of the historical Jesus. For this community, entrance into the
Kingdom of God is dependent on “water and spirit” that effect a personal
rebirth (John 3:5; 4:10–14). Jesus is the “bread of life” that has “come down
from heaven” (John 6:35, 41, 51).6 This bread is his “flesh,” which, when
consumed, provides the faithful with immortality (John 6:51). The same is
true of his blood. When Jesus’s flesh and blood have been consumed, he is
incorporated into the person. The text is clear, however, that believers are
not eating the flesh or drinking the blood of the historical Jesus, because
Jesus himself has ascended to heaven and his flesh has been transformed into
a glorified body. What they are eating is “flesh” transfigured and made
divine via the Spirit, which joins with it during the ceremony in the same
way that the Logos did at the incarnation. Because the Spirit is made
assimilable via Jesus’s divinized flesh and blood, the faithful who have
eaten it are mystically united with him. His spirit thus fuses with matter
and begins the process of its divinization. Eating Jesus results in the
immortalization or resurrection of the flesh of the faithful. In later tradi-
tions, including the Valentinian, this understanding of the Eucharist
persists.
Christians believed that these rituals were effective because they relied on
the power of the secret Name of God (YHWH) that had been given to Jesus,
a tradition that appears to be part of the foundational Christian movement as
early as Paul. The invocation of the Name effected forgiveness of sins,
healing, and salvation. Its efficacy was based on principles common to ancient
magic, in which the secret names of deities and angels were understood to
carry tremendous power.
6
John 6:35, 41, 51.
7 The Cosmic Drama Internalized

One aspect that cannot be overemphasized is the relationship between early
Christian mysticism and the drama of cosmic endings that Christian Jews
believed would play out in their lifetime. This drama depended on the
Genesis story, which teaches that God created human beings in his Image,
so that they enjoyed living directly in his presence. Ancient readers specu-
lated about why exactly this was no longer the case, and what was needed to
restore it. Most Jews thought that Adam had made a bad choice that had
separated him from God, tarnishing his original state or causing him to lose it
entirely. This meant that piety was the key to restoration and salvation. If one
lived in obedience to God’s Law, upon death or the eschaton one would be
restored to the original created state and live again in Paradise. They taught
this via their doctrine of the resurrection of the dead in a glorious, angelic
body reflecting God’s Image.
Jews such as the Therapeutae and the Qumranites believed that the lost
Image could be restored, at least provisionally, before death; that the escha-
tological encounter with God and all the promises that went with it could be
had now, including the promise of the glorified body. This meant that the
rewards traditionally reserved for the Last Day became available to the
faithful in the present, including the revelation of God’s mysteries and
encounters with God resulting in the (apo)theosis of the devotee. Mysticism
and eschatology are not competing alternatives, however, but are instead
opposite ends of the same apocalyptic continuum. Eschatology views salva-
tion and transformation on a cosmic level as a future apocalyptic reality.
Mysticism views salvation and transformation on a personal level, as an
immediate apocalyptic reality. Eschatology is mysticism externalized and
postponed. Mysticism is eschatology actualized in the present and on a
personal, internalized level.
Mysticism and eschatology not only do not oppose each other, they work
in tandem. Rarely if ever in early Christian literature do we find one without
the other. The matter usually is one of focus or emphasis, with either the
eschatological or the mystical dominating. In the earliest Christian literature,
the two operate seamlessly as partners, beginning with the early memories of
Jesus. He is remembered as a prophet, anointed with the Holy Spirit. In this
way, he is recalled as the mystic par excellence, in whom God’s Spirit
dwelled at his baptism and who was transfigured into a luminous angel on
the mountain. A major focus of his teaching was the immediacy of God. He
was remembered as a teacher who spoke about the future but imminent end
of the world, when God’s Judgment would occur and his Kingdom would
come. Simultaneously, Jesus was remembered as a teacher who taught that

God’s Kingdom was already accessible to believers, that it had been sown like
a mustard seed in the earth. He had come to directly reveal to them what is
hidden: the mystery of the Kingdom and knowledge of the Father.
This dual message allowed early Christian mysticism to develop in fasci-
nating directions, especially when the immediacy of the eschaton was called
into question after long years of waiting for an event that became the great
Non-Event. When the Kingdom did not come, the early Christians reeval-
uated their traditions to explain the Non-Event and make their recollections
of Jesus’s apocalyptic words meaningful again. They tried several strategies,
and all of them were successful to some extent. Paul appears to have
emphasized that Christians were already experiencing a divine transforma-
tion as a result of the indwelling of Christ’s Spirit at their baptism.
Revelations of Jesus should be expected as part of their experience. The
transformation, however, would be fully actualized at the eschaton, when the
final revelation of Jesus in the clouds of heaven would occur. Paul’s solution
was to understand the restoration to God’s image as occurring in stages,
paving the way to the final moment of full actualization. In this way, both the
mystical and the eschatological dominate religious experience. The authors
of the Synoptic gospels assure their readers that they must prepare for the
eschaton regardless of when it will happen. The eschaton is understood to be
underway, although postponed. This meant that the cosmos was changing as
God or his Spirit broke into the world, making possible direct encounters
between him and the faithful. But the restoration of the Image was reserved
mainly for the day of the resurrection. This solution allowed the eschatolo-
gical to dominate while the mystical simmered in the background.
The early Christians also began to consider the implications of Jesus being
the first to be resurrected from the dead. Did this mean that the end of the
world had already started? Many thought so, which led them to believe that
they were living in the era of the End, and that all the promises of the
eschaton were theirs already. With the collapse of their eschatological
expectations, the early Christians relied more and more on the mystical
dimension of apocalypticism. Some, like the Syrian Christians represented
by the Gospel of Thomas, shifted their theology away from a future-
oriented, cosmic eschatology to a personal mysticism. This depended on a
premortem ascent and vision attained through a regime of self-discipline that
would transform their bodies, allowing them to enter Eden. The Johannine
Christians went so far as to collapse the future eschatological drama back into
the story of Jesus, so that the coming of the Son of Man, the Judgment, and
the establishment of God’s Kingdom already occurred during Jesus’s lifetime.
Although there is still an expectation of a future coming of Jesus, this takes a

backseat to the teaching that we have already been judged, saved, and had
God revealed to us through Jesus and his Spirit. In this case, the mystical
dimension trumped the eschatological and the cosmic drama was played out
as an internalized pageant.
8 The Mystery Unveiled

The mysticism that pervades the foundational early Christian movement is
Christocentric. It focuses on the “revelation of Jesus Christ,” which is
understood to be the disclosure of the mystery that has been hidden with
God for the ages: that Christ Jesus is the Power and Fullness of God. It was
taught that all Christians experienced this revelation in an ongoing manner
beginning with baptism, which brought an indwelling of the Spirit. The
experience continued in the life of the community and the sacraments, in
which Jesus and the Spirit were encountered regularly. Christ’s ultimate
revelation would be a vision coming at the eschaton.
The revelation of Jesus functioned as a visio dei, in which the vision of
Christ Jesus substitutes for the vision of God: Encounter with Jesus is
encounter with God. The faithful are transfigured into the same Image that
Christ is, which means that they too become God-manifest. Through this
transfiguration, the faithful (eventually) achieved the “lot” of immortality.
There is some speculation in the literature that the Father himself might be
revealed at the end of time, but in the present it is Jesus as God’s Image who is
met by the faithful, and it is he that they become.
II
The Middle Ages

M
8
SUFISM
William C. Chittick
1 Introduction
The Arabic word sūfı̄,̣ the original sense of which has been much discussed,
came into use in the second century AH/eighth century CE1 to designate a
certain sort of pious, usually ascetic, individual. Its derivative form “Sufism”
̣
(tasawwuf, literally, “to be a sūfı̄”)
̣ has been one of several terms used to
designate those tendencies of Islamic thought and practice that focus on the
inner domain of the human spirit rather than the outer domain of ritual
activity, social rules, and creedal dogmatics. Many Western scholars have
referred to Sufism as mysticism, esotericism, or spirituality, but there is no
consensus as to what exactly it, or any of these words, designates. The
difficulty of defining the word “Sufism” itself is partly the result of the
historical and geographical vagaries of the word’s usage and the frequent
controversies over its legitimacy – controversies in which the two sides
typically had radically different notions of what it denotes. Throughout
Islamic history, numerous definitions have been offered by authors claiming
to speak for it. These are rarely consistent with the notion that Sufism had a
clearly defined identity, especially when we take into account the definitions
offered by critics.2 In what follows, I use the word as a designation for the
focus on “interiority” that is found in the sources of the Islamic tradition and
in countless authors down through the centuries, whether or not the term
1
“AH” stands for the Latin anno Hegirae (“in the year of the Hijra”) and designates a year or
period in the Muslim calendar. Year one was 622 CE, in which Muhammad emigrated from
Mecca to Medina, known as the Hijra.
2
A century ago, the well-known Orientalist R. A. Nicholson published “A Historical Enquiry
Concerning the Origin and Development of Sufism,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
(1906), which included a list of seventy-eight early definitions by Sufi authors. A longer list is
found in J. Nurbakhsh, Sufism: Meaning, Knowledge, and Unity (New York: Khaniqahi-
Nimatullahi, 1981).
83
84 W i l l i a m C. C h i t t i c k
“Sufism” itself was employed in each case. I will discuss three broad issues:
Sufism’s relation to other fields of learning, its characteristic approach to
theory, and its understanding of the role of praxis.
2 The Three Dimensions of Islam

The Koran and the Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad) are full of raw
material for the disciplines that came to be called jurisprudence (fiqh),
scholastic theology (kalām), philosophy, and Sufism, but these disciplines
themselves appeared gradually. When scholars say that Sufism originated
in the second/eighth or third/ninth centuries, they mean that before that
time, the sources do not delineate the specific concerns that differentiate
the Sufis of later times from other Muslims. The same is true, however,
for the other approaches to Islamic thought and practice – not least
jurisprudence and scholastic theology, which are often said to represent
“orthodox” Islam.
We can attempt to unravel the interwoven strands of germinal Islam by
differentiating among three dimensions of human concern: practice, under-
standing, and transformation. On the most outward, “exoteric” level, the
Koran and Hadith lay down rules and regulations for right and wrong
activity, such as the “five pillars,” the essential acts of every Muslim. This
strand of Islam became codified and institutionalized in the various schools of
jurisprudence, all of which were trying to explicate what is commonly called
the Shariah (sharı̄ʿa, literally “road leading to water”), a word that is usually
translated as sacred or revealed law.
On a more subtle level, the Koran and the Hadith provide guidelines for
right understanding and right thought. Both have a great deal to say about the
“unseen” (ghayb), which includes God, angels, and the Last Day, and they
mention that God has sent scriptures and prophets. Muslims are told to have
“faith” (ı̄mān) in all this, though the word’s semantic field overlaps with that
of knowledge (ʿilm). Faith implies understanding the truth of these notions
and committing oneself to the praxis that they entail. Schools of thought
explicating the significance of faith and its objects began to appear in the
second/eighth century and are typically classified as scholastic theology or as
philosophy. Scholastic theologians attempted in a rather dogmatic way to
clarify and rationalize the Koran’s teachings about God, the universe, and
human destiny; philosophers addressed the same subjects (and others as well)
without limiting themselves to properly “Islamic” sources, taking much of
their inspiration from the content and methodology of Greek thought,
especially Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Corpus Hermeticum.
S u fi s m 85
Parallel with these two approaches, a further approach was found in

various saintly figures who relied on inner insight (bası̄ra) ̣ and mystical
“unveiling” (kashf). They claimed that the only way to acquire true under-
standing of God, the world, and the soul was to adhere assiduously to the
outer and inner model of human perfection established by the Prophet. Their
watchword was “Be truly pious, and God will teach you” (Koran 2:282).
They respected rational thought but recognized its limitations, especially in
its attempts to unravel the nature of the unseen. They sought to achieve what
later was called “a stage beyond the stage of reason” (tawr
̣ warā’ tawr
̣ al-ʿaql).
Once this strand of thought and practice became differentiated from other
strands, these figures were looked back on as the early Sufis. Every one of the
many hagiographical accounts that talk about their lives and teachings traces
their approach back to the Prophet himself and some of his outstanding
companions, especially his cousin and son-in-law ʿAlı̄ and the first caliph
Abū Bakr.
Those who took this Sufi approach based themselves squarely on the
Koran and the Hadith. In their view, the primary concern of these sources
was to guide people in re-joining their Divine Source. They saw the proto-
type of their path in Muhammad’s “ladder” (miʿrāj) or “night journey” (isrā’),
during which the angel Gabriel took him up stage-by-stage to the highest
heaven, from which he entered alone into God’s presence. This was the
second of the two defining moments of Islam’s foundation, the first being
God’s revelation of the Koran – which also took place through the inter-
mediary Gabriel. For the Sufi tradition down through the centuries, the goal
of both right practice and right understanding has been to assimilate the
Koranic revelation and, on that basis, to ascend the ladder in the footsteps of
the path breaker, the Prophet himself.
By the time of al-Ghazālı̄ (d. 505/1111), a scholar of great renown,
there existed a variety of approaches to understanding God, the universe,
and the human soul. Scholastic theologians gave pride of place to rational
interpretation of the Koran; Hellenophile philosophers preferred rational
interpretation of the universe and the soul in the context of a metaphy-
sics of being; and Sufis claimed access to the unveiling of the esoteric
meanings of the Koran, the cosmos, and the human self. Al-Ghazālı̄
himself was a synthesizer, drawing from jurisprudence, theology, philo-
sophy, and Sufism. The oft-repeated assertion that he brought Sufism
into the Islamic mainstream means that he helped give it a high profile in
the official religious establishment. What he was doing, however, was
making explicit the Koranic stress on balance among practice, under-
standing, and transformation.
By “transformation,” the third dimension of human concern, I mean

achieving conformity with the Source of all, or what al-Ghazālı̄ and others
called “becoming characterized by the character traits of God” (takhalluq bi
akhlāq Allāh). The competence of the jurists is limited to right and wrong
activity, and that of the scholastic theologians to the rational defense of the
articles of faith. What characterizes the specifically Sufi approach is the
insistence that true understanding of and conformity to the Divine Reality
depend on the soul’s transformation. The philosophers also had a good deal
to say about this issue – they spoke about achieving “conjunction” (ittisāl) ̣
with the Agent Intellect or “deiformity” (taʾalluh, from the same root as
Allāh) – but with some exceptions, they tended to get bogged down in the
rational preliminaries and had little to say about the Koranic path. In contrast,
the Sufi masters spoke from the standpoint of having climbed the ladder to
God in the Prophet’s footsteps.
3 The Three Principles of Understanding

In a brief overview such as this, it would be impossible to do justice to the
major authors who produced significant works on Sufi theory. Instead, I
address a few of the basic themes, the contours of which can be summed up in
what are commonly called the three “principles” (asl)̣ of faith: the assertion of
God’s unity (tawh ̣ı̄d); prophecy (nubuwwa), or divine guidance; and the return
(maʿād) to God, or eschatology. When elaborated by scholastic theologians,
philosophers, and Sufis, tawh ̣ı̄d developed into various approaches to meta-
physics and theology; nubuwwa yielded elaborate discussions of human per-
fection and spiritual anthropology; and maʿād focused on the posthumous
development of the soul and the means to achieve a happy resting place.
The first of the five pillars of Islamic practice is a speech act: “bearing
witness” (shahāda) that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is God’s
messenger. Jurists have much to say about how and when one performs this
act, but they have nothing to say about its meaning, which is the domain of
theologians, Sufis, and philosophers. The first half, “(There is) no god but
God” is known as the sentence declaring tawh ̣ı̄d. The Koran says that God is
designated by “the most beautiful names.” The quickest way to grasp the
implications of tawh ̣ı̄d is to insert the divine names into the formula: God is
One, so “None is one but God.” God is Alive, so “None is alive but God.”
God is Knowing, so “None is knowing but God.” God is Desiring, so “None
is desiring but God.” In short, every real quality, not least existence itself,
pertains exclusively to God, for God is the Real (al-h ̣aqq), and “There is
nothing real but God.”
S u fi s m 87
The most sophisticated and prolific theoretician of the Sufi tradition was
Ibn ʿArabı̄ (1165–1240), who likes to point out that dogmatic theologians,
focusing on one apparent meaning of tawh ̣ı̄d, come to the conclusion that
God is radically other, dwelling in transcendence and “incomparability”
(tanzı̄h). Sufis say the same thing, but they add that transcendence does not
contradict immanence and “similarity” (tashbı̄h), for the law of noncontra-
diction pertains to the created realm, not to God, whose very incompar-
ability demands that he be the coincidence of opposites (jamʿ al-ad ̣dād). In Ibn
ʿArabı̄’s view, scholastic theologians reject immanence because of their
overreliance on reason (ʿaql), the mental faculty that analyzes and system-
atizes. In contrast, Sufi teachers also use the faculty of imagination (khayāl),
which, when cultivated and refined, provides access to “unveiling” or
“mystical vision,” in which the divine face is seen to be actually present in
phenomenal appearances. For Ibn ʿArabı̄, true understanding of tawh ̣ı̄d
depends upon seeing with both eyes of the “heart” (qalb): the eye of reason
and the eye of imagination.
Beginning with Avicenna (d. 1037), philosophers typically spoke of being
or existence using the word wujūd. The existence of God is then necessary,
and the existence of everything else is contingent upon God’s existence.
The literal sense of wujūd, however, is “to find and to be aware of,” and the
Koran mentions God as the subject of the verb, so theologians speak of God
as al-wājid, the Finder. As al-Ghazālı̄ explains, God is “the Finder in an
absolute sense, and anything else, even if it finds some of the attributes and
causes of perfection, also lacks certain things, so it can only find in a relative
sense.”3 In other words, tawh ̣ı̄d demands that, as al-Ghazālı̄ likes to put it,
“There is nothing in wujūd but God.” This means not only that God’s Being
is the only true and real being, but also that his finding – his consciousness
and awareness – is the only true and real finding.
The notion that God’s Being is true and real and that its created analogues
are “metaphors” (majāz) is a constant theme of Sufi teachings, whether or not
the term wujūd is employed. Moreover, as the often quoted Arabic proverb
puts it, “The metaphor is the bridge to the reality.” As seen by the Sufis, the
universe is a transparent metaphor, which is to say that all phenomena point
back to the noumena that are God’s most beautiful names. All things are
theophanies or divine “self-disclosures” (tajallı̄), a term derived from the
Koranic story of Moses. In truth, says Ibn ʿArabı̄, all of reality is two: the
3
̣ al-asnā f¯ı sharh ̣ maʿānı¯ asmāʾ Allāh al-h ̣usnā, ed. Fadlou A. Shehadi (Beyrouth: Dar el-
al-Maqsad
Machreq, 1971), 143.
Real Wujūd that is God, and the metaphorical wujūd that is God’s self-
disclosure.
Ibn ʿArabı̄’s stress on the dual implications of tawh ̣ı̄d – both transcendence
and immanence – led Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), the great Hanbali polemicist,
to ascribe to him the notion of wah ̣dat al-wujūd, “the oneness of Being,”
though Ibn ʿArabı̄ never used the term. According to Ibn Taymiyya, this
expression was outright unbelief, for it means that no distinction can be
drawn between God and the cosmos. Everyone who took part in the heated
debate that ensued (including Orientalists in modern times) has had in mind a
specific meaning of wah ̣dat al-wujūd and has assumed that Ibn ʿArabı̄ spoke of
it in that meaning. In fact, at least seven distinct meanings can be discerned in
the literature.4 Few people actually took the trouble to read Ibn ʿArabı̄’s
books, not least because they are notoriously difficult. What becomes clear
when one does delve into his writings is that he addressed the relationship
between the Oneness of God and the manyness of the cosmos in scores of
ways, none of which is reducible to a simple either/or statement. One of his
refrains is “He/not He” (huwa lā huwa), a variant on the formula of tawh ̣ı̄d,
“No god but He.” Things, phenomena, contingent beings, creatures are
“He” inasmuch as they partake of wujūd, but “not He” inasmuch as they are
simply themselves. Everything is a commingling of real and unreal, being and
nonexistence, light and darkness, necessity and contingency.
Ambiguity, in short, defines our cosmic situation. This is what Ibn ʿArabı̄
and others mean when they say that the universe is khayāl, a word that means
both imagination and image. All things are God’s imagination – images of
both Real Being and nothingness. Like reflections in a mirror, they are what
they appear to be, but they are also something else. In Ibn ʿArabı̄’s formula-
tion, the rational eye of the heart thinks in terms of either/or, but the
imaginal eye sees that things can simultaneously be and not be. Seeing with
either eye alone distorts the vision of tawh ̣ı̄d, with its harmonious balance of
transcendence and immanence. The general Sufi acknowledgment of cosmic
ambiguity led to a vision of the cosmos as ranked in hierarchical degrees of
intensity of wujūd. The basic insight is simply that some things are clearer
images of the divine qualities than others – it is not a question of “yes or no”
but rather “To what extent?”
The Koran refers to two basic realms of created existence, using terms such
as unseen and visible, heaven and earth, high and low. Many Sufis and
4
See William Chittick, “Rūmı¯ and Wahdat al-wujūd,” in Poetry and Mysticism in Islam, ed. A.
Banani, R. Hovannisian, and G. Sabagh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
70–111.
S u fi s m 89
philosophers spent a good deal of effort explaining that these are not sharp
dichotomies but designations for the extreme points on a spectrum. Some of
them discussed a third, intermediate realm, often calling it by the Koranic
expression “isthmus” (barzakh). Its outstanding characteristic is that it is
neither heaven nor earth, neither spirit nor body, neither high nor low;
rather, it is low in relation to heaven and high in relation to earth, gross in
relation to spirit and subtle in relation to body. Thus, we commonly find a
three-world scheme: the World of Spirits at one extreme, the World of
Bodies at the other extreme, and the Isthmus or World of Images in
between – what Henry Corbin labeled the mundus imaginalis. The overall
picture is that the divine qualities are infinitely present in the Real Being, and
their properties and traces become manifest in ever-decreasing levels of
intensity, much as light diminishes as it recedes from its source. Things
dwelling at each lower level make manifest, or act as symbols for, those
dwelling at higher levels: “As above, so below.”
That the lower discloses the properties of the higher accords with two of
the implications of tawh ̣ı̄d mentioned in elementary Islamic catechisms:
Everything comes from God, and everything is constantly sustained by
God. The third implication is that everything goes back where it came
from. God is the First and the Last. This going back is the already mentioned
maʿād, “return,” the third of the three principles of faith. It helps explain why
the first two principles, tawh ̣ı̄d and prophecy, are so important: Our response
to them determines the trajectory of our ultimate encounter with the One:
“As below, so above.” We will go back to God in keeping with the manner
in which we live our lives and shape our souls.
Philosophers commonly described the Return to God as the necessary
outcome of a prior movement, called “the Origin” (mabdaʾ). Sufis used the
same Koranic terminology, but they often preferred the word qawsān, which
means “two bows” or “two arcs” (like Latin arcus, the word qaws means both
bow and arc). The word derives from a Koranic verse that refers to the
Prophet’s proximity to God on his Night Journey: “He was two-bows-
length away, or closer” (53:9). This is taken as an allusion to the fullness of
human perfection that is reached when an individual, having descended into
the world from God, returns voluntarily to him by achieving deiformity and
becoming characterized by his traits. Through such a trajectory, man tra-
verses the entire circle of existence and re-joins his Source.
Sufi theory also gives prominence to the notion of the universe as macro-
cosm (al-ʿālam al-kabı̄r) and the human individual as microcosm (al-ʿālam al-
̣
saghı̄r). Both realms make manifest the same roots, for each is an all-embracing
theophany, appearing in God’s “form” (sūra). ̣ The macrocosm, however, is
relatively externalized, dispersed, and differentiated (mufasṣ al),

̣ and the micro-
cosm relatively internalized, focused, and undifferentiated (mujmal). In this
anthropocosmic vision, the human subject takes as its object, at least poten-
tially, the entire cosmos. Sufis see Koranic reference to this teaching in many
passages, not least the Creation story, according to which God taught Adam
“the names, all of them” (2:31). These are the names of all things, whether
manifest or non-manifest, visible or unseen, even of God himself. To say that
Adam – a word that the Koran uses generically for human beings – was taught
the names implies that awareness of God and the universe is innate to the
human substance, no matter how obscured it may have become by the
forgetfulness (nisyān) that is endemic to mankind ever since “Adam forgot”
(Koran 20:115). The role of the prophets is “to remind” (dhikr, tadhkira), that is,
to guide people in remembering what they already know because of their
̣ created in God’s form.
primordial nature (fitra),
The cosmos in its entirety is a self-disclosure of Being, an image of Infinity; it
is what Ibn ʿArabı̄ calls “Nondelimited Imagination.” The mundus imaginalis
discussed by Corbin is then the intermediary cosmic realm, situated between
the intense luminosity of the spirits and the darkness of the bodies. In a similar
way, the microcosm has three levels: spirit (rūh ̣), soul (nafs), and body (badan).
The soul is the isthmus between consciousness and forgetfulness, the image of
light and darkness, life and death, activity and inertia. The human drama plays
out in the soul, not in the spirit or body, for it is constantly pulled in two
directions – upward toward greater awareness and downward toward deeper
forgetfulness. The Persian poet Rūmı̄ (d. 1273) offers some of the most down-
to-earth depictions of this internal struggle in Sufi literature, as when he says,
“The states of human beings are as if an angel’s wing were stuck on a donkey’s
tail so that perhaps the donkey, through the radiance and companionship of the
angel, might itself become an angel.”5
Having descended into manifestation, the microcosm, unlike the macro-
cosm, is forced to take into account its own free will, however limited this
may be. People have no choice but to return to God, because everyone dies
and is resurrected, but their freedom to choose plays a major role in deter-
mining the manner in which they will experience posthumous becoming.
Failure to make the right choices can lead to indefinite misery (although
many Sufi authors, in contrast to the exoteric theologians, say that hell’s
suffering – as opposed to hell itself – cannot be everlasting).6
5
ı mā f¯hi,
F¯hi ı ed. B. Furūzānfar (Tehran: Amı¯r Kabı¯r, 1969), 107.
6
Ibn ʿArabı¯ provides numerous arguments to prove the point. For a few of them, see William
Chittick, Ibn ʿArabı¯: Heir to the Prophets (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), ch. 9.
S u fi s m 91
The function of the prophets is to guide people in making the choices that
lead to a happy return. The divine root of prophecy is the name Guide
(al-hādı̄), one of the many contrasting names of the Godhead. Its correlative is
the name Misguider (al-mud ̣ill), the most salient cosmic manifestation of
which is Satan.7 As in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm: People encoun-
ter the conflicting claims of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. The
general Sufi position is that no one can tread the labyrinth of moral and
cosmic ambiguity and achieve the goal of human life – transformation and
deiformity – without prophetic guidance. Muslims are called specifically to
follow Muhammad and climb the ladder in his footsteps.
Here a major discussion enters the picture, that of “the perfect human
being” (al-insān al-kāmil), an ideal type embodied first and foremost by
Muhammad and then by other prophets. There are numerous sides to the
issue. Ibn ʿArabı̄’s voluminous discussions of metaphysics, cosmology, and
spiritual psychology can best be understood as an attempt to describe the full
parameters of human perfection. Among the many prominent issues he and
others address is the relationship between the prophets (nabı̄), the last of
whom was Muhammad, and the “friends” (walı̄), those who achieve nearness
to God by conforming to the prophetic model (the translation of this word as
“saint” is problematic).8
4 Climbing the Ladder

The Sufis wrote myriad volumes on theory, and perhaps even more on
practice. Sufi institutions – the so-called “orders” (tarı̄qa, ̣ literally,
“paths”) – began developing around the sixth/twelfth century and eventually
spread throughout the Islamic world, always adapted to local circumstances.
If esotericism is understood as something exclusive to initiates, and exoteri-
cism as suitable for the general public, then the weight of Islamic history
suggests that later Sufism has been more exoteric than esoteric, for its
teachings about interiority were assimilated into the most popular forms of
religiosity. One can also say that in many cases, Sufi orders turned into a sort
7
Some of the more interesting esoteric interpretations of Satan are provided by Sufis such as
the famous al-Ḥallāj. See Peter J. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Ibl¯sı in Sufi Psychology
(Leiden: Brill, 1983). On Ibn ʿArabı¯’s views, see William Chittick, “Iblı¯s and the Jinn in al-
Futūh ̣āt al-Makkiyya,” Classical Arabic Humanities in Their Own Terms: Festschrift for Wolfhart
Heinrichs on His 65th Birthday, ed. Beatrice Gruendler and Michael Cooperson (Leiden: Brill,
2008), 99–126.
8
A closely related discussion has to do with the relationship between “the Seal of the
Prophets” (Muhammad) and “the Seal of the Friends.” On this see Michel Chodkiewicz,
The Seal of the Saints (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1993).
of exoteric esotericism, and Sufi literature is full of criticisms of teachers who

preserved the trappings of Sufism but lacked the prerequisite personal trans-
formation. For similar reasons, calling Sufism “mysticism” is problematic,
given that a mystic should be someone who has actually achieved some sort
of divine intimacy or inner illumination. The vast majority of those affiliated
with Sufi orders, however, are simply striving on the path, acknowledging
that God’s friends alone deserve to share in the divine mysteries. This is one
reason why they have rarely referred to themselves as “Sufis,” for, in most
definitions, the word designates a high station of spiritual realization. Rather,
they call themselves “the poor” (Arabic faqı̄r, Persian darwı̄sh). The expression
is Koranic: “O people, you are the poor toward God, and God is the Rich,
the Praiseworthy” (35:15).
In almost every case, the Sufi orders trace their origin by a chain of
transmission (silsila) back to Muhammad. The Sufi teachers, commonly
known as “elders” (shaykh, pı̄r) or “spiritual guides” (murshid), initiate dis-
ciples by means of a ritual, again going back to the Prophet, called “the
swearing allegiance of good-pleasure” (bayʿat al-rid ̣wān, alluded to in Koran
48:10). Sufi teachers also transmit specific practices, the most common of
which is the “invocation” (dhikr) of a divine name or a Koranic formula. The
word literally means reminder, remembrance, and mention; it is used in
the Koran to designate not only the practice of invoking God’s name but also
the function of prophecy itself – “reminding” people of their rootedness in
God. In communal meetings, Sufis engage in rituals centering on the recita-
tion of Koranic verses and divine names (and rarely involving anything that
might be called “dancing”). All of this is “esoteric” only in the sense that not
all Muslims participate.
The notion that Sufism adds a dimension to ordinary, exoteric observance
of Islam is found in the common teaching that there are three basic compo-
̣
nents of the Islamic tradition: the Shariah or revealed law; the Tariqah (tarı̄qa)
or Sufi path; and the Haqiqah (h ̣aqı̄qa) or “Reality,” which is the source and
goal of both Shariah and Tariqah. The Reality, in other words, is God
himself, who revealed the Koran so that people could climb the ladder
back to him in the footsteps of the Prophet.
Sufi writings call the final goal of the path – reaching the Reality – by
many names and describe the process in numerous ways. All such works
focus on overcoming the distance demanded by God’s transcendence, and
this helps explain the hostility toward Sufism that has often appeared among
the exoterically minded jurists and theologians. According to al-Ghazālı̄ and
many others, the goal is simply the full actualization of tawh ̣ı̄d. He explains
this in his grand summa of the spirit of Islamic practice, Ih ̣yāʾ ʿulūm al-dı̄n,
S u fi s m 93
“Revivifying the Sciences of the Religion”: Tawh ̣ı̄d, he says, has four levels.
The first is to utter the formula “No god but God,” while the heart is heedless
of its meaning. The second is to acknowledge its truth, as in the belief of the
common people. The third is to witness its truth by way of unveiling, as in
the case of those brought near to God. The fourth is to see nothing in wujūd
(existence, consciousness) but the One – this, he tells us, is what the Sufis
mean when they speak of “annihilation” (fanāʾ) in tawh ̣ı̄d.”9
Al-Ghazālı̄’s reference to four levels of tawh ̣ı̄d follows the standard model
of the ladder ascended by the Prophet. Discussion of the ladder’s rungs –
sometimes enumerated as 7, 10, 100, 300, or even 1001 – makes up a
common genre of Sufi literature. A famous example is Mantiq̣ al-tayr, ̣ “The
Language of the Birds,” by the Persian poet Farı̄d al-Dı̄n ʿAtṭ āṛ (d. 1221), in
which a group of birds flies over seven mountains and achieves final union
with its king. Each of the mountains – called seeking, love, recognition,
independence, unity, bewilderment, and poverty – represents a transforma-
tion of the soul and a stage in becoming characterized by divine traits.
5 Conclusion
The distinction between the exoteric path of the jurists and theologians and
the esoteric path of the Sufis can perhaps best be reduced to the focus on
transformation, or to the notion that true understanding comes only through
active and conscious participation in the very reality of the divine conscious-
ness. This is why the two approaches have often been differentiated in terms
of two basic sorts of knowledge: transmitted (naqlı̄) and intellectual (ʿaqlı̄).
Transmitted knowledge underlies all learning, since it is the source of
language, grammar, social norms, and, in the specifically Islamic context,
the Koran and the Hadith. As for intellectual knowing, it is the consciousness
of Reality, or a direct awareness of the way things are – maʿrifa, “self-
recognition,” a word often translated as “gnosis.” This term’s most often
cited locus classicus is the Prophet’s purported saying, “He who recognizes
himself recognizes his Lord.”
The distinction between these two sorts of knowledge is implicit in
al-Ghazālı̄’s four levels of tawh ̣ı̄d. The first and second are based on what is
technically called taqlı̄d, imitation, that is, following the authority of the
transmitted learning. The third and fourth depend on inner transformation,
9
Ih ̣yāʾ ʿulūm al-dı¯n (Beirut: Dār al-Hādı¯, 1993), vol. 4, 359. For a free translation of the passage,
see David Burrell, Al-Ghazali: Faith in Divine Unity & Trust in Divine Providence (Louisville:
Fons Vitae, 2001), 10ff.
or what is called tah ̣qı̄q, realization. The word tah ̣qı̄q derives from the same
root as h ̣aqq and Haqiqah (h ̣aqı̄qa). As a Koranic divine name, al-h ̣aqq
designates the real, the true, the worthy; Haqiqah, as noted, designates the
origin and final goal of both the Shariah and the Tariqah. As for tah ̣qı̄q, it
means to establish and actualize what is real, true, and worthy, that is, to attain
to the Haqiqah. Once realization has been achieved, there can be no more
talk of imitation, for the distinction between knower and known has been
effaced.
Sufi authors provide numerous depictions of the transformed selfhoods
achieved by the friends of God. Ibn ʿArabı̄ often calls the highest level of
human perfection “the station of no station” (maqām lā maqām), because it
represents the full realization of all divine attributes and character traits. Like
the Divine Essence, this supreme stage cannot be designated by any specific
name. Here are brief excerpts from his discussions:
The people of perfection have realized all stations and states and passed
beyond them to the station above both majesty and beauty, so they have no
attributes and no description. It was said to Abū Yazı̄d, “How are you this
morning?” He replied, “I have no morning and no evening; morning and
evening belong to him who becomes delimited by attributes, and I have no
attributes.”10
The highest of all human beings are those who have no station, because the
stations determine the properties of those who stand within them. But without
doubt, the highest of all groups themselves determine the properties – they are
not determined by properties. They are the divine ones, for the Real is
identical with them.11
10
Ibn ʿArabı¯, al-Futūh ̣āt al-makkiyya (Cairo: 1911), vol. 2, 133.
11
Ibn ʿArabı¯, al-Futūh ̣āt al-makkiyya, vol. 3, 506. For these two passages and several more along
with a discussion of their significance in the context of Ibn ʿArabı¯’s teachings, see William
Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), ch. 20.
9
KABBALAH
B r i a n Og r e n
1 Introduction
“Kabbalah” is a multifaceted term which, in its most austere religious sense,
denotes the “reception” of tradition from a higher source or an older genera-
tion. One of the earliest expressions of this sense of “Kabbalah” comes in a
verbal form in the Mishnaic tractate Avot, which begins: “Moses received
(kibbel) the Torah from Sinai, and transmitted it to Joshua; and Joshua to the
elders; and the elders to the prophets; and the prophets transmitted it to the
men of the great assembly.”1 This passage establishes an uninterrupted chain of
transmission of Kabbalah, that is, of that which is “received,” going back to the
theophany at Sinai. In so doing, it lends a sense of direct divine sanction to
Kabbalah, which in this passage is connected to both prophecy and religious
adjudication. It has thus been understood for millennia to go beyond the
reception of the Written Torah and to include the entire tradition of com-
mentary, law, and ethics known as Oral Torah, thereby giving even seemingly
innovative interpretations and practices an air of primordial authority.
Abraham Joshua Heschel has observed that “the term kabbalah denotes the act
of taking an obligation upon oneself. The term in this sense has the connotation
of strictness and restraint. Yet kabbalah in its verbal form means also: to receive, to
welcome, to greet.”2 Heschel goes on to note that the obligatory usage has a
legal meaning, whereas the welcoming connotation is spiritual, but that the two
are inseparable from each other. In the traditional view, a binding commitment
to established statutes goes hand-in-hand with a sense of personal sanctity and
awe. It is from this standpoint that starting in the Middle Ages, the term
“Kabbalah” came to denote a sacrosanct esoteric tradition fundamentally based
1
Avot 1:1.
2
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Young, 1951), 61.
95
96 B r i a n Og r e n
within Jewish praxis. Kabbalah, in this view, was part of God’s revelation
through Torah to his people, Israel. In the words of the thirteenth-century
Zohar: “There are three interconnected levels: the blessed Holy One, Torah,
and Israel. Each is level upon level, concealed and revealed.”3 Kabbalah thus
became associated not only with the revealed and received, but also with the
received and concealed elements within what came to be three of the founda-
tion stones for all of Judaism, namely, God, Torah, and Israel.
For medieval kabbalists, Kabbalah as esoteric lore is the heart of Oral Torah,
received by Moses at Sinai on behalf of the entire people of Israel. It is thus a
misconception to identify Kabbalah with Jewish “mysticism,” which I take to
denote a direct, individual, and novel experience of God.4 Such mystical
encounter is certainly one aspect of medieval Kabbalah, but it is only one
part of the larger picture of reception that traces itself to divine revelation. In
what follows, other aspects of kabbalistic tradition will be presented in an
attempt to offer a fuller portrait. This essay will focus on a phenomenological
exposition of some major kabbalistic concepts. I take this approach rather than
a historical survey because influences are not always linear, corollary processes
are rarely singular, and representative ideas often crop up in different periods
and disparate lands. In addition, perceptions of kabbalists themselves are not
always historically accurate, nor are they always chronologically conditioned.
For example, works such as the twelfth-century Bahir and the thirteenth-
century Zohar were attributed to ancient authors but were taken to contain
eternal teachings. Kabbalists such as the sixteenth-century circle of Isaac Luria
saw themselves in direct contact with the past and the future through means
such as reincarnation and prophetic revelation. A nonlinear phenomenological
exposition thus allows for a fuller, more complex portrayal of Kabbalah.
Accordingly, it is to some of the timelessly perceived esoteric traditions that
we now turn, as structured on the three, originally Zoharic foundations of God,
Torah, and Israel.
2 God
a Transcendence and Immanence
The relationship between transcendence and immanence is of special con-
cern to Kabbalah. Is God wholly other, or is he personal and intimate? Does
3
Zohar 3:73a.
4
For more on this, see Joseph Dan, Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 3–4; Boaz Huss, “The Mystification of Kabbalah and the Myth of
Jewish Mysticism” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 110 (2007), 9–30.
K a b ba l a h 97
God, in all of his infinitude, somehow relate to his finite creation? If he is

infinite and wholly other, then how did he possibly create that which is finite
and dissimilar to his own essence? Kabbalistic attempts to grapple with such
questions assume many forms, including expositions of classical midrashic
and philosophical theories of the intermediary nature of language and the
transcendent quality of intellectual abstraction. But perhaps the most dis-
tinctive and prominent kabbalistic manner of dealing with such questions is
the doctrine of Ein-Sof and the sefirot.
Ein-Sof literally means “without end,” and it denotes the transcendent,
infinite, hidden aspect of God. The concept was developed from the via
negativa as expounded by the likes of the eleventh-century Neoplatonist
Bahya ibn Paquda and the twelfth-century rationalist Moses Maimonides.
According to this doctrine, God is beyond all finite limitations, and thus all
that can be said about him is what he is not. God’s essence is beyond human
comprehension, so any assertion about it is by nature false. Claiming that he is
“infinite,” however, is legitimate in that it asserts that he is “not” finite.
Philosophers usually use the adjectival phrase bilti ba’al takhkit to denote this
apophatic, negative attribute of God.
By contrast, the term ein sof (written here with a small “e” and “s” to
denote its linguistic function) is usually used in an adverbial sense, denoting
the infinite nature of God’s various other attributes. The first known instance
in which the term is used nominally as Ein Sof (written here with an upper-
case “E” and “S” for distinction) comes from within the twelfth-century
Provencal kabbalistic circle of Isaac the Blind.5 Isaac’s student Azriel of
Gerona writes: “The boundless is called Ein-Sof, Infinite. It is absolute
undifferentiation in perfect, changeless oneness. . .. The philosophers
acknowledge that we comprehend it only by way of no.”6 Here Ein-Sof is
an appellation for God’s ultimate essence, which for Azriel and subsequent
kabbalists paradoxically remains undefined by its very definition as infinite,
undifferentiated oneness. It is thus beyond all comprehension.
Kabbalists bridge this abyss by positing that out of the unknowable Ein-Sof
radiate knowable potencies called sefirot. This term first appears in the ancient
cosmogonic text Sefer Yetzirah, although there it seemingly relates to pri-
mordial accounts rather than to God’s manifestation. By contrast, medieval
kabbalists cast the sefirot as ten divine hypostases that emanate from the clear
5
For more on this, see Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, ed. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky,
trans. Allan Arkush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 261–289.
6
Azriel of Gerona, “Commentary on the Ten Sefirot,” in Me’ir ibn Gabbai, Derekh Emunah
(Warsaw, 1850), 2b, quoted in Daniel C. Matt, The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish
Mysticism (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 29.
light of Ein-Sof in a sequential manner of increasing opacity. Paradoxically,

the more opaque they become, the clearer they are to human comprehen-
sion. From the most abstract to the most tangible, they are:
(1) Keter Elyon, “Highest Crown”: the least palpable, with indistinct bor-
ders alongside Ein-Sof.
(2) Hokhmah, “Wisdom”: the beginning of God’s ways, considered as the
supernal father.
(3) Binah, “Understanding”: the place of return, the upper Eden, the
divine womb, the supernal mother.
(4) Hesed, “Mercy”: associated with the right, the side of love and of the
divine masculine.
(5) Gevurah, “Might”: associated with the left, the side of judgment and of
the divine feminine.
(6) Tif’eret, “Beauty”: the mediating force of balance.
(7) Netzah, “Eternity”: feminine triumphalism.
(8) Hod, “Splendor”: masculine glory.
(9) Yesod, “Foundation”: a righteous covenant.
(10) Malkhut, “Royalty”: God’s indwelling on earth.
Whether these sefirot are essentially divine or are mere instruments for
God to break forth from his concealed essence in Ein-Sof is hotly debated
among kabbalists, but all assert the ultimate unity of the ten, the need for
harmony between them, and the inherent heresy in treating them as
separate powers.
b Bisexuality
The sefirotic decad that is actually one and the apparent separation that actually
demands harmony give rise to a remarkably polar, bisexual structure within
the kabbalistic notion of the godhead itself. This is based on the bisexual
nature of primordial man, as understood from a melding of the two see-
mingly contradictory accounts of creation in Genesis. According to Genesis
1:27: “God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him;
male and female He created them.” Man and woman are created simulta-
neously. Genesis 2:7, however, tells a different story. There “God formed
man from the dust of the earth,” and only later said to himself: “It is not good
for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him” (Gen. 2:18). To do
this, God took from the side of man and formed it into woman, an act to
which the first man proclaimed: “This one at last is bone of my bones and
flesh of my flesh. This one shall be called Woman, for from man she was
K a b ba l a h 99
taken” (Gen. 2:23). In this account, the formation of woman is subsequent to

the creation of man.
Rabbinic tradition noticed this discrepancy, and offered a theory of
original androgyneity as an explanation, not unlike that of Aristophanes in
Plato’s Symposium.7 Humanity, the rabbis explain, was indeed created simul-
taneously “male and female” as in the account in Genesis 1:27, but as a single
entity that was then divided, as in Genesis, ch. 2. This is referred to in
rabbinic literature as du-partsufin, which literally means “dual-countenance,”
and connotes a bisexual nature within primordial man.
Kabbalists took this notion a step further, noting that if (according to
Genesis 1:27) “God created man in His image,” and if that image was dually
“male and female,” then God too must have elements that are both male and
female. The twelfth-century Abraham ben David of Posquieres was one of
the first to make this link, equating the dual male and female countenances to
divine mercy and divine sternness, respectively. Abraham ben David’s oft-
quoted statement is variously interpreted by scholars as a statement of an
inseparable unity within God, a necessary separation for the sake of equal
cooperation between the two powers, and a statement of the necessary
incorporation of the female into the prioritized male.8 Whatever the case
may be, the godhead itself here is clearly cast as a bisexual polarity in need of
unitive, or at least interactive, harmony.
For the thirteenth-century prophetic kabbalist Abraham Abulafia and
other philosophically inclined authors such as the early sixteenth-century
Yohanan Alemanno and Leone Ebreo, this bisexual polarity came to repre-
sent the intellect as a formal masculine element issued from God, which
impregnates the material feminine body created by God.9 In an idyllic state,
these two elements are completely unified, with the feminine ultimately
subordinate to the masculine. On various levels of both microcosmic and
macrocosmic restoration, woman ideally returns to man, from whom she
was taken.
7
Genesis Rabbah 8:1; Leviticus Rabbah 14:1.
8
See, respectively, Scholem, Origins, 217–218; Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 128–130; Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 61–64; Elliot Wolfson, Language, Eros,
Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press,
2005), 167–170.
9
Abraham Abulafia, Imrei Shefer (Tel Aviv: Aharon Barzani and Son, 1999), 62; Yohanan
Alemanno, Einei ha-Edah (ms. Paris BN 270), 42a; Leone Ebreo, Dialogues of Love, trans.
Cosmos Damian Bacich and Rosella Pescatori (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2009), 281.
God’s bisexuality becomes especially pronounced in relation to the sefirot.

This is the case for each individual sefirah, which has the power to both
receive and to overflow the divine influx, and for relations between the
sefirot, which are usually coupled from the second (Hokhmah) onward.
Hokhmah is often cast as the supernal father, while Binah is the supernal
mother. Hesed is the masculine representation on the right, while Gevurah is
the feminine divine on the left, and Netzah and Hod are a similar pair. Tiferet is
the masculine body linked to Malkhut, the vaginal receptor, through Yesod,
the divine phallus. In an idyllic state, these pairs all join together in both
ecstasy and creation, allowing for the divine flow by the process of unity and
integration.
3 Torah
a Infinite Revelation
For kabbalists, not only are the sefirot divine manifestations, so too is the
language of Torah. This idea derives from the assertion in Sefer Yetzirah that
God formed the world with thirty-two paths of wisdom, namely, the ten sefirot
and the twenty-two Hebrew letters. Such an assertion accords the Hebrew
language a special divine status, and as noted by later kabbalistic interpreters,
thirty-two is represented in Hebrew numerology by the combination of the
very first letter and the very last letter of the Torah. The sefirot coupled with
divine language thus become synonymous with the contents of the Torah,
from its very beginning to its very end. Not only is Torah God’s revelation, it is
the divinity itself. As famously stated in the Zohar, “Torah is nothing but the
blessed Holy One.”10 “Torah” here stands for Written Torah, while “the
blessed Holy One” stands for Tiferet, the central masculine pillar in the sefirotic
structure. This outlook, which hypostatizes Torah, fundamentally changes the
process and meaning of reading the Torah in two primary ways.
First, if Written Torah itself is divine, then reading Torah becomes a way
of directly encountering God. Reading itself becomes a mystical activity of
direct relation, which functions as a path to union with Tiferet, the blessed
Holy One through whom the light of Ein-Sof flows. As one eighteenth-
century Hasidic master noted, “By the cleaving of man to the letters of the
Torah . . . he draws down onto himself the revelation of the light of Ein-
Sof.”11 The divine letters act as channels for Ein-Sof, and the process of
10
Zohar II, 60b.
11
Mordekhai of Chernobyl, Liqqutei Torah, fol. 29d, quoted in Moshe Idel, Absorbing
Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 184.
K a b ba l a h 101
reading actively opens those channels and allows the reader to directly
experience the flow of divine light. Reading directed toward God turns
into actual immersion in the divine, and the author-text-reader nexus
genuinely conflates into one.
Second, if Torah is perceived to be God, and (according to medieval
Jewish thought) God is infinite, then Torah too must necessarily be under-
stood as an infinite being. One medieval kabbalist explains that “the Torah
has seventy aspects, and there are seventy aspects to each and every verse; in
truth, therefore, the aspects are infinite.”12 This is based on a rabbinic
statement from Numbers Rabbah 13:15 that “there are seventy modes of
expounding Torah,” but here it relates to the word “secret,” which in
Hebrew is sod, and which numerologically equals seventy. The secret tradi-
tion that is Kabbalah thus organically contains within itself the secret of a
Torah that in its innermost “secret” aspect is at once absolutely divine yet
dynamically multifarious.
Another expression of the infinitude of Torah was popular in Lurianic
Kabbalah, and ties into the idea of reading as direct, experiential revelation.
This is the idea that every letter of the Torah has six hundred thousand aspects
in relation to the six hundred thousand children of Israel who stood at the
foot of Mount Sinai. The idea came to be expanded beyond the six hundred
thousand to all of the souls of Israel, as based on God’s pronouncement: “I
make this covenant, with its sanctions, not with you alone, but both with
those who are standing here with us this day before the Lord our God and
with those who are not with us here this day” (Deuteronomy 29:13–14).
Accordingly, each soul of Israel individually received the Torah, and each
thus has its own individual understanding. There is thus no one single
meaning of divine revelation; there are instead infinite possibilities of sub-
jective, albeit divinely authoritative meanings, based on personal experience
of the divine.
b Interpretive Hermeneutics
The multitude of individual understandings entails an infinity of possibilities
for experience of the divine through the reading of Written Torah.
Nevertheless, such reading is anchored in specific kabbalistic interpretive
patterns of Oral Torah. The process of endless revelation is filtered through
limited structures of discourse, an idea that relates to the embodiment of the
infinite God in a seemingly finite text, and also to the dialectical nature of
12
Kaf ha-Ketoret, quoted in Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York:
Schocken Books, 1971), 42.
Kabbalah itself as subjective experience grounded in received tradition. Due

to this dialectic, not all interpretations are equally valid – a fact that markedly
distinguishes kabbalistic hermeneutics, in all of their multiplicity, from the
postmodern approach to texts.
As the famous thirteenth-century kabbalist and exegete Nahmanides states
regarding the biblical account of creation, “it is a profound secret that is not
understood from a reading of the biblical verses alone, and it cannot be
known completely except by way of the Kabbalah (i.e., the received tradi-
tion) going back to Moses our master, as received from the mouth of divine
fortitude; and those who know it are obliged to conceal it.”13 This statement
by a highly respected kabbalistic exegete is too complex to unpack here in its
entirety, but in several ways it sheds great light on the kabbalistic under-
standing of biblical hermeneutics. First, profound secrets are understood to
be contained within the text of the Bible, and personal revelation relates to an
understanding of these secrets. Second, these secrets cannot simply be under-
stood by all who read the text, even if the readers are intelligent and
insightful. Rather, the revelation of secrets requires a tradition of transmis-
sion, an Oral Torah that is ultimately traced back to God himself. This is
fundamentally related to the revelation at Sinai. Finally, individual revelation
requires personal concealment, both to preserve the secrets for an esoteric
elite and to conserve the dialectic of concealment and revelation that, by its
very nature, constitutes the secret of the infinite contained within the finite
that is contained within the infinite.
The idea of the concealed and the revealed as standing side-by-side in the
Torah has been variously understood, but the most prevalent kabbalistic
explication involves a fourfold method of interpretation. This method,
which is dominant in the Zohar and in the writings of Moshe de Leon,
came to be known as Pardes, which means “Paradise,” and which is an
acronym for the four layers of peshat or literal sense, remez or allegorical
sense, derash or homiletical sense, and finally sod or secret sense. According
to one reading, this is a hierarchical schema that at once preserves tradi-
tional modes of interpretation while asserting that the secret sense is their
culmination.14 According to another reading, these different layers are not
absolutely distinct, and inasmuch as the Torah is dialectically both infinite
and finite in its immanent transcendence and transcendent immanence, it
follows that the literal sense comprehends all the other senses.15 Whatever
13
Nahmanides, Commentary on Genesis 1:1.
14
See especially Idel, Absorbing Perfections, 429–437.
15
For a nuanced analysis, see Elliot Wolfson, Luminal Darkness: Imaginal Gleanings from Zoharic
Literature (Oxford: One World Publications, 2007), 56–110.
K a b ba l a h 103
the case may be, both of these readings emphasize that the kabbalistic
fourfold system preserves the rabbinic dictum that “a biblical verse cannot
depart from its literal sense” (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 63a). Indeed, it is
important to note the inclusive character of the kabbalistic fourfold system,
in which the esoteric does not eradicate the exoteric but necessarily pre-
serves it. In this way, kabbalistic hermeneutics are at once conservative and
innovative. They conserve traditional layers and variant methods of read-
ing, while opening new possibilities for the revelation of the secret that
needs to be concealed.
4 Israel
a Israel as the Divine Feminine
Just as God is manifest in Torah, so is she hypostatized in the people of Israel.
I utilize the feminine pronoun “she” deliberately here, as the hypostatization
is of the divine feminine. Whereas Torah represents the masculine blessed
Holy One in Tiferet, Israel represents his divine female cohort in Malkhut.
The relationship between the two is perhaps best characterized by Isaac the
Blind, commenting on the rabbinic statement that “the world was created
exclusively for the sake of Israel.”16 Isaac writes: “This means ‘due to the
merit of Israel’ – because of the unique qualities inherent in Israel. For [Israel]
receives the divine overflow from the very root, core, and trunk of the Tree –
from the middle pillar which draws from the branches.”17 Israel as receptacle
is none other than the feminine Malkhut, while the middle pillar is Tiferet,
who inseminates Malkhut with his divine overflow. The “Tree” is the
sefirotic structure, but it seems to be no coincidence that the core and
trunk are Tiferet, Written Torah. Based on the book of Proverbs, it has
been likened to “a tree of life to those who behold it” (Proverbs 3:18).
“Those who behold” are the pious of the people of Israel, who not only
derive nourishment from the tree, but who also symbiotically provide fertile
ground in which the tree can take root.
A key concept at work here is Israel’s particularistic exclusivity, presented in
the above quote by Isaac the Blind as “the unique qualities inherent in Israel.”
The idea of uniqueness as an inherent quality is further expressed by the
seventeenth-century kabbalist Shabbetai Sheftel Horowitz: “The souls of the
[non-Jewish] nations are from external forces, the forces of the husks . . . but
16
Song of Songs Rabbah 2:6; cf. Leviticus Rabbah 36:4.
17
Isaac the Blind, “The Process of Emanation,” trans. Ronald C. Keiner in The Early Kabbalah
(New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 83.
the souls of the nation of Israel are emanated from Holiness.”18 Here we find
an ethnocentric dichotomy cast in the very kabbalistic language of “husks” and
of “emanated Holiness.” The husks are those parts of emanated reality that
went awry and became alienated from the divine essence, while the souls of
Israel, like the sefirot and the divine Torah, are a manifestation of the light of
Ein-Sof within existence.19 The souls of Israel are the body of Malkhut, who
through an attachment to Torah, or Tiferet, can channel the flow of Ein-Sof
into the world. It is thus through Israel, and Israel alone, that God ultimately
acts in the concrete world.
This way of thinking gives theosophical significance to Israel’s biblical role as
“a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). Indeed, it is only
because Israel is synonymous with Malkhut and thus hypostatically divine that it
can receive Torah and become wedded to it. Torah needs Israel as its exclusive
partner in order to be able to flourish in the world. Yet the relationship is
reciprocally symbiotic; only through cleaving to Torah can Israel create an
open channel and return to its Divine Source.20 Just as Malkhut remains cut off
from the sefirotic tree (the tree of life) when she does not cleave to her consort
Tiferet, so too Israel, even with its inherent divinity, is cut off from its Divine
Source without the medium of the divine Torah.
b Israel as Oral Torah

Just as Tiferet becomes identified with Written Torah, so Malkhut, and by
extension Israel, becomes identified with Oral Torah. This is perhaps best
exemplified by a now famous statement by Isaac the Blind, commenting on
an earlier text entitled Midrash Konen:
Malkhut [is] the Oral Torah. It is the hue of black fire on white fire, which is
the Written Torah. Now the forms of the letters are not . . . shaped except
through the power of black, which is like ink. So too the Written Torah is
unformed in a physical image, except through the power of the Oral
Torah.21
18
Shabbetai Sheftel Horowitz, Shefa Tal (Brooklyn, 1960), fol. 1a-4c, quoted in Moshe
Hallamish, An Introduction to the Kabbalah, trans. Ruth Bar-Ilan and Ora Wiskind-Elper
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 268.
19
For more on the history and implications of this essentially ethnocentric idea of Israel in
medieval kabbalistic thought, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in
Kabbalistic Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
20
For more on this complex relationship, see Brian Ogren, Renaissance and Rebirth:
Reincarnation in Early Modern Italian Kabbalah (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2009), 80–84 and
204–211.
21
Isaac the Blind, “The Mystical Torah – Kabbalistic Creation,” trans. Ronald C. Keiner in
The Early Kabbalah, 75–76.
K a b ba l a h 105
Oral Torah gives expression to Written Torah, which is otherwise formless

in this world. It is only through the black fire that the white fire becomes
visible, only through the ink that the parchment takes on meaning. Only
through the interpretive process that is Oral Torah does Written Torah have
any significance in the world. Only as a lived Torah can it truly come to life.
In this regard, the Congregation of Israel functions not only as a commu-
nity of interpreters but also as a living Torah society: a social expression of
abstract theosophical ideas. The living God becomes manifest in his com-
munity through the medium of Torah, but Torah needs to be both inter-
preted and lived in order for this manifestation to actually occur. This is the
true meaning of Israel as Oral Torah, which is one point of a triangle, the
other points being Written Torah and God. Yet the societal aspect of this
equation does not stop with earthly action. In fact, one of the most salient
features of kabbalistic thought brings earthly action into the divine realm
with a stratagem known as ta’amei ha-mitzvot, that is, “the reasons for the
commandments.” On the interpretive level, these give cosmic significance to
even the most mundane of the commandments. While on the level of lived
experience, Israel truly comes to embody metaphysical, and even divinely
revelatory principles of Torah through entirely normative practices.
An interesting example of this is the seemingly obsolete biblical command
to allow the land of Israel to lay fallow once every seven years (Leviticus 25).
Indeed, not only is this a physical, time-bound and space-bound command-
ment, in a state of exile in medieval Europe, it no longer seems relevant. Yet
Nahmanides comments that it is “one of the great secrets of the Torah,”22
and then in his classical kabbalistic manner, he seems to conceal more than he
reveals. He does, however, mention that the commandment alludes to “all of
the days of the world,”23 which thus makes it one of the most stringent
commandments, whose transgression is punishable by exile. Such gravity was
noticed by subsequent kabbalists, and “days” came to be interpreted as
referring to the seven lower sefirot.24 In the process of interpretation, time
itself becomes hypostatized, and a seemingly mundane, outmoded com-
mandment takes on cosmic meaning that here infuses not only the people
of Israel, but also the land of Israel with theosophical significance. Not only in
this example but throughout kabbalistic thought, Israel’s state of exile is
related to its neglect of Torah. This situation is to be remedied through
Oral Torah, which Israel embodies through interpretation and the
22
Nahmanides, Commentary on Leviticus 25.
23
Nahmanides, Commentary on Leviticus 25.
24
For more on this, see Haviva Pedaya, Nahmanides: Cyclical Time and Holy Text [Hebrew]
(Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2003), especially 207–466.
performance of the commandments, and by which Torah, God, and Israel

can all be restored to their proper, integrative places.
5 Conclusion
I close with a quote from a late stratum of Zoharic literature, which brings
together the various elements of God, Torah, and Israel and infuses them
with righteousness in an attempt to define Kabbalah: “The Shekhinah [a
synonym for Malkhut] is called Righteousness, and the blessed Holy One is
the master, or husband of Righteousness.” The passage continues regarding
Malkhut: “She is certainly Oral Torah. And She is Kabbalah when she receives
from [her husband] the master of Righteousness, which is Written Torah.
When she [actively] goes to Him to receive, she is called Halakhah. When
She [passively] receives from Him, she is called Kabbalah.”25 Kabbalah here is
a hypostatic process that involves the union of the masculine and the
feminine elements of God as manifest in Torah and in Israel, respectively.
It is the subtle turning of halakhah (i.e., Jewish Law) on its head – yet without
subverting it, and precisely by means of infusing it with righteous, cosmic
meaning.
25
Tiqqunei ha-Zohar 21, 58a; cf. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 275.
10
MEDIEVAL CHRISTIAN MYSTICISM
B r u c e Mi l e m
1 Introduction
“Mysticism” is a modern designation that became widespread in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first scholars of mysticism,
such as William James, Evelyn Underhill, and Rudolf Otto, focused on what
they called mystical or religious experience, which they thought was the root
of all religion. This emphasis on experience is characteristically modern, in
harmony with doubts about tradition, authority, and institutions, and con-
gruent with modernity’s confidence in the experiential basis of science.
Because of the modern origins and character of the concept of “mysti-
cism,” we have to be careful when looking for mysticism in medieval
Christianity. It is not that medieval people did not have, or were not
interested in, extraordinary experiences of union with God. Rather, medie-
val people did not put the same weight on experience as an authority
different from tradition, Scripture, and church that modern people do.
They expected these authorities to agree. Moreover, medieval thinkers
typically put experiences of God within the context of the Christian’s gradual
transformation into a perfected human being who enjoyed some sort of
union or identity with God. This transformation, enacted in central
Christian rituals such as baptism and communion, is what mattered, not
the experiences. Still, some writers in the Middle Ages explored or empha-
sized the possibility that union with God is available in this life rather than
exclusively in heaven, and they are the focus of this essay.1 While some of
1
Mystical women writers of medieval Christianity are discussed in another essay in this
volume. Regrettably, space precludes discussion of Eastern Orthodox mystical theologians,
such as Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas. Two
classic works on Eastern Orthodox mystical theology are Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical
Theology of the Eastern Church (London: Clarke, 1957) and Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian
107
108 Bruce Mi lem
these writers saw union as the basis for extraordinary experiences, others
understood union as a permanent state of being that Christians could attain.
2 Two Early Influences: Augustine and Eriugena

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) had unparalleled influence on medieval
Christian theology. Although he is not usually considered a mystic, he
wrote extensively about how God is present to Christians on earth. One
way is through visions. In his Literal Commentary on Genesis, Augustine
explains that visions come in three kinds. First are visions in which one
perceives God by means of the senses, such as when the Israelites saw and
heard God descend to Mount Sinai. Second are imaginative visions, such as
those given to the prophets. The third kind of vision is purely intellectual,
without sense perception or images of any sort, in which one apprehends
God by the mind alone. This is the kind of vision enjoyed by those in heaven.
However, Augustine believed one can have the third kind of vision in this
life, and in his Confessions, he describes two that he himself had. Both
experiences have a three-step structure, which Augustine probably bor-
rowed from the pagan Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (204–270). First,
one has to turn one’s attention away from the senses and physical things.
Second, one turns inward and searches within oneself. In Book 10 of the
Confessions, for instance, Augustine finds traces of God’s presence in his own
memory. Another example is in the second half of his treatise On the Trinity,
where he argues that the best analogy to the triune God is the soul’s own
faculties of memory, knowledge, and will, which have separate functions but
make up one unified soul. In the third stage of the intellectual vision, one is
lifted above oneself to perceive God directly, without the mediation of
images. This last step happens only by God’s grace, and in this life such
experiences are partial and transient. Although they deliver knowledge
unavailable by other means, Augustine does not regard them as more author-
itative than the Bible or rational speculation.
Augustine’s Confessions provides a model for mystical encounter with God
in other ways as well. One aim of the book is to articulate Augustine’s sense
that God was with him at all times, even when Augustine himself was mired
in sin or error. By looking back at his life, Augustine discovers God’s
presence at every turn. He also uses the Bible in an influential way. It is
well known that Augustine presents the Confessions as a speech to God. But
Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 2: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–
1700) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
Med i e va l C h r i s t i a n My st i cis m 109
the conversation is not one-sided: God speaks too by means of the extensive
quotations from Scripture that Augustine includes. Like Christian thinkers
before and after him, Augustine believes that in reading the Bible, one
encounters God. This does not commit him to a literalist interpretation of
Scripture. Instead, he practices a “spiritual” or “mystical” style of interpreta-
tion that goes back at least as far as Origen (ca. 180–254). Indeed, the word
“mystical” in the Middle Ages mainly referred to a level of meaning in the
Bible hidden beneath the apparent literal meaning of the text. For instance,
Augustine reads the Garden of Eden story in Genesis not so much as history
but rather as an allegorical description of the human soul and its tendency
toward sin. In depicting the self and the Bible as the best places for discover-
ing the divine, Augustine influenced mystical thought in medieval
Christianity.
Another early influence is John Scotus Eriugena (ca. 800–ca. 877). In the
Periphyseon, he attempts to integrate Christian doctrine with Neoplatonic
ideas gleaned from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (ca. 500) and other
Greek authors. This leads him to develop the relationship between God and
created things in new and original ways. Since creation involves giving being
where there was none before, it follows that creatures are beings. God, on the
other hand, utterly transcends the limitations that define creatures and needs
to be conceived in a wholly different way. Consequently, if creatures are
beings, then God is not one, and it is better to call God “nothing.” This
“nothing” is not the same as nonexistence, since it is more excellent than the
being that creatures have. But Eriugena’s equation of God with nothing
shows that God is best described in negative terms rather than positive ones.
In addition, it allows Eriugena to reinterpret the Christian idea that God
creates everything from nothing: the nothing that God creates from is in
fact God.
Eriugena also maintains that creatures are the means by which God
expresses or reveals himself. The whole universe, then, is the manifestation
of God. These claims led to suspicions that Eriugena was a pantheist who
simply identified God with the universe and everything in it. His work was
even condemned as heretical in the thirteenth century. But Eriugena’s view
of creatures as God’s self-expression rests on the infinite difference between
God and creatures. His treatment of God oscillates between apparently
contradictory descriptions: God is identical with creatures in one sense but
utterly different from them in another. In this way, his thought is dialectical.
This aspect of his thinking, derived in part from Pseudo-Dionysius, influ-
enced later writers. Although Eriugena did not write or apparently care much
about mystical experiences, his understanding of ordinary things as the
110 Bruce Mi lem
self-expression of an utterly transcendent God makes them in some sense

divine and makes God present in everyday life.
3 Monastic Mysticism: Bernard of Clairvaux

Between the sixth and the thirteenth centuries, intellectual life in Western
Europe was based in monasteries. It was there that manuscripts were copied,
preserved, and studied. Many monasteries followed the rule of St. Benedict
(ca. 480–543), which required monks to spend part of each day working,
another part in prayer and worship, and a third part in study of the Scriptures
and theology. Catholic monasticism thus encouraged the cultivation of
spirituality, and monasteries produced several important mystical writers.
Hugh (ca. 1090–1141) and Richard (d. 1173), both of St. Victor, a monastery
outside Paris, offered the first systematic accounts of mystical contemplation,
which, as Hugh wrote, could in the end provide a foretaste of the Beatific
Vision of God in heaven. The greatest of the monastic writers is Bernard of
Clairvaux (1090–1153). He is also one of the greatest mystics of love in the
Christian tradition.
Famous in his own day as a preacher who helped to motivate the Second
Crusade and to promote the Cistercian monastic order, Bernard wrote
prolifically about the soul’s ascent to God. Like Augustine, he interpreted
the Bible mystically. This is clearest in his sermons on the Song of Songs, the
most erotic text in the Bible, which Bernard, following old Christian tradi-
tion, interprets allegorically as an account of the soul pursuing and being
pursued by God. He weaves many quotations and allusions to the rest of the
Bible into his commentary on the Song. This merges Bernard’s voice with
the divine voice of the Scriptures and offers a literary enactment of the union
with God that his sermons describe. Bernard combines his commentary on
the Song of Songs with a keen interest in spiritual experience. In one sermon,
he famously remarks that he will read from “the book of experience.”2 This
book is the Song of Songs, but Bernard’s description suggests that he reads it
through the lens of contemplative experience. In this way, Bernard treats the
Scripture and experience as mutually complementary. He occasionally
alludes to his own experiences, though he does not claim any special
authority from them.
In his treatise On Loving God, Bernard explains that one should approach
God through love, which deepens by degrees as one progresses. He urges
2
Sermon 3 on The Song of Songs, in Bernard of Clairvaux, Selected Works, trans. G. R. Evans
(Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1987), 221.
devotion especially to the incarnate Christ, who shares in the physical woes
of ordinary people. Bernard begins with the love that people commonly have
for themselves, which he associates with the body. The next stage consists in
loving God for the benefits that God gives. The third stage is loving God
unselfishly, simply in response to what God is. Finally, in the fourth stage, all
self-love fades away, and one views oneself as nothing apart from God’s will.
One’s love for God motivates one’s actions without hindrance by concern
with the body or its welfare. Bernard admits to being unsure that anyone
actually attains this love on earth, although he supposes that some of the
martyrs did. Such union with God attained through love nevertheless leaves
God and the soul as separate beings, just as love may be said to unite two
people who yet retain distinct identities.
4 The New Mysticism: Francis of Assisi and Bonaventure

Bernard McGinn argues that the year 1200 marks a shift in mystical thought
so profound that he calls it “the new mysticism.”3 Monastic life lost its place
at the center of Christian spirituality. Western Europe was urbanizing
rapidly, and people began working out new forms of spirituality. One
example was offered by the new mendicant orders of Franciscans and
Dominicans, who were not monks retired from the world but friars delib-
erately engaging it through preaching and works of service. Writers began to
use vernacular languages rather than Latin, and they began to write in
different genres as well: poems, allegories, spiritual biographies. Last but
not least, women authors began to contribute their ideas and experiences.
The character of this “new mysticism” can be seen in the founder of the
Franciscan order, Francis of Assisi (ca. 1181–1226). Born to a noble family, he
chose to live as a beggar devoted only to preaching the word of God in
imitation of Christ. Two years before his death, he reportedly had a vision of
an angel, a six-winged seraph, nailed to a cross. When the vision passed, he
discovered the marks of Crucifixion on his own body, in his hands, feet, and
side. These marks, called “stigmata,” were taken as signs of divine approval,
and Francis was apparently the first of many to receive them. He wrote little,
but among his writings is the “Canticle of Brother Sun,” a song or poem that
praises God for creating various natural phenomena that Francis addresses
with winning familiarity: “Lord Brother Sun,” “Sister Moon,” “Brother
3
Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–
1350), Vol. 3 of The Presence of God (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 1–30.
112 Bruce Mi lem
Wind,” even “Sister Bodily Death.” The poem offers the natural world as
one place for meeting God.
One of his followers in the Franciscan order was Bonaventure (1217–
1274), who synthesized ideas and themes from Francis, Pseudo-Dionysius,
Augustine, Bernard, and others in a superb work entitled The Mind’s Journey
to God. Inspired by Francis’s vision of the crucified angel, Bonaventure
sketches the path toward an experience of ecstatic union with God. His
“journey” has seven steps, with the first six arranged in pairs, corresponding
to the six wings of the crucified seraph. First, one looks at the natural world as
evidence of God’s creative activity. Then, second, one imaginatively con-
siders those same natural things as embodying God’s power and wisdom.
Third, one turns within and considers how the mind, with its powers of
memory, knowledge, and love, is an image of the Trinity. In the fourth step,
one contemplates the mind after its purification by divine grace, brought
through Christ. Fifth, one meditates on God as being or existence (esse). In
the sixth step, one considers God as “good,” which according to Pseudo-
Dionysius is the highest and best of God’s names. As Bonaventure explains,
to be good is to overflow with love and gifts. It is because of this love that the
one God spills over into the three persons of the Trinity. Out of love, God
chose to become human and die on the cross. Like Francis, Bonaventure
focuses on the crucified Christ. This vision arouses intense love, which in the
seventh and final step makes one “pass over” into an ecstatic state of loving
union with God. The mind is taken beyond itself, cannot grasp where it is,
and plunges into darkness, where it finds deep peace. This state is temporary
in this life, yet it gives a foretaste of heaven.
5 Rhineland Mysticism: Meister Eckhart

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Rhineland of Holland,
Belgium, eastern France, and western Germany proved to be a fertile area
for mystical thought and writing. In this region were many communities of
beguines, women interested in spirituality and ecstatic experience, who
frequently lived together but without taking vows or receiving official
church supervision. Some of these communities were eventually turned
into convents under the watch of Dominican friars. A considerable number
of writings survive from these beguinages and convents that show keen
interest in union with God and unusual experience. In addition, the
Dominicans ran a school in Cologne to educate its members. Founded by
Albert the Great (ca. 1200–1280), it counted Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1224–
1274) as an alumnus. Albert wanted to reconcile the doctrines of the church
with new texts from the ancient Greeks that were then becoming available,
including writings by Aristotle and Neoplatonic philosophers such as Proclus
(ca. 410–485). This inspired a particular strain of speculative theology that
merged the Aristotelian focus on being with the Neoplatonic idea of the
ineffable One from which all things arise. The most famous representative of
this school is Eckhart of Hochheim (ca. 1260–1328).
Born in Germany, Eckhart joined the Dominican order and was educated in
Cologne and Paris, where he received a master’s degree in theology and
became known forever after as “Meister” Eckhart. He wrote biblical com-
mentaries and other texts in Latin but also delivered sermons and penned
devotional works in Middle High German. Eckhart was both an academic
professor of theology and a devoted pastor. He was clearly aware of the ideas
spreading among the nuns, beguines, and other pious women and may have
been influenced by them. Eckhart interprets the relationship between God and
creatures in a dialectical way reminiscent of Eriugena. All things are dependent
on God the creator for everything that they are. In this sense, creatures in
themselves are nothing apart from God, and the being that they have is God’s
own being. It follows that God is indistinct from creatures. But creatures are
distinct and different from one another. This means that God, in being
indistinct from all creatures, is for that very reason distinct from them. In this
way, Eckhart shifts between contrary descriptions of God, who is both distinct
and indistinct from creatures, both absolutely identical with and completely
different from them. Nor does he strictly hold to the identification of God with
being and creatures with nothing. One can also look at being as something that
creatures have, in which case it makes more sense to speak of God as nothing,
not a thing, “neither this nor that,” as Eckhart often says.
While Bernard of Clairvaux understood union with God as a merging
of love that left God and the soul separate beings, Eckhart sometimes
describes a union in which God and the soul are fully merged. One
recurring image in Eckhart’s German works is the “ground” of the soul.
This ground, which is the source of the intellect and the will, also turns
out to be God’s ground. Similarly, Eckhart often talks about a “light” or
“spark” or “little castle” in the soul, where God and the soul are unified
in such a way that no distinction between them can be drawn. Eckhart
even says that God must put aside the persons of the Trinity in order to
be one with the soul. One unresolved question is whether Eckhart
understands this identity without distinction as a constant state of
being, an occasional event, or some combination of the two.
Eckhart repeatedly urges the practice of what he calls “detachment.” This
requires giving up self-centered goals and recognizing that all things are
114 Bruce Mi lem
nothing without God. It enables one to maintain equanimity in all circum-

stances whether good or bad. By letting things be rather than viewing them
in terms of our self-interest, we can perceive them in their sheer created
existence, which is wholly dependent on God. We then learn to serve others
with genuine compassion and no expectation of any reward. All things
become images of the divine, who is present in them and utterly transcendent
at the same time. Eckhart sometimes even claims that the truly detached
person compels God to come down and reside in him.
In developing these ideas, Eckhart relies in a special way on the Bible.
Most of his works are interpretations of Scripture that attempt to unearth the
hidden, spiritual meaning of particular passages. This mystical meaning is not
a static truth but instead the Word, identical with Christ, more of a living
presence than a doctrine. This Word is inexhaustible, and every verse in the
Bible can be given multiple interpretations. In his Latin commentaries,
Eckhart sometimes offers a dozen or more interpretations of a single verse.
In a way, union with God is attained through mystical interpretation of
Scripture, as the exegete works with God to draw out its inner meaning.
Eckhart’s sermons invite their listeners to share in this event too.
Toward the end of his life, Eckhart was accused of heresy and put on trial.
He died of natural causes before the final verdict, which condemned twenty-
eight propositions from his works as heretical or “badly-sounding.” His
judges worked from lists of suspicious propositions taken from Eckhart’s
writings without regard for their original context. This procedure ignores the
often poetic movement of Eckhart’s language and the dialectical character of
his thought, which balances assertions of the identity of God and creatures
against contrary statements of absolute difference. Eckhart insisted that even
if he were in error, he was no heretic, because heresy involves an act of
rebellion against the Church, to which he himself was unwaveringly loyal.
After Eckhart’s condemnation, his writings continued to circulate surrep-
titiously or with his name removed. Two of his friends and students, John
Tauler (ca. 1300–1361) and Henry Suso (ca. 1295–1366), defended and
developed his ideas but were also careful to state them in more orthodox
ways. Some later mystical writers, such as John Ruusbroec (1293–1381),
drew on Eckhart but also kept a critical distance.
6 Late Medieval Mysticism: Jean Gerson and Nicholas of Cusa

By the late fourteenth century, mystical writing emphasized experiences of the
divine and of love as the path to union. Jean Gerson’s (1363–1429) famous
definition of mystical theology exemplifies both trends. He defines it as the
experiential knowledge of God achieved through loving union with God.

Gerson distinguishes mystical theology from academic or scholastic theology,
which proceeds by intellectual reflection on the Scripture and church doctrine.
For Gerson, the experience of union with God attained through love is itself a
source of knowledge distinct from that provided by conventional theology.
His definition points the way toward the modern concept of “mysticism.”
Writers in England in the fourteenth century also emphasize experience
and love. Julian of Norwich (1342–ca. 1416) and Richard Rolle (ca. 1300–
1349) recount visionary experiences that they use as the basis for theological
reflection. Developing ideas from Thomas Gallus (ca. 1200–1246) and rein-
terpreting Pseudo-Dionysius, the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing (late four-
teenth century) portrays love as the primary force in the ascent to God.
The last great mystical theologian of medieval Christianity is the bishop
and cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). He is sometimes considered the
first great modern thinker as well. Although medieval intellectuals thought
the universe was finite, Cusanus proposed that it was infinite. He was fond of
using mathematical images and examples to illustrate theological ideas. Some
scholars maintain that his theory of knowledge resembles the one developed
by Kant three centuries later.
Cusanus also looks back to the dialectical style of theology practiced by
Eriugena and Eckhart. He portrays God as the “coincidence of opposites,” in
that contradictory terms apply equally well to the divine. God is both the
absolute maximum and the absolute minimum, both being and nonbeing,
and so on. Yet, while we are compelled to describe God in these contrary
terms, we must also recall that God is absolutely one, beyond the duality
implied by our paradoxical descriptions. Doing theology in this way, one
gradually recognizes how little about God one actually knows, and one
acquires what Nicholas calls “learned ignorance.”
Cusanus’s most important contribution to mystical thought is his treatise
On the Vision of God. He sent the treatise to monks in Tegernsee, Germany,
along with an icon (probably of Christ) painted in such a way that the icon’s
eyes appear to be looking right at viewers no matter where they stand. The
treatise then takes off from the experience of contemplating the icon. One
looks, of course, but seeing the icon means being seen by it. In seeing the
icon, one sees the icon seeing and sees oneself being seen. Cusanus’s treatise
plays with this ambiguity throughout, which is signaled in the title On the
Vision of God: Is God the subject seeing or the object seen? If several people
are looking at the icon at once, then one also realizes that everyone else is
having the same experience. Everyone in the room is enfolded into the one
gaze of the icon.
116 Bruce Mi lem
This gaze is both particular and universal. It regards each person indivi-
dually, but it also views them all in one. This strange gaze expresses the
relationship between God and creatures, which Cusanus conveys in two
linked terms: explicatio, or unfolding, and complicatio, enfolding. The created
universe is the unfolding of all things in their multiplicity from the singularity
that is God. Yet God is the absolute infinite that enfolds all things within
itself. In this way, Cusanus identifies God with the created universe while
also maintaining God’s distinction from and transcendence of it. In addition,
just as seeing the icon means being seen by it, so Cusanus argues that loving
God coincides with being loved by God. Although the believer’s love or
desire for God could be taken as a longing for something absent, Cusanus
makes it instead a sign of God’s presence. His speculative theology urges
Christians to reconsider their concept of God and think about their ordinary
experience as believers in a new way.
7 Conclusion
Although the emphasis on experience in mysticism is characteristically mod-
ern, it is true that medieval Christian mysticism makes room for extraordin-
ary experiences and visions. Bernard of Clairvaux and Bonaventure set out a
path toward union with God culminating in an ecstatic experience, even if it
is best described, as in Bonaventure, as a kind of darkness. Many writers give
accounts of their visions. But some of the writers who are usually acclaimed
as mystics, such as Eckhart, Eriugena, and Cusanus, do not emphasize
experiences or visions. Their mysticism consists in a particular way of think-
ing about God that tries to articulate how God is present in ordinary things
and everyday experience. All three use a dialectical or paradoxical mode of
speech that balances contrary descriptions of God against each other.
Although God is identical with ordinary things, God is also absolutely
transcendent and unlike them. Following their path of thinking may not
lead to any special, peak mystical experiences, but it can infuse all things with
a new significance as expressions or images of God. Thus, mysticism in the
medieval context includes not just ecstatic raptures but also abstract specula-
tion and a quiet transformation of quotidian experience.
Christian mysticism of the Middle Ages existed for the most part in
harmony with the institutions and doctrines of the Catholic Church.
Augustine, Bernard, Bonaventure, Eckhart, and Cusanus all occupied
important offices in the church or in their monastic or fraternal orders.
Although Eriugena and Eckhart were ultimately condemned for espousing
heretical views, both declared themselves loyal to the Church. Augustine
played a crucial role in drawing the lines between orthodoxy and heresy.
Bernard actively preached against heresy. They all put the Bible at the center
of their reflection on God. For these reasons, it would be incorrect to suppose
that mysticism in the Middle Ages flourished best in the margins. Instead, it
can be found in the mainstream of medieval Catholic theology and spiri-
tuality. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, when writers began to speak of
mystical theology in opposition to academic speculative theology, and when
church authorities became concerned about new movements of popular
spirituality, the harmonious accord between mysticism and church institu-
tions started to break down. In this respect, the story of medieval Christian
mysticism reflects the larger pattern of social fragmentation in Western
Europe that helps set the scene for the modern period.
11
H I L D E G A R D O F B I N G E N A N D W O M E N ’S
MYSTICISM
Anne L. Clark
1 Frauenmystik or “Women’s Mysticism”

In the Middle Ages, Christian women as well as men committed them-
selves to the practices of prayer, meditation, and asceticism that were the
conditions usually associated with the mystical life. Some of them also
committed themselves to producing texts in which they strove to com-
municate what they learned through their practices. The history of scho-
larship on medieval Christian mysticism has traditionally privileged texts
by male authors as representing the pinnacle or at least the mainstream of
mystical accomplishment, thereby marginalizing texts by women as sec-
ondary or derivative. Recent attention to women’s texts as representing
“feminine” mysticism is usually marked by an insistence on their affectiv-
ity and on “paramystical” physical phenomena. These approaches obscure
how thoroughly affective many mystical texts by men are, how male
mystics were often influenced by women, and how male texts about
female mystics tended to emphasize paramystical experience. “Women’s
mysticism” is thus a problematic category, and the attention to women’s
mystical texts in this essay is not an assertion of any inherently female
essence to the subject matter. What is common to most if not all women’s
mystical literature is an awareness of the suspicion about women’s author-
ity to teach, or a discomfort with cultural assumptions about the nature of
women and their religiosity. These commonalities are due, of course, not
to an essential female nature but to women’s awareness of cultural norms
that ascribed to them a particularly carnal nature, and that positioned men
as authoritative teachers, mediators of sacramental grace, and confessors
of sins.
I offer here a characterization of mystical life that is relevant for the study of
both male and female medieval mystics. It is a life structured by “tuning” the
118
Hi ldeg ard of B ing en an d Women’ s M ystic ism 119
self – body, mind, and emotions – to seek the presence of the divine,1 and
preparing the self to be invaded or flooded or lifted up, thus losing a clear
sense of the boundaries of the self. The emphasis here is on a structured life of
practice, not a single type of “peak experience.” Furthermore, where extra-
ordinary psychological experiences are described, they are often not the
primary focus of the authors’ concerns; rather, mystical authors are often
primarily concerned with praising God, teaching proper devotion, and
leading the moral life.2
For most of the Middle Ages, the structure that supported mystical religion
was monastic, a community life of moderate asceticism organized to mini-
mize the importance of individual will. The primary activity of the mon-
astery was the Divine Office, an elaborate course of shared ritual composed
primarily of singing the psalms found in the Psalter of the Old Testament.
The texts of these rituals as well as other books of the Bible provided the
sustenance for lifelong meditation; that is, ruminative reading and reflection.
Furthermore, the lifelong participation in the Divine Office, with its repe-
titive chanting of the psalms and other hymns, enabled the effects that Judith
Becker ascribes to music in trance experience: “by enveloping the trancer in
a soundscape that suggests, invokes, or represents other times and distant
spaces, the transition out of quotidian time and space comes easier.” Such a
transition could involve “feelings of nearness to the sacred, loss of boundaries
between self and other, experience of wholeness and unity,” or sometimes
feelings of anguish or pain, as well as gnosis.3 The other principal ritual of the
Middle Ages, the celebration of the Eucharist, seems to have been cultivated,
especially by women, as an opportunity for intimate experience of the
presence of God.4 Thus, mystical practice was deeply rooted in the liturgical
life of the medieval church, and this liturgical foundation is often apparent in
the mystical texts.
Despite limited literacy throughout the Middle Ages, there is none-
theless a significant body of mystical literature associated with women.
Some of this literature is hagiographical, that is, texts written about parti-
cular individuals that testify to their holiness. Women who were perceived
by others to have extraordinary connections to God were often the subjects
1
Cf. Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century
(New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999), 81.
2
Grace M. Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 5.
3
Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004), 27, 54–55.
4
Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to
Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
120 Anne L. Clark
of hagiographies, and sometimes these texts contain fascinating portraits of

women engaged in mystical pursuits. However, hagiographies are heavily
inflected by their (usually male) authors’ perspectives. Because they offer
idealized models of sanctity based on particular assumptions about female
nature, they must be treated with caution as sources for women’s mysti-
cism. There are also many texts that more reliably transmit women’s words
about their own experience and their mystical thought, and these will be
the primary focus of this essay. Within these texts, women’s claims about
their experience of divine presence vary widely, and no normative taxon-
omy is offered here to rank them.
2 The Life and Works of Hildegard of Bingen

Perhaps now the most famous religious woman of the Middle Ages,
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was widely regarded in her own day as
a prophet and visionary. From the age of fourteen, Hildegard lived in a
monastic community, first in a small women’s hermitage attached to a
community of Benedictine monks in Disibodenberg, then in a monastery
for women that she founded in Rupertsberg, against the initial wishes of her
abbot. Hildegard claimed that from a young age she sensed in herself “the
power and mystery of secret and wonderful visions,” but the turning point in
her life came at the age of forty-two when she suddenly experienced an
outpouring from heaven: “A greatly flashing fiery light coming from the
opened heavens poured down over my brain and inflamed my whole breast –
not like a burning flame but a warming one, as when the sun warms whatever
it shines its rays upon” (Scivias, Prologue).5 Hildegard’s sense of divine
inspiration recalls the story in Acts of the Apostles, when the sound of a
mighty wind filled the house where the disciples of Jesus were gathered
together, and “tongues as if of fire” appeared above the head of each of them,
“and they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in various
tongues” (Acts 2:2–4). As the author of Acts portrays this fiery invasion
loosening the tongues of the Apostles in a miraculous way, so Hildegard
portrays her own fiery, tongue-loosening experience bringing immediate
knowledge that must be shared: “And suddenly I tasted the understanding of
the exposition of Scripture – namely, the Psalter, the Gospels and other
catholic books from the Old Testament as well as the New” (Scivias,
5
Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 2 vols., ed. Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris.
Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 43, 43A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978).
Translations from Latin texts are my own.
Prologue). She hears a voice from heaven identifying itself as “living and dark
light illuminating the person I have chosen,” which commands her by words
and by “the whip” of illness to write what she sees and hears. Hildegard
emphasizes that what she describes as seeing, hearing, taste, and touch should
not be confused with normal sensory perception and was not experienced in
ecstasy or dreams. Yet her expression also suggests her sense of being invaded
and changed by divine power, transforming her into a channel of the
mysteries of God.
The noetic aspect of this initiatory experience continues in a series of
visions that unfold for the rest of Hildegard’s life. This was the basis for her
composition of three major works, Scivias (Know the Ways), Liber vitae
meritorum (The Book of Life’s Merits), and Liber divinorum operum (The Book of
Divine Works). Each of these works is presented as a vividly detailed record of
her visions, which describe scenarios of movement and sound, including
verbal explications of the visions provided by a voice from heaven. A copy of
the Scivias produced in Hildegard’s monastery included brilliant paintings of
the visions, and an illuminated manuscript of the Liber divinorum operum.
Although not produced at Rupertsberg, it was probably adapted from
pictorial designs by Hildegard no longer extant.6 These manuscripts attest
to Hildegard’s attempt to communicate the fullness of her experience, both
visually and verbally.
Hildegard also wrote a long musical play, the Ordo Virtutum (Order of
Virtues), several minor theological, pastoral, and hagiographic works, and a
glossary of her own neologisms. She composed more than seventy pieces of
liturgical music, mostly intended for use in the Divine Office, and gathered
them into a collection entitled Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum
(Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations). Hundreds of Hildegard’s
letters to a wide array of correspondents are also extant, attesting to her deep
involvement in the affairs of her world, and to the keen desire of many people
to seek her counsel, or occasionally to question her about her claims to divine
revelation. Hildegard was also profoundly interested in the human body,
medicine, and the natural world, and she produced two scientific texts. The
first was the Physica or Liber simplicis medicinae (The Book of Simple Medicine), an
encyclopedia of natural history, including works on the properties of plants,
animals, stones, and other elements of nature. The other was the Liber
compositae medicinae or Causae et curae (Book of Compound Medicine or Causes
6
Madeline H. Caviness, “Hildegard as Designer of the Illustrations to Her Works,” in
Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of Her Thought and Art, ed. Charles Burnett and Peter
Dronke (London: The Warburg Institute, 1998), 29–62.
122 Anne L. Clark
and Cures), a treatise describing diseases and their cures. She understood her
own physical suffering (diagnosed in modern times as migraine) as part of her
experience of being used by God.
Hildegard’s visionary mode of writing broke with the medieval tradition
of citing textual authorities to support one’s perspective. This style, com-
bined with her claims of divinely infused knowledge, might suggest that she
had a relatively limited education. However, as new scholarship continues to
demonstrate, Hildegard seems to have absorbed much of the intellectual
traditions available to a twelfth-century monastic. Although the written
word (with its meaning sometimes enlarged by paintings and melodies) was
Hildegard’s primary means of expression, she also traveled to Trier and to
Cologne to preach, an indication of how eager her contemporaries were to
hear her message.
The mystical life for Hildegard was hardly one of withdrawal from the
world or pursuit of solitary contemplation. Her astonishingly diverse corpus
of writings, her preaching tours, the two monasteries she founded, her care
and education of the nuns at Rupertsberg, her correspondence with kings,
popes, bishops, abbots, abbesses, and laypeople – all of this shows that for
Hildegard the mystical life was the source she drew on to shape the world as
much as she could.
3 Hildegard’s Vision
Although “holistic” is a word often associated with modern or postmodern
sensibilities (especially those drawing on ecology or New Age spirituality), it
is not at all anachronistic to use it to describe the worldview Hildegard
created from what she perceived to be divine visions. Characteristic of her
holistic vision of reality is the concept of viriditas, a “greenness” that is alive,
powerful, moist and fresh, fertile.7 In an early vision of the Trinity in which
the figures seen are described as having the colors of sapphire, glowing fire,
and bright light (none of which literally suggests green), Hildegard declares
that what is conveyed is the viriditas of God that is the source of his creative
work. Consequently, the work of creation enables human perception of God
(Scivias, II.2.1). Hildegard’s scientific interest in nature is part of this larger
vision of the world as manifesting divine viriditas. Given that the earth’s
viriditas is literally the source of green plants that nourish animals, it both
symbolizes human fertile physicality and points humanity beyond itself to the
7
Constant Mews, “Religious Thinker,” in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her
World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 56–61.
creator (Scivias, II.1.2). Viriditas is most fully expressed in the incarnation of

God in the body of the Virgin Mary, a belief that elicited Hildegard’s most
rapturous poetry. “In you blossomed the beautiful flower which gave fra-
grance to all the spices that were dry. / And at that, they all appeared in full
viridity” (“O viridissima virga”).8 The redemption of a disordered cosmos
through divine incarnation enabled the establishment of Ecclesia
(Hildegard’s personified image of the church), whose righteous members
make her “burst forth with buds and spread out with blessed viridities”
(Scivias, II.5.26).
Although Hildegard affirms viriditas as the foundation for divine, human,
and cosmic correspondences, she also asserts that one particular type of
human life is most exalted for maintaining this essential connection to
God: the monastic life of virginity, best expressed by the life of virginal
women (Scivias, II.5.1–26). For Hildegard, as winter dries out the viriditas of
the grass, so marriage leads to human aridity. But the virgin “stands in the
simplicity and beautiful integrity of paradise, which never will appear dry but
will always remain in the greenness of flower” (Ep. 52 r).9 Virginal bodies
retain the qualities of earthly paradise; sexual bodies reflect the corrupted
nature of a fallen world. Virginal bodies – especially, again, female ones – also
are most fully capable of making the music that Hildegard wrote, music
created for singing in the Divine Office.10 Music, like viriditas itself, is
something that binds heaven and earth together, bridging the gap between
the present and the Edenic past, where the virginal bodies of Adam and Eve
sang with the angelic choirs (Ep. 73).
Hildegard’s visionary experience led her to articulate the presence of the
divine in the form of powerful female entities, especially Sapientia or Caritas,
the embodiment of God’s eternal counsel. Barbara Newman has demon-
strated how Hildegard’s female figures express God’s eternity and cosmic
relations. But Hildegard’s use of male figures, for example Father and Son,
comes to the fore in her meditations on the particularities of history.11 Thus,
Hildegard enlarged biblical wisdom traditions to create a theology that gave
full expression to her sense of divine fecundity and beauty, qualities also
embodied in the earth and in Hildegard herself as revealer of this divinity
8
Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia, 2nd ed., trans. Barbara Newman (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 126, translation modified.
9
Hildegard of Bingen, Epistolarium, 3 vols., ed. L. Van Acker and Monica Klaes, Corpus
Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 91–91B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991–2001).
10
Bruce Holsinger, “The Flesh of the Voice: Embodiment and the Homoerotics of Devotion
in the Music of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179),” Signs 19:1 (1993), 92–125.
11
Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987), 45–46.
124 Anne L. Clark
(Liber divinorum operum, III.3.2).12 Her sense of the divine as overwhelming all
categories also led to images that overwhelm all verbal or visual logic. In the
Liber divinorum operum, she described a fantastic hybrid figure: an image
standing erect with a bright splendor obscuring its head, with lion’s feet
and six wings. The rest of its body was covered in fish scales, except for its
belly, where there was a human head with white hair and a beard. This image
simultaneously represents God, human beings created in God’s image, the
Son of God, the pregnant body of the Virgin Mary, and perhaps even the
body of Eve holding within her the future generations of human beings.
Whereas hybrids or monsters often convey a sense of impurity or threat,
Hildegard’s vision emphasizes the jubilant impossibility of maintaining con-
sistent boundaries between human and divine. In spite of all her attention to
the pastoral crises of her day, Hildegard’s ultimate experience of the presence
of the divine was cosmic harmony, whether expressed in music, viriditas,
Sapientia, or a monstrous image of superabundant meaning.
4 Other Visionary Nuns

Hildegard of Bingen’s mode of visionary writing had no exact imitators.
Elisabeth of Schönau (1128/29–1164/65) knew Hildegard and was influ-
enced by her visionary expression, but her own works are strikingly different.
Elisabeth explicitly described her visions as occurring while she was in
ecstasy, or rapture, or mentis excessus, outside of her normal cognitive process.
Yet, although she was not afraid to admit her loss of normal consciousness,
her texts retain a vivid personal voice. By contrast, those of Hildegard are
dominated by an attempt to represent the voice of the Living Light rather
than her own. These contrasts are linked to differing views of mystical
experience. Whereas Hildegard saw herself as chosen by God to receive
divine revelation, Elisabeth had a more complicated sense of mystical agency.
She was aware of how her own actions, particularly devout prayer, could
influence the course of her ecstatic experience. The monastic liturgy was
often the setting and even the trigger for her ecstasies, and so it is not
surprising that she affirmed that sometimes her trances and encounters with
heavenly beings were shaped by the actions of other members of her com-
munity. Also, Elisabeth described her experiences as much more dialogic or
interactive than Hildegard’s. Elisabeth spoke with the various angels and
saints she encountered, and she spoke with members of her monastic
12
Hildegard of Bingen, Liber divinorum operum, ed. A. Derolez and P. Dronke, Corpus
Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 92 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1996).
community. Mediating between these two areas of engagement was a

powerful part of her life. Elisabeth claimed occasionally to hear the voice
of the Lord, but her most frequent and important experiences are encounters
with angels and saints, especially the Virgin Mary. This too sets her apart from
Hildegard, who portrayed an exclusive relationship with the Living Light,
despite her keen interest in the various ways in which the divine presence
manifests itself.
The dialogic character and sense of mystical embeddedness in a liturgical
community that mark Elisabeth’s visionary works emerge even more force-
fully in the works of Gertrude “the Great” (1256–ca. 1301–2), who lived in
the monastery of Helfta and contributed substantially to its vibrant intellec-
tual and devotional culture. Legatus memorialis abundantiae divinae pietatis (The
Memorial Herald of the Abundance of Divine Love) is a collaboratively written
work enshrining both first-person and third-person accounts of Gertrude’s
mystical life. It was part of a decades-long effort at Helfta to produce a
literature of spiritual guidance that would foster within the community the
kind of experience that Gertrude cultivated in herself.
The Legatus attests to a belief in a permeable sense of both the divine and
human being. For example, a wound – the puncturing of the skin that opens
up the body – is a powerful focus of attention for Gertrude. She prayed for
her own heart to be inscribed with Christ’s wounds and felt that she did
actually receive the stigmata in her heart (Legatus, II.4.3).13 Later she prayed
for her heart to be transfixed by the arrow of Christ’s love. When she
received the Eucharist, she looked at the painting of the Crucifixion in her
prayer book and saw coming out of the wound in Christ’s side a ray of
sunlight pointed like an arrow. This arrow moved toward her but retreated –
arousing but not satisfying her desire. Three days later, Christ appeared to
her, “inflicting a wound in my heart,” which led Gertrude to acknowledge
him as the one who “was made bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”
(Legatus, II.5.2–4). Evoking the words of Adam greeting his new spouse Eve,
Gertrude acclaims Christ as her intimate partner who has made them one in
substance.
This focus on wounding and mutual interpenetration is not a celebration
of a spiritual height accessible to her alone. Gertrude described the
Eucharistic ritual, the prayers spoken, the material stimulants (e.g., the
painting in her prayer book), and even her own lukewarm devotion, all of
which teach her audience about how to pursue this path. As she
13
Legatus divinae pietatis in Le Héraut, 4 vols., ed. Pierre Doyère et al. Sources Chrétiennes 139,
143, 255, 331 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1968–1986).
126 Anne L. Clark
acknowledged, her book was written so that Christ would offer such benefits
to many people (Legatus, II.10.1). Other testimonies in the Legatus portray
Gertrude’s penetration into Christ as directly connecting God to the world
through her. For example, after receiving the Eucharist, Gertrude saw her
soul “in the likeness of a tree having its root fixed in the wound in the side of
Jesus Christ. Through that wound as if through the root, she felt herself
penetrated in a marvelous new way by the power of the humanity and
divinity passing through each of her branches and fruits and leaves, in such
a way that the fruit of his whole life took on a greater splendor though her”
(Legatus, III.18.16). Gertrude then prayed that others in heaven, on earth, and
in purgatory might benefit from the divine grace she received. Whereupon
she saw each of the fruits on her tree exude a most powerful liquid that
flowed forth to increase the joy of those in heaven, to mitigate the punish-
ments of those in purgatory, and to enhance both the sweetness of grace for
the just and the bitterness of punishment for sinners on earth. As Anna
Harrison has shown, the nuns of Helfta embraced the communal monastic
liturgy as an ongoing opportunity to move into an intimacy with Christ.
Feeling his divinity infused in them, they taught the members of their
community how to feel Christ’s proximity through their liturgy and through
joining with Christ in the work of salvation.14
5 Beguines and New Possibilities

In the early thirteenth century, some women forged a new style of religious
life embracing poverty, prayer, chastity, and often charitable work such as
care for the sick and dying. They did not take formal monastic vows,
although they sometimes lived together in informal communities. These
women were known as “beguines,” and their life in the world (instead of in a
monastery) offered them new possibilities for creating mystical lives – yet it
also made them the frequent target of suspicion about their lifestyle and their
mystical claims.
Hadewijch, about whom little biographical detail is known, was a
beguine living in thirteenth-century Brabant. She probably acted as an
informal leader of a small group of beguines, and she wrote a substantial
collection of poems, visions, and letters in her native Dutch. Some of her
works show familiar elements such as the mystical possibilities of communal
liturgy, especially the celebration of the Eucharist. Erotic imagery adapted
14
Anna Harrison, “‘I Am Wholly Your Own’: Liturgical Piety and Community Among the
Nuns of Helfta,” Church History 78:3 (2009), 549–583.
from the Song of Songs, which can be seen in Gertrude of Helfta, explodes
in Hadewijch’s works as she takes over the language of Minnesang, German
love poetry in the courtly tradition, to teach about the ecstasies and horrors
of loving God.
Hadewijch’s visions include some of the most explicit attempts to convey
the extremity of desire. For example, she describes her tremulous presence at
a service of morning prayer sung in church on Pentecost Sunday,
My heart and my veins and all my limbs trembled and quivered with eager
desire and, as often occurred with me, such madness and fear beset my mind
that it seemed to me I did not content my Beloved, and that my Beloved
did not fulfill my desire, so that dying I must go mad, and going mad I must
die. (Vision 7)15
At a communal liturgy on the feast celebrating the infusion of the Holy Spirit
into the world and into Christ’s disciples, Hadewijch describes herself on the
brink of frenzy as she wants her Beloved to “content” her in his godhead,
holding nothing back. For this, she desires to “give satisfaction in all great
sufferings . . . to grow up in order to be God with God.” She then sees her
Beloved, first as a three-year-old child, coming to her with the Eucharistic
bread and chalice, then as a man. After giving her the Eucharist, “he came
himself to me, took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my
members felt his full felicity, in accordance with the desire of my heart and
my humanity.” But then he seemed to dissolve, so that she could not see him
outside of her or distinguish him within: “Then it seemed to me as if we were
one without difference. . .. I wholly melted away in him and nothing any
longer remained to me of myself” (Vision 7).
The divinizing experience of “being God with God” opens Hadewijch to
a kind of knowledge that pierces her: the knowledge of damnation. In
another vision, Hadewijch describes seeing the countenance of her
Beloved, in which she recognized “all the countenances and all the forms
that ever existed and ever shall exist” and saw the reason for the damnation or
blessing of every one who had ever lived (Vision 6). Her vision pans out to
encompass the mystery of divine judgment, causing her to fall out of this
visionary ecstasy but into “fruition of his Nature, which is Love.” This
movement from a God’s eye view of human wretchedness and beatitude to
being engulfed in the enjoyment of God’s nature ends with a return to the
moral life, now transformed: she now must live “in conformity with my
15
Quotations of Hadewijch are from Hadewijch, The Complete Works, trans. Columba Hart
(New York: Paulist Press, 1980).
128 Anne L. Clark
Divinity and my Humanity – back again into the cruel world, where you
must taste every kind of death” (Vision 6). The suffering that Hadewijch
experiences in the world is the agony of God’s absence, the struggle to keep
up the pursuit despite its seeming folly, and the torment of identifying with
the damning, not just the loving, power of God (Vision 5). The struggle of
the pursuit is most fully expressed in Hadewijch’s poems, in which she
becomes the lover-knight of Minnesang, pursuing Minne, Lady Love, who
demands the impossible yet somehow entices her lover “to sally forth to meet
my doom” (Poems in Stanzas, 9.1.10). Doom, enemy, battle, violence: For
Hadewijch the mystical life requires the masculine aggression of the knight as
he tries to conquer his fierce Lady. Love is not simply languishing in desire.
As Barbara Newman puts it, for Hadewijch love demands “unfaith,” “an
angry, no-holds-barred demand for reciprocity . . . a fierce determination to
‘stand up to’ infinite Being, demanding all of Love’s love for all of one’s
own.”16 Hadewijch crafted a new language of love, ecstatic and agonistic,
whereby the sweetness of enjoying the Beloved is never far from the terror of
madness, the acceptance of suffering, and the bracing awareness that one is
out to conquer God.
As Amy Hollywood has shown, Marguerite Porete (d. 1310), another
beguine, rejected a mysticism grounded in visionary experience and the
acceptance of suffering. Instead, she articulated a path of divinization through
the annihilation of reason and the will. The courtly language of love is still
used, but for Marguerite, love’s demand is self-annihilation. Freedom is
achieved by this annihilation: The soul is freed from the exhausting, inex-
haustible demands of the virtuous life. Yet, being fully united with the
divine, the soul becomes unable to sin and is returned to its natural, unfallen
state.17 Marguerite’s book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, was condemned for the
radicalism of her language of annihilation and her seeming amorality. When
she refused to recant the teachings therein, she was burned at the stake.
6 Conclusion
Marguerite’s fate points to the growing danger for women experimenting
with new ways of expressing their experience of God’s presence – especially
16
Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 177, 182.
17
Amy Hollywood, “Suffering Transformed: Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, and the
Problem of Women’s Spirituality,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics: Hadewijch of
Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York:
Continuum, 1994), 87–113.
beguines and laywomen who did not have the protection of monastic
communities. The sharply divided response to Margery Kempe (1373–1438),
a married woman who claimed to marry Christ and be assured of her own
salvation, drew on the increased cultural willingness to attribute women’s
mystical claims to demonic rather than divine inspiration.
Accusations of heresy or demonic possession, the rich symbolic environ-
ment of the liturgy, and the discipline of monastic practice – all of these
cultural elements point to the social embeddedness of the mystical life.
Medieval women – many more than have been discussed here – used the
resources of their religion to develop means of perceiving, uniting with, and
being transformed by the brilliant, sometimes scorching presence of their
God. Their creativity and commitment to articulating their sometimes
startling expressions of God and self are among the most vibrant aspects of
medieval Christianity, and a crucial chapter in the history of Western
mysticism.
III
The Renaissance and Early

Modernity
M
12
RENAISSANCE HERMETISM
A n t o i n e Fa i v r e
1 Hermetism: A Definition
“Hermetism” (adjective: “hermetic”) has two complementary meanings.
First, it designates the works known as the Hermetica, written in Greek at
the dawn of our era in the region of Alexandria. The term “Alexandrian
Hermetism” is often used to refer to these works, which deal with matters
such as cosmology, spiritual illumination, and theurgy. A collection dating
from the second and third centuries CE, dubbed the Corpus Hermeticum
(henceforth CH) at the beginning of the Renaissance, stands out within
this body of works. It is composed of seventeen short treatises, which were
oftentimes to be edited along with the Asclepius, and the fragments attributed
to Stobaeus. Their “author” or inspirer is the legendary figure Hermes
Trismegistus, or Hermes the “thrice great,” associated in many different
(and conflicting) mythical genealogies with the Egyptian Thoth and the
Greek Hermes.
In the expression “Neo-Alexandrian Hermetism,” however, Hermetism
refers to the various works, adaptations, and commentaries that stand in the
philosophical or religious wake of the Hermetica, particularly of the CH, in
the Middle Ages but principally from the Renaissance until the present day.
The term “Hermeticism,” which is vague, is frequently used as a synonym
for esotericism and also for alchemy.
2 Rediscovery and First Publication of the CH at the Dawn

of the Renaissance
In the Middle Ages, there had been no dearth of literature following in the
tradition of the Hermetica and/or inspired by the figure of Hermes
Trismegistus, but the CH itself had been lost since around the fifth century
133
134 Antoine Fai vre
(save for the Asclepius, originally known in Greek as Logos Teleios, which
survived in an ancient Latin translation only). Around the year 1460, a monk
named Leonardo da Pistoia discovered fourteen treatises of the CH in
Macedonia. These had been gathered together in the eleventh century, and
it was in this form that the Byzantine Platonist Psellus had known them.
Pistoia brought the treatises to the ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici the
Elder, who had entrusted Marsilio Ficino with the creation of a Platonic
Academy. Cosimo and Ficino had intended to have the available writings of
Plato translated into Latin; however, when they learned of these fourteen
treatises (CH I–XIV), Cosimo insisted that Ficino temporarily set aside his
Latin translation of Plato and work on the hermetic texts instead. In 1463,
Ficino completed his translation of the treatises, which was printed at Treviso
in 1471 under the title Mercurii Trismegisti Pimander Liber de potestate et sapientia
Dei, together with a prefatory argument (Argumentum) by Ficino himself. In
his Argumentum, Ficino called attention to the Asclepius, which he called “the
most divine” of this kind of literature (an edition of the Asclepius had just been
printed in Rome in 1469 and inserted into Apuleius’s Opera). He also
described a “genealogy of wisdom,” which he elsewhere called prisca theologia
(ancient theology), consisting of six main figures: Mercurius (Hermes)
Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus (an Orphic teacher of Pythagoras),
Pythagoras, Philolaus, and Plato. That list was later to undergo various
changes depending on the authors who presented it.
The CH (often published under the title of the first treatise, Poimandres, or
Pimander in Ficino’s 1471 translation) and the Asclepius enjoyed considerable
success throughout the Renaissance. Up to 1641, no fewer than twenty-four
Latin editions appeared, not counting partial ones or translations into other
languages. In addition, there were many commentaries. This literature was a
central element in European culture, mostly among learned and prominent
members of society. A large part of these commentaries constitutes Neo-
Alexandrian Hermetism proper, one of the so-called modern esoteric currents.
3 Other Key Figures at the End of the Fifteenth Century: Giovanni

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni da Corregio,
and Lodovico Lazzarelli
Anthony Woodville’s English translation of several of the hermetic texts in
the anthology The dyctes or sayengis of the philosophers bears witness to an early,
albeit discreet presence of the CH in England. In fact, it was the first dated
book in the history of English printing: published by William Caxton in
Westminster in 1477. In Italy, the reception was much wider.
R e na i ssa nc e H e rmetis m 135
For example, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate

(1486) begins with a reference to the “Magnum, O Asclepi, miraculum”
passage of the Asclepius (Ascl. 6). Pico synthesized the hermetic traditions
advanced by Ficino with the Kabbalah, which he believed had been entrusted
to Moses on Mount Sinai. Two years before, on Palm Sunday of 1484, there
appeared in Rome a certain Giovanni da Correggio. On the banks of the
Manara, he put on winged shoes and a crown of thorns topped with a crescent
moon bearing the inscription: “This is my son Poimandres, whom I have
chosen.” Mounting a white donkey, he made a speech in which he called
himself the “angel of Wisdom, Poimandres, in the highest and greatest ecstasy
of the Spirit of Jesus Christ.” He seems to have believed that Poimandres (CH
I) had been identical with the Logos who had first appeared to Hermes, then
incarnated in Christ, and had now reincarnated (so to speak) as Correggio,
who was therefore the “Hermetic Christ” (Poimandres and Christ in one).
Following his speech, he deposited various objects on the throne of Saint Peter
in the Vatican. In 1496, he turned up again in Florence and then in Lyons.
Lodovico Lazzarelli saw in Giovanni a new and divine prophet whom he
considered his mentor, and he left a vivid description of these events in a
manifesto entitled Epistola Enoch, probably published in Milan ca. 1490.
Another text by Lazzarelli, Crater Hermetis (“The Mixing-Bowl of
Hermes”) written around 1492 or 1494 – but not published until Lefèvre
d’Etaples’s edition in 1505 – is a fictitious conversation in the style of the
dialogues contained in CH. The complete Latin subtitle of this work reads in
English translation: “A Dialogue on the Supreme Dignity of Man, entitled
the Way of Christ and the Mixing-Bowl of Hermes.” The interlocutors in
the dialogue are Lazzarelli himself, who plays the role of the initiator, and
two other historical personalities: Ferdinand I of Aragon, King of Naples and
Sicily, and Giovanni Pontano, his prime minister, who are cast in the role of
pupils. The Crater Hermetis is one of the most interesting examples of
hermetic-Christian syncretism written during the Renaissance.
Convinced that the Bible and hermetic writings were equiprimordial, in
1482 Lazzarelli dedicated to Correggio a manuscript in his own hand con-
sisting of three parts, each one opening with a dedicatory preface. The first
contains Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the Pimander (1471, i.e., CH I–XIV);
the second contains the Asclepius. The third contains the first Latin translation
(by Lazzarelli himself) of CH XVI–XVIII: three treatises that he had appar-
ently discovered in a separate manuscript (unfortunately not preserved). He
entitled them Diffinitiones Asclepii ad regem Ammonem. This author is an even
better exemplar than Ficino and Pico of Christian Hermetism in the
Renaissance (in addition to being one of the first noteworthy authors
136 Antoine Fai vre
instrumental in the early development of Christian Kabbalah). For many

years, however, he was passed over in silence until the historians Wouter
J. Hanegraaff and R. M. Bouthoorn recognized his contributions.1
Also at this time appeared Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples’s first edition of the
Pimander (Paris, 1494). It contains, besides Ficino’s translation of CH I–XIV,
a series of commentaries or Argumenta of his own (long attributed to Ficino).
The second edition (Paris, 1505) was augmented with both the Asclepius and
an abridged version of Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis.
Hermes Trismegistus also appeared in artworks of the Renaissance. He
had already appeared in medieval art, for example, in alchemical treatises in
which he was represented as a sage seated in a crypt, tomb, pyramid, or
temple, holding the Tabula Smaragdina, or Emerald Tablet, in his hands. At
the end of the fifteenth century, he appears in Bacchio Baldini’s Florentine
Picture Chronicle (1470–1475). The god Hermes-Mercurius in Botticelli’s
painting Primavera (1482) could be interpreted as an allusion to Hermes
Trismegistus. One sees him looking upward and playing with clouds, touch-
ing them lightly as if they were beneficent veils through which transcendent
truths might reach the seeker. Six years later, in 1486, an artist inlaid the
pavement of Siena Cathedral with a panel representing Hermes Trismegistus
as a tall and venerable bearded man, dressed in a robe and cloak, wearing a
brimmed miter and in the company of two personages (possibly Moses and
Plato). The panel bears the inscription “Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus
Contemporaneus Moysi” (Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus Contemporary
of Moses). Pope Alexander VI, the protector of Pico della Mirandola,
commanded Pinturiccio to paint a great fresco in the Borgia Apartments of
the Vatican. Abounding with hermetic symbols and zodiacal signs, the fresco
depicts Hermes Trismegistus, young and beardless, in the company of Isis and
Moses. Around 1500, he was painted on a wall of the church Sint-Walburgis
in Zutphen in the Low Countries, in the company of Mary, the newly born
Jesus, angels, and sibyls. Many such examples could be mentioned.
4 First Half of the Sixteenth Century: Hermetism

and philosophia perennis
Many hermeticists of this period were instrumental in fostering what was to
be called – mostly as of 1540 – philosophia perennis (perennial or eternal
1
See especially W. J. Hanegraaff and R. M. Bouthoorn, Ludovico Lazarelli (1447–1500). The
Hermetic Writings and Related Documents, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol.
281 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005).
philosophy). Among them are to be counted Champier, Giorgio, and

Agrippa. Symphorien Champier, an admirer of Ficino and disciple of
Lefèvre d’Étaples, attempted to derive all of Greek philosophy from
Hermes, incorporating into the tradition of prisca theologia (as Ficino had
defined it) the supposed doctrines of the Druids, as well as elements drawn
from the Kabbalah. His Liber de quadruplici vita: Theologia Asclepii Hermetis
Trismegisti discipuli cum commentariis . . . (Lyons, 1507) contains, among other
texts, Lazzarelli’s translation of Diffinitiones Asclepii. As exemplified by
Lefèvre and Champier, the French were generally more cautious than their
Italian or German counterparts regarding the “magical” elements of the CH
and the Asclepius.
Francesco Giorgio (or Zorzi), who belonged to the Order of Friars Minor,
authored De Harmonia mundi totius Cantica tria (Venice, 1525; Paris, 1545,
1546; French translation by Guy Lefèvre de la Boderie, Paris, 1578), and In
Sacram Scripturam Problemata (Venice, 1536; Paris, 1622). These two works are
an original construction aimed at making the prisca theologia coincide with
Neoplatonism and Kabbalah, as well as astrological and alchemical elements.
De Harmonia mundi was to enjoy a lasting success among representatives of
esoteric currents.
Indeed, the Hermetic treatises were increasingly considered to be the
expression of a philosophy transmitted over the course of many centuries,
since the time of Moses or even before. What Ficino had called prisca theologia
became – albeit in a slightly different sense – philosophia perennis. This
expression was introduced by the Italian Augustinian and Vatican librarian
Agostino Steuco (De perenni philosophia, Lyon, 1540, new ed. 1590).
Although staunchly attached to the church’s magisterium, he too tried to
reconstruct the ancient philosophy as a foundation for restoring Christian
unity. The CH, the Asclepius, and the figure of Hermes Trismegistus were
thus thought to belong to a far distant past, namely to the age of Moses, or
possibly earlier. Although pagan in character, they were considered to fore-
shadow Christian truths and were expected to give new depth to the
Christian revelation.
Traces of Hermetic influence are also noticeable in Copernicus’s De
Revolutionibus (1543), wherein Hermes Trismegistus is identified with the
sun considered as the visible God. But one of the most famous representatives
of Hermetism at that time, who was also to remain an influential figure in the
history of Western esotericism, was the German Henricus Cornelius
Agrippa. Besides quite a few passages in his much celebrated De Occulta
Philosophia (1533), several of his writings are devoted to a hermeneutics of
the CH, particularly Oratio in praelectionem Hermetis Trismegisti de Potestate et
138 Antoine Fai vre
Sapientia Dei (Cologne, 1535); Liber de triplici ratione congnoscendi Dei (1516);
and Dehortatio gentiles theologiae (ca. 1526, a text in which he distances himself
from Hermetism).2
Sebastian Franck, another German, presented in his Die Güldin Arch
(Augsburg, 1538) a collection of biblical sayings and paraphrases, together
with extracts from “illuminated pagans and philosophers” such as Hermes
Trismegistus. In Basel, Franck also made a German translation (1542) of both
the Asclepius and CH I–XIV, illuminated by long commentaries dealing
mostly with commonalities between the Bible and nature (a still-unpublished
manuscript).
Almost all French adherents of the prisca theologia dealt with Hermetism
from a perspective of Christian apologetics. This is reflected, for instance, in
Gabriel du Préau’s book Mercure Trismégiste ancient Thelogien & excellent
Philosophe, de la puissance & sapience de Dieu . . . Auecq’ un Dialogue de Loys
Lazarel poëte chrestien intitulé le Bassin d’Hermès (Paris, 1549; new ed. 1557). It
contains, along with abundant commentaries, the first edition in French of
CH I–XIV, of the Asclepius, and (as the title indicates) of Lazzarelli’s Crater
Hermetis.
Besides the presence of Agrippa and Franck, in general the Germanic
countries had little part in this Neo-Alexandrian Hermetic current. This may
be due partially to the fact that Humanism made only slight progress in those
countries during this period, hampered by the barrier that Lutheranism had
erected against it. Therefore, Hermetism, by its very nature a legacy of
ancient Greek literature, remained mostly a subject of study for the huma-
nists. As a consequence, during this period most commentators of the CH
were French and Italian.
Any overview of Neo-Alexandrian Hermetism must also give attention to
the so-called Tabula Smaragdina, a short text that belongs to the literature of
the Hermetica and had circulated in a Latin translation as early as the twelfth
century. In the period considered here, it was the subject of quite a few
commentaries (e.g., in Johann Trithemius’s correspondence with Germain
de Ganay in 1505). But its first printed edition, also in Latin, appeared in
Nuremberg in 1541 (part of a compilation of alchemical texts gathered under
the title De Alchemia, 1541). The publication of this enigmatic prose poem
caused torrents of hermetic, alchemical, and theosophical ink to flow – and
still does.
2
See W. J. Hanegraaff, “Better than Magic: Cornelius Agrippa and Lazzarellian Hermetism,”
Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft 4:1 (2009), 1–25.
5 Bearers of the Flame in the Latter Half of the Sixteenth Century

In the second half of the sixteenth century, Valentin Weigel, whose work is
an adumbration of Christian theosophy, cites the name of Hermes
Trismegistus more than that of any author of his time. The French
Catholic scholar Adrien Turnèbe produced the first edition of the original
Greek CH (Paris, 1554) based on the manuscript used by Ficino and
accompanied by the latter’s Latin translation, as well as by Lazarelli’s
translation of the additional treatises (i.e., Diffinitiones Asclepii, or CH
XVI–XVIII). In the wake of such scholarly publications, François Foix-
Candale, bishop of Aire, near Bordeaux, brought out another edition in
1574 (CH I–XIV, accompanied by some other hermetic texts). Five years
later, he produced extensive commentaries of his own in French, in Le
Pimandre de Mercure Trismégiste: de la Philosophie Chrestienne, Cognoissance du
Verbe Divin . . . (Bordeaux, 1579, new ed. Paris, 1587). Here, the hermetic
texts serve as supports of meditation and reflection on a great variety of
themes, such as the World Soul, the spirits of the elements, celestial bodies –
themes that, for the most part, were part and parcel of the philosophia occulta
of the Renaissance.
De la vérité de la religion chrestienne . . . (Antwerp, 1581), by the Huguenot
Protestant Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, was written at a time when William
of Orange was trying to establish religious tolerance at Antwerp. The author
employed Hermetism with a view to fashioning a position above all religious
conflicts and close to that of Erasmus – but with an additional esoteric
dimension. He compared the CH with the Zohar and made mention of
Orpheus, Zarathustra, the sibyls – and especially of Hermes, “the source of
them all.” This work was published several times in Latin translation and
proved to be influential in the development of Protestantism in France.
Translated into English by Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding in 1587, it
counts as one of the main expositions of Hermetism in the tradition of
Ficino.
Giordano Bruno may be counted among the most influential authors in
terms of Hermetism in particular, and esoteric literature in general. He made
frequent use of the hermetic texts (notably in Spaccio della bestia triomphante,
1584). In contrast to that of Ficino and the French, his Hermetism represents
a kind of aggressive return to hermetic magic. Not a Christian, unlike most
other hermeticists of his time, he did not identify the intellectus and Filius Dei
of the CH with the second person of the Trinity, and he was less prone to
share the hope nursed by others that a religious reconciliation might be
effected by a general acceptance of Hermetism. In fact, Bruno did not desire
140 Antoine Fai vre
a reformed Christendom but rather a return to the cults or beliefs of ancient

Egypt as described in the CH and particularly in the Asclepius. In 1591 in
Rome, he tried to win over Clement VIII to his views, but his radical ideas
led him to the stake in 1600.
Hannibal Rossel’s Pymander Mercurii Trismegisti, swollen to six volumes
(Cracow, 1585–1590), is not so much a commentary on the CH as an
encyclopedic roll call of a variety of philosophical themes, along with a
presentation of CH I–VII and the Asclepius. Francesco Patrizi’s Nova de
universis philosophia (Ferrara, 1591) contains CH I–XIV (as established by
Turnèbe and Foix de Candale), the Asclepius, and CH XVI–XVIII
(Diffinitiones Asclepii), along with the medieval so-called Theologia
Aristotelis, and a new Latin translation of these texts. He subjected the
Aristotelian philosophy to sharp criticism and wanted to oust it from
Jesuit-run colleges. Patrizi portrayed the true magus as one who is devoted
to God, and true prisca magia as the true religion. He claimed that a single
treatise of the CH contained more philosophy than all of Aristotle. In the
dedicatory preface of his book, he asked Pope Gregorius XIV to place the
CH on the academic curriculum as an alternative philosophy. He went so
far as to suggest to the pope that Hermetic Platonism be assigned in all
Christian schools as an aid to converting the Lutherans. In 1592, Clement
VIII, won over to some of Patrizi’s ideas, called him to Rome to hold the
chair of Platonic philosophy at the University La Sapienza. Once there,
however, Patrizi incurred the displeasure of the Inquisition and his book
was placed on the Index. Alongside such reforming plans as Patrizi’s, other
works were to appear. In 1587, a painting appeared on a pilaster of a Sistine
room in the Biblioteca Vaticana, showing Hermes Trismegistus with
attributes of Mercurius. The caption informs us that he is “Mercurius-
Thoth, inventor of the alphabets.” Other examples of his presence in
Roman Catholic buildings could be adduced.
Religious Hermetism is irenic by nature. The Puritanism then flourish-
ing in England brought about a weakening of the theological syncretism
that had favored such tendencies. With Edward VI, the English Protestants
had already begun to break with the past, going so far as to destroy books
and libraries. Under the reign of Mary, a Hispano-Catholic intolerance
went even further in this direction. Later, Puritan Anglicanism under
Elizabeth tended to be impervious to Erasmian tolerance. Hermetism
continued to develop within private circles, however, such as those that
formed around Sir Philip Sidney and Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer,
John Dee.
6 Reappraisals and Developments as of the Beginning

of the Seventeenth Century
Isaac Casaubon, a Protestant minister in Geneva and one of the greatest
philologists of his age, set out to prove (in a chapter of his De rebus sacris
ecclesiasticis exercitations XVI, London, 1614) that the CH had not been
written prior to the second or third century CE and was therefore a “forgery”
of the early Christian era. Although Casaubon’s name has long been attached
to that new dating, since 1976 research (see especially Mulsow 2002) has
shown that this discovery had already been made by other philologists as
early as the 1560s. Be that as it may, the claim that the CH had been
erroneously dated could only deal a heavy blow to its authority, since that
authority depended largely on its age. Nevertheless, Neo-Alexandrian
Hermetism did not disappear. Indeed, in the following centuries and up to
the present day, many esoterically oriented people have preferred to ignore
or downplay the significance of the new dating. The following are a few
examples of concerns at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
One of the first highly sympathetic exegetes of the CH at this time in
Germany was Heinrich Noll (author of Theoria Philosophiae Hermeticae, septem
tractatibus, Hanover, 1617; Theoria Philsophiae Hermeticae, Copenhagen, 1617;
and Panergii Philosophici Speculum, 1623, an initiatic novel that stands in the
wake of early Rosicrucian literature). Noteworthy too is the Italian Livius
Galante, who authored Christianae theologiae cum platonica comparatio (Bologna,
1627). Furthermore, a number of translations of the CH into European
languages continued to appear. For example, Abraham Willemsz van
Beyerland produced a Dutch version of sixteen treatises of the CH, based on
Patrizi’s text, under the title Sestien boecken . . . (Amsterdam, 1643, new ed.
1652). Beyerland, who was also a translator of Jacob Boehme, added long
strongly theosophical commentaries of his own (his translation was to be used
in 1706 by the first translator of the CH into German, a Paracelsian).
Alchemical treatises (e.g., Michael Maier’s Symbola aureae mensa duodecim
nationum, 1617) occasionally devoted an entire, laudatory chapter to Hermes
Trismegistus. In addition, many such treatises of the seventeenth century are
rich in illustrations in which he appears, usually on the front page, either alone
or in the company of other personages such as Hippocrates, Galen, Aristotle,
Geber, and Paracelsus. The first version of the CH in English was produced by
John Everard and contributed greatly to the continuation of Neo-Alexandrian
Hermetism throughout the following centuries. (Everard titled it The Divine
Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, in XVII Books. Translated formerly out
of the Arabick into Greek . . ., London, 1650, new ed. 1657.)
142 Antoine Fai vre
The number of scholarly works on Hermetism has increased considerably

since the middle of the twentieth century. With regard to Neo-Alexandrian
Hermetism proper, Frances A. Yates’s book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic
Tradition (1964) has been highly instrumental in calling the attention of
historians to the significance of this current in the history of the
Renaissance. Her groundbreaking book has paved the way for an ongoing
academic recognition, even institutionalization, of modern Western esoteri-
cism as a specialty in its own right. In addition, it has caused a flurry of
debates, in particular, over what Robert S. Westman has called the “Yates
Thesis,” according to which there is a close relation between Hermetism and
the scientific revolution.3
In the wake of this, the scholar Wouter J. Hanegraaff introduced (in 2001)
the expression “the Yates paradigm,” referring to the presence in her work of
a “grand narrative” that consists in presenting “the Hermetic Tradition” as a
more or less autonomous movement, based on a covert reaction against
Christianity and the rise of scientific worldviews. Yates also considers the
tradition of “magic” – which she sees as essentially nonprogressive – as an
important factor in the development of the scientific revolution. Hanegraaff
and others have called this paradigm into question. Still, even if neither of
these two claims made by Yates can withstand close scrutiny, her work and
the debates that still surround it will probably continue to foster the interest
of historians in this fascinating chapter of Western culture in general, and of
Western esoteric currents in particular.
3
See R. S. Westman and J. E. McGuire, Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (Los Angeles:
William A. Clark Memorial Library, 1977).
13
CHRISTIAN KABBALAH
P e t e r J. Fo r s h a w
G ershom Scholem argues that the primary motivation

for Christian kabbalists was a form of missionary activity: “Christian
Kabbalah can be defined as the interpretation of kabbalistic texts in the
interests of Christianity (or, to be more precise, Catholicism); or the use of
kabbalistic concepts and methodology in support of Christian dogma.”1 As
evidence, he points to the Christological speculations of Jewish converts,
such as the Pugio Fidei (Dagger of Faith) of Raymund Martini (1220–1285),
works that contributed to the growth of an incipient Christian Kabbalah.2
1 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and the Dawn of Christian Kabbalah

Although the Majorcan mystic Ramon Lull (1225–1315) is sometimes cred-
ited with being the first Christian to show an acquaintance with Kabbalah in
his De auditu Kabbalistico, the work actually shows little familiarity with the
Jewish tradition. Christian speculation about the Kabbalah first took root in
the Florentine Renaissance. While Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was busy
translating and writing commentaries on the works of Plato, Plotinus, and
Hermes Trismegistus, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) began
studying kabbalistic works. This was all part of Pico’s project of creating his
syncretic philosophia nova, his synthesis of Aristotelian and Platonic thought
with esoteric doctrines gleaned from prisci theologi such as Zoroaster,
1
Gershom Scholem, “The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,” in The Christian Kabbalah:
Jewish Mystical Books & Their Christian Interpreters, ed. Joseph Dan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
College Library, 1997), 17–51, here 17.
2
Scholem, “The Beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,” 18. See also Moshe Idel’s
“Introduction to the Bison Book Edition,” in Johann Reuchlin, On the Art of the Kabbalah,
trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), v–xxix;
Idel, Kabbalah in Italy 1280–1510: A Survey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011),
227–235.
143
144 Peter J. Forshaw
Orpheus, Hermes Trismegistus, and Pythagoras. Pico is the first author raised
as a Christian who is known to have read an impressive amount of genuine
Jewish Kabbalah. He marks a watershed in the history of Hebrew studies in
Europe.3
The fruit of Pico’s studies can best be found in his famous nine hundred
Conclusiones Philosophicæ Cabalisticæ et Theologicæ (1486). It was here that Pico
first introduced the Kabbalah into the mainstream of Renaissance thought by
means of forty-seven “Cabalistic Conclusions” according to “the secret
teaching of the wise Hebrew Cabalists” and seventy-two “Cabalistic con-
clusions according to my own opinion,” with further kabbalistic references
in other groups of “Conclusions,” including those on magic, Mercury
Trismegistus, Zoroaster, and the Orphic hymns.4
Pico’s two major kabbalistic influences were the Spanish kabbalist
Abraham Abulafia (1240–ca. 1291) and the Italian rabbi Menahem
Recanati (1250–1310). These men represent two quite different types of
Kabbalah, the one ecstatic, the other theosophical-theurgical. Recanati is
mainly concerned with the ten sefirot as divine emanations and engages in a
symbolic exegesis of Scripture as the way to unravel their mysteries. On the
other hand, Abulafia, the father of prophetic Kabbalah, tends to downplay
the importance of the sefirot and concentrates on the names (shemot) of God
and their permutations as a spiritual discipline by which man can attain union
with the divine.5 Though neither detailed nor systematic in his discussion,
for example, of the sefirot, paths of wisdom, and gates of understanding, Pico
nevertheless shows an awareness of these teachings and understands their
relation to kabbalistic theories of creation and revelation.
Pico’s alleged primary motivation for studying the Kabbalah is evangeliz-
ing against heretics and Jews. In the Apologia he composed in 1487 – follow-
ing the condemnation of thirteen of his theses as heretical – he avows that his
motive is “to do battle for the faith against the relentless slanders of the
3
On Pico and Kabbalah, see François Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens de la Renaissance (Paris:
Dunod, 1964), Cap. III; Klaus Reichert, “Pico della Mirandola and the Beginnings of
Christian Kabbala,” in Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism, ed. Karl Erich
Grözinger and Joseph Dan (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 195–207; Pico della Mirandola:
New Essays, ed. M. V. Dougherty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), passim.
On Pico as creator of the “first true Christian Cabala,” see Bernard McGinn, “Cabalists and
Christians: Reflections on Cabala in Medieval and Renaissance Thought,” in Jewish
Christians and Christian Jews: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Richard H.
Popkin and Gordon M. Weiner (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 11–34.
4
Steven A. Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of Traditional
Religious and Philosophical Systems (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies,
1998), 343, 421, 489, 497–503, 507, 511.
5
On Abulafia and Recanati, see Idel, Kabbalah in Italy, passim.
C h r i s t i a n Ka bb a l a h 145
Hebrews.”6 As his second set of “Cabalistic Conclusions” explains, his

intention is one of “providing powerful confirmation of the Christian
religion from the very principles of the Hebrew Sages,” so that the Jews
can be refuted by their own kabbalistic books.7 He proposes to use the
Kabbalah’s own hermeneutical techniques to prove, for instance, the supre-
macy of the name of Jesus and the mystery of the Trinity.8
The significance of Pico’s Kabbalah should not, however, be restricted
simply to Christian polemic and apologetics. Chaim Wirszubski argues that
the “Cabalistic Conclusions” “outgrew their original purpose” and that Pico
viewed Kabbalah from an entirely new standpoint, being “the first Christian
who considered cabbala to be simultaneously a witness for Christianity and
an ally of natural magic.”9 Pico’s interest goes far beyond the simple con-
firmation of Christianity when in his “Magical Conclusions” he famously
asserts that the divinity of Christ is best demonstrated by the science of magic
and Kabbalah.10 Joseph Dan believes that with this thesis, Pico is less con-
cerned with promoting traditional Catholicism than with implying that
Christianity should discover a new meaning, one outlined in his nine
hundred theses.11 The extreme nature of the claims Pico makes, such as
that “no magical operation can be of any efficacy unless it has annexed to it a
work of Cabala,” created a widespread interest in this Jewish tradition.12
Pico’s alliance between Kabbalah, magic, and theology produced a signifi-
cant development in Christian Kabbalah: From then on, a Christian kabbalist
could be a theologian or a magus or both.
2 Johann Reuchlin’s Influential Formulations on the Word

and the Art
During the time Pico was active in Florence, he was visited by the German
scholar Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522), universally regarded as one of the key
6
Brian P. Copenhaver, “The Secret of Pico’s Oration: Cabala and Renaissance Philosophy,”
in Renaissance and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Peter A. French and Howard K. Wettstein
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 56–81, here 75.
7
Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis, Paul J. W. Miller,
and Douglas Carmichael (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 29, 32.
8
Farmer, Syncretism in the West, 523.
9
Chaim Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989), 151, 185.
10
11
Joseph Dan, “The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin and Its Historical Significance,” in Dan,
The Christian Kabbalah, 55–95, here 57.
12
figures of European scholarship and intellectual life at the turn of the

sixteenth century. Reuchlin wrote two of the most influential books of
Christian Kabbalah, the De Verbo Mirifico (On the Wonder-Working Word,
1494) and De Arte Cabalistica (On the Kabbalistic Art, 1517).13 One of the main
attractions of Kabbalah for him was the multiplicity of divine names in
Hebrew. In his “Conclusions,” Pico had briefly referred to the name of
Jesus in a kabbalistic context; in De Verbo Mirifico, Reuchlin launched into a
full-blown declaration of how the Jewish four-letter name the
Tetragrammaton, YHVH, had been superseded by the five-letter Christian
Pentagrammaton, the name “above all others,” YHSVH.
Reuchlin’s first kabbalistic work was significant for its ideas about lan-
guage and the contribution it made to the Renaissance debate on the occult
powers and properties of words and names. It contained extraordinary
examples of marvelous deeds achieved through the wonder-working word,
from feeding the hungry and curing the sick to exorcizing demons and
reviving the dead.14 By the time he published De Arte Cabalistica, Reuchlin
was the leading Christian Hebraist of his age and had become involved
in the controversy with the Cologne Dominicans over the Talmud,
sometimes referred to as the “Battle of the Books.” Reuchlin wrote his
second kabbalistic work “as a form of special pleading for the protection of
Hebrew books against burning because of their ‘Christian’ content.” This
was a particularly courageous stance to take and a radical departure from the
standard theological antagonism toward the Talmud.15
An important aspect of the new concept of language found in kabbalistic
sources was a set of exegetical techniques having no counterpart in the
Christian interpretation of Scripture. In De Arte Cabalistica, Reuchlin
provides examples of the Jewish techniques of gematria (or arithmetic),
13
On Reuchlin, see Karl E. Grözinger, “Reuchlin und die Kabbala,” in Reuchlin und die Juden,
ed. Arno Herzig and Julius H. Schoeps (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1993), 175–
187; Bernd Roling, “The Complete Nature of Christ: Sources and Structures of a
Christological Theurgy in the Works of Johannes Reuchlin,” in The Metamorphosis of
Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R.
Veenstra (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 213–266; Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, “Einleitung:
Johannes Reuchlin und die Anfänge der christlichen Kabbala,” in Christliche Kabbala, ed.
Schmidt-Biggemann (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2003), 9–48.
14
Charles Zika, “Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico and the Magic Debate of the Late Fifteenth
Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 39 (1976), 104–138.
15
Joseph Leon Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in the Renaissance (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1944), 50; Joseph Dan, “Christian Kabbalah in the
Renaissance,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff
(Leiden: Brill, 2006), 991; Reichert, “Pico della Mirandola and the Beginnings of
Christian Kabbala,” 197.
Notariacon (manipulation of letters), and Themura (commutation of letters),

all for the sake of proving the supremacy of the Christian religion.
Somewhat incongruously, Reuchlin’s Jewish representative, Simon ben
Eleazar, promotes Christian Trinitarian doctrine with his explanation of
how the twelve-letter name Ab Ben Veruach Hakadosh (Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit) flows from the Jewish Tetragrammaton YHVH.16 So informa-
tive was Reuchlin’s exposition that from his time, no writer who touched
on Christian Kabbalah with any thoroughness did so without using him as a
source.
3 Other Significant Sources for Early Christian Kabbalah

One of the central figures in sixteenth-century Christian Kabbalah is
undoubtedly the Venetian scholar Francesco Giorgio (ca. 1460–1540),17
author of two large volumes on Kabbalah that were widely read: De
Harmonia mundi totius cantica tria (Three Canticles on the Harmony of the
Whole World, 1525) and the Problemata (1536). In both books, the
Kabbalah was central to the themes developed, and the Zohar, for the first
time, was used extensively in a work of Christian origin. Elaborating on the
works of Pico and Reuchlin, in De Harmonia mundi Giorgio presents
the major ideas of Renaissance kabbalists. In the process, he takes the
Christianization of Kabbalah far beyond that found in Pico’s theses. One
of Giorgio’s disciples, Arcangelo da Borgonuovo (d. 1571), borrowing
extensively from the works of his teacher and Reuchlin, published a
Dechiaratione sopra il nome di Giesu (Declaration on the Name of Jesus, 1557),
essentially an expansion of the final chapters in Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico.
This was later followed by a commentary on Pico’s kabbalistic theses,
Cabalistarum selectiora, obscurioraque dogmata (More select and obscure dogmas
of the Cabalists, 1569).18
The German Jewish convert Paulus Ricius (1470–1541) likewise discov-
ered in Kabbalah the mysteries of the Trinity, the eternal generation of the
Son of God, redemption through the passion and blood of the Messiah, and
his resurrection. Rici was widely read in Hebrew sources, and with the zeal
of a convert he published a series of short tracts under the title Sal Fœderis (Salt
16
Blau, The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala, 57–59.
17
Giulio Busi, “Francesco Zorzi: A Methodical Dreamer,” in Dan, The Christian Kabbalah,
97–125; Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1979; reprinted 2001), 33–44.
18
Chaim Wirszubski, “Francesco Giorgio’s Commentary on Giovanni Pico’s Kabbalistic
Theses,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974), 145–156.
of Covenant) in 1507, intended to defend Christianity against the calumnies of

the Jews. In 1514, Rici became physician to Emperor Maximilian I, for
whom in 1519 he prepared a new Latin translation of the Talmud, with
commentary. In 1516, he published what was to become an influential
translation of Joseph Gikatilla’s Gates of Light (1516), containing the first
depiction of the Tree of Life outside a Jewish text. The most famous of his
kabbalistic works is the four-part religio-philosophical synthesis of kabbalistic
and Christian sources, De Cœlesti Agricultura (On Celestial Agriculture, 1541).
Book Four consists of an introduction to the Kabbalah in a series of fifty
theorems, as well as a translation of main passages from Gikatilla’s Gates of
Light. Ironically, despite his Jewish origins and obvious erudition, and despite
the orthodox, non-magical nature of Rici’s Kabbalah, he was accused by a
priest of not propounding true Kabbalah “because he presented this doctrine
in another light than that of Pico.”19
The individual responsible, however, for providing the most enduring
image of early modern Christian Kabbalah is the German theologian
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535), in his encyclopedia of esoteric
thought, De Occulta Philosophia libri tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy,
1533). This work was to became one of the most widely consulted sources
for Kabbalah in the Christian world – despite (or perhaps because of) the
fact that Agrippa only shows knowledge of the works of Christian kabbalists
such as Pico, Reuchlin, Rici, and Giorgio, rather than direct engagement
with Hebrew or Aramaic sources. Agrippa presents a similar intermingling
of Pythagorean, Neoplatonic, and kabbalistic ideas to Reuchlin, iterating
the same claims to Hebrew being the “original language” and the signifi-
cance of its twenty-two letters as the foundation of the world. Scholem
observes that the place of honor in De Occulta philosophia is accorded to
practical Kabbalah and arithmology, for it is a rich source of information on
the occult and kabbalistic significance of numbers; at the same time, we
should not neglect the importance of Kabbalah for Agrippa’s notion of a
sacralized magic.20
19
Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens, 89. On Ricius, see also François Secret, “Notes sur Paolo
Ricci et la Kabbale chrétienne en Italie,” Rinascimento 11 (1960), 169–192; Crofton Black,
“From Kabbalah to Psychology: The Allegorizing Isagoge of Paulus Ricius, 1509–1541,”
Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 2:2 (2007), 136–173.
20
Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Meridian Books, 1978), 198; Zika, “Reuchlin’s
De Verbo Mirifico and the Magic Debate,” 138. See also Christopher I. Lehrich, The Language
of Demons and Angels: Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 149–159. On
Christian Kabbalah’s relations with occult philosophy, see Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens,
ch. 11.
4 A Cabalchemical Hybrid: Experimental Fusions of Kabbalah

and Alchemy
During the course of the sixteenth century, a pronounced trend emerged
toward the permeation of Christian Kabbalah with alchemical symbolism.21
This convergence of alchemy and Kabbalah was perhaps to be expected as
both arts were concerned with knowledge of creation. Both arts, too,
advocated a secret transmission of knowledge from master to pupil, with
initiations, ordinations, and revelations from God and his angels. To a certain
extent, the kabbalists’ reduction of language to its elemental letters corre-
sponded to the alchemists’ reduction of matter to its primal state; the
permutation of letters and words corresponding to the circulation and
combination of elements and substances.
The first known combination of alchemy and Kabbalah can be found in
the works of the Venetian priest Giovanni Agostino Panteo (d. 1535), who
develops a hybrid “Kabbalah of Metals” in two works: the Ars transmutationis
metallicae (Art of metallic transmutation, 1519) and Voarchadumia contra alchimiam
(Voarchadumia against alchemy, 1530).22 In the most kabbalistic-sounding
chapter of the Voarchadumia, concerned with the “Mixture at the roots of
the Unity of the 72 Voarchadumic elements,” Panteo numerically analyzes a
small collection of words connected with alchemical substances. We learn
that the mysterious substance Risoo is called Thélima in Greek, and in Hebrew
Reçón, both terms appearing in Panteo’s list of synonyms for gold. Both
words translate literally as “Will,” but the alchemico-kabbalistic significance
lies in the realization that the Hebrew Reçón shares the same letters as Eretz,
one of the Hebrew words for “earth.”23 In this opaque way, Panteo attempts
a kabbalistic elucidation of the secrets of the powers of alchemical substances
and processes. He makes no direct reference to Jewish texts, but he does
mention Pico and provides three magical alphabets derived from Hebrew,
one of which subsequently appears in Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia.
Another is the Enochian alphabet, well known to those familiar with John
Dee’s communications with spirits.
21
Gershom Scholem, Alchemy and Kabbalah (Dallas: Spring Publications, 2006); Raphael Patai,
The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), 152–169.
22
On Pantheus, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1941), Vol. 5, 537–40; Hilda Norrgrén, “Interpretation
and the Hieroglyphic Monad: John Dee’s Reading of Pantheus’s Voarchadumia,” Ambix 52:3
(2005), 217–245.
23
Nicolas Séd, “L’or enfermé et la poussière d’or selon Moïse ben Shémtobh de Léon (c.
1240–1305),” Chrysopoeia, Tome III, fasc. 2 1989, 121–134, at 131.
The French Paracelsian David De Planis-Campy (1589–ca. 1644) identi-

fied Dee, the Elizabethan magus, as one “most versed in Chymical Cabala.”
This is doubtless because of the composite alchemical symbol “mathemati-
cally, magically, cabbalistically, and anagogically” elucidated by Dee in his
Monas Hieroglyphica (1564).24 Dee is familiar with the kabbalistic exegetical
techniques of “the Tziruph (or Themura) of the Hebrews” and speaks of the
“cabbalistic expansion of the quaternary,” thereby introducing a
Reuchlinian reference to the Pythagorean tetraktys. It is evident, however,
that he is less convinced of the importance of Hebrew than Pico or Reuchlin.
Dee also shows a marked tendency to forge his own Kabbalah of Greek and
Roman letters and geometrical, astrological, and alchemical symbols to dis-
cover the secrets of God and creation. Despite being classed by Méric
Casaubon as “a Cabalistical man, to his ears,” Dee gives the distinct impres-
sion that he is not particularly interested in kabbalistic textual interpretation.
In the Monas, he pointedly makes a distinction between a “Kabbalah of the
Real” and a “Kabbalah of the Word,” the former relating to the Book of
Nature, the latter to the Book of Scripture. Dee turns from an exclusively
“literal” kabbalistic reading of printed books to one connected with natural
magic and deciphering the hieroglyphs or signatures of the created world.25
5 The Sigillum Dei in Heinrich Khunrath’s “Christian-Cabalist”

Amphitheatre
So far our story of Christian Kabbalah has primarily been one of Catholic
exponents.26 However, it is a Lutheran acquaintance of Dee, the German
theosopher and alchemist Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605), who appears to
be the first person to publish a work explicitly describing itself as “Christian
Cabalist”: The Christian-Cabalist, Divinely Magical and Physico-Chymical
Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1595 and 1609).27 Familiar with Agrippa’s
24
Peter J. Forshaw, “The Early Alchemical Reception of John Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica,”
Ambix 52:3 (2005), 247–269, at 263.
25
Philip Beitchman, Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1998), 242–243.
26
On Dee’s switches from Protestantism to Catholicism and back, plus possible contacts with
Familism, see Deborah Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and
the End of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 129, 149.
27
On Khunrath, see Peter J. Forshaw, “Curious Knowledge and Wonder-Working Wisdom
in the Occult Works of Heinrich Khunrath,” in Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to
the Enlightenment, ed. R. J. W. Evans and Alexander Marr (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 107–
129. Khunrath’s usage is antedated in manuscript, however, by Jean Thénaud (d. 1542)
whose La Saincte et trescrestienne cabale dates from around 1521. See Blau, The Christian
Interpretation of the Cabala, 89–97; Wirszubski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter, 185 n.1.
De Occulta Philosophia, it is likely that Khunrath deepened his knowledge of

Christian Kabbalah through a compendium published while he was studying
medicine in Basel: the Artis Cabalisticæ: hoc est, Reconditae Theologiae et
Philosophiae, Scriptorum, Tomus I (Volume 1 of the Cabalistic Art, that is, of the
Writers of Recondite Theology and Philosophy, 1587) of Johannes Pistorius of
Nidda (1546–1608). This collection has been called the “Bible of Christian
Cabala,” containing as it does works by Pico, Reuchlin, Rici, Arcangelo da
Borgonuovo, Leone Ebreo, and a Latin translation of the Sefer Yetzirah.28
Khunrath’s knowledge of the Kabbalah most clearly reveals itself in the
Amphitheatre’s engraving of Christ, the Sigillum Dei (Seal of God) or Sigillum
Emet (Seal of Truth). As Raphael Patai remarks, one “has the impression of
seeing a complex Jewish emblem written in Hebrew,” a central figure (of
Christ cruciform) from which radiate eight concentric rings, five in Hebrew
letters, forming “a veritable brief anthology of important quotations and
names of Jewish religious significance.”29 It includes the Ein Sof, ten sefirot,
ten Names of God and ten angelic orders, the twenty-two letters of the
Hebrew alphabet, and the Hebrew text of the Decalogue. The debt
Khunrath owes to Reuchlin is nowhere more evident than at the heart of
the engraving where five large tongues of flame appear, each bearing one
letter of the wonder-working word YHSVH.
It appears that we are now quite far from Christian Kabbalah as primarily
missionary activity aimed at converting the Jews. For Khunrath, kabbalistic
reception of divine revelation is to be used for the recognition of the divine
Father and Son and the understanding of what he calls the “Three Books” of
Nature, Man, and Scripture, as represented in the best-known engraving
from his Amphitheatre, the “Oratory-Laboratory.” Khunrath’s claims of being
“ineffably rapt in God” and inspired by “Sophia Enthusiastica” include a new
dimension of personal revelation (through dreams and angels) to his kabba-
listic experience in the Oratory. In the Laboratory, one of the products of
Khunrath’s emphasis on the necessary conjunction of Kabbalah, magic, and
alchemy is the “Divine” Philosophers’ Stone, with its “Physico-Magical,
Hyperphysico-magical, Theosophical and Kabbalistic” uses.30
28
Secret, Les Kabbalistes Chrétiennes, 280.
29
Patai, The Jewish Alchemists, 156.
30
Forshaw, “Curious Knowledge and Wonder-Working Wisdom,” 115, 128; Dan,
“Christian Kabbalah in the Renaissance,” 639. See Dan, “The Kabbalah of Johannes
Reuchlin,” p. 62, on the opposition between Kabbalah and mysticism: “the first
emphasizes tradition and marginalizes individual experience, whereas the latter includes
the notion of an original discovery of a truth by an individual.”
6 Zoharic and Lurianic Influences: Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala

denudata
Interest in Kabbalah and alchemy reappears in the seventeenth century’s most
prominent anthology of Jewish and Christian kabbalist texts. With the
conviction that the Kabbalah was an original secret revelation that contained
all the spiritual evolution of humanity from the creation of the world, and
that the Jewish and Christian religions were identical from the point of view
of their esoteric core, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1631–1689) decided
to publish a Latin translation of the most significant parts of the Zohar, along
with other kabbalistic treatises and commentaries to assist the reader’s under-
standing. This resulted in the publication, in 1677, of the first volume of the
Kabbala denudata, seu doctrina Hebraeorum transcendentalis et metaphysica atque
Theologica (The Kabbala Unveiled or the transcendental, metaphysical and theological
doctrine of the Hebrews), dedicated “to the Hebrew-, Chymistry-, and
Wisdom-loving reader.” Whereas previously the most influential Hebrew
sources had been the works of medieval authors such as Recanati, Gikatilla,
and Abulafia, the Kabbalah Unveiled espouses the works of a new form of
Kabbalah with a stress on redemption and the millennium, promoting what
Scholem calls the “true theologia mystica of Judaism.”31
In keeping with the interests of earlier Christian kabbalists such as
Reuchlin and Agrippa, this volume includes a “Key to the Divine Names
of the Kabbalah” and an edition of Gikatilla’s Gates of Light. New, however,
are works of the Safed mystic Isaac Luria (1534–1572) and other Lurianic
kabbalist works, including a detailed explanation of the Tree of Life and a
summary of an unusual Jewish alchemical treatise, the Esch Mezareph (The
Refiner’s Fire), giving correspondences between the sefirot, planets, and
metals, plus several speculative kabbalistic works by the Cambridge
Platonist Henry More (1614–1687).
A second volume of the Kabbalah Unveiled, the Liber Sohar restitutus (The
Book of Splendour restored, 1684), emphasizes Knorr’s missionary intent,
beginning with a systematic résumé of the Zohar’s doctrines, to which is
added a Christian interpretation. The same technique is used in another text
included in the volume, the Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae . . . ad conversio-
nem Judaeorum (Outline of Christian Kabbala . . . for the conversion of the Jews), a
dialogue between a “Kabbalist” and a “Christian Philosopher,” in which
31
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books,
1954), 284.
they explain their respective religious doctrines, showing the concordance

between the two traditions.
Inspired by the Lurianic Kabbalah with its “optimistic, vitalist philosophy
of perfectionism and universal salvation,” Rosenroth and his collaborator in
the publishing enterprise, Frans Mercurius van Helmont (1614–1699),
rejected many of the conventional Christian views of the fall, salvation, and
the Trinity, as well as the particularly Protestant focus on divine justice,
predestination, man’s helplessness, and the concept of an eternal hell. They
tended to minimize or allegorize Christ’s role in the redemptive process,
preferring instead the Lurianic vision of a universe restored to its original
perfection through human effort.32
This second volume also contains work that would later be of great interest
to occult societies such as the Golden Dawn, in particular, a section entitled
Pneumatica cabbalistica, introducing kabbalistic ideas about spirits, angels and
demons, the soul, and the various states and transformations included in the
kabbalistic theory of metempsychosis. Also included were Latin translations
of Lurianic works, including chapters on angelology, demonology, and the
magical creative power of language, describing how pious men can create
angels and spirits through prayers. The Kabbala denudata was superior to
anything that had previously been published on the Kabbalah in a language
other than Hebrew, providing a non-Jewish readership with authentic texts
that were to be the principal source for Western literature on Kabbalah until
the end of the nineteenth century.33
7 Christian Kabbalah on the Threshold of Modernity: Oetinger

and Molitor
Moving to the eighteenth century, the best known representative of Christian
Kabbalah is undoubtedly the Lutheran pastor Friedrich Christoph Oetinger
(1702–1782), who sought a philosophia sacra as a substitute for the systems of
profane philosophy developed by thinkers such as Descartes and Hobbes. He
found this in various guises, including the philosophy of Leibniz, the
Neoplatonically kabbalistic works of Henry More, the writings of Paracelsus
and other alchemists, the theosophy of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), the works
32
Allison P. Coudert, The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and Thought
of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698) (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999), 345.
See especially ch. 6: “Christian Knorr von Rosenroth and the Kabbalah Denudata”; eadem,
“The Kabbala Denudata: Converting Jews or Seducing Christians,” in Pokin and Weiner,
Jewish Christians and Christian Jews, 73–96.
33
Scholem, Kabbalah, 416.
of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), and in the Jewish

Kabbalah. Oetinger was especially drawn to the Lurianic Kabbalah, with the
Etz Hayim (Tree of Life) of Luria’s main disciple Hayim Vital (1543–1620), a
major source for his Öffentliches Denckmahl der Lehrtafel einer weyland
württembergischen Princeßin Antonia (Public Monument of the Didactic Painting of a
Former Württemberg Princess Antonia, 1763).34 This was his description and
analysis of an emblematic triptych commissioned for the Church of the Holy
Trinity at Bad Teinach in the Black Forest by Princess Antonia of
Württemberg (1613–1679), one of the daughters of the alchemist and occultist
Frederick I, Duke of Württemberg. In his commentary on Princess Antonia’s
Lehrtafel, Oetinger sets forth a system of Christian Kabbalah based on his
reading of the Zohar, containing separate chapters comparing the philosophies
of Newton, Boehme, and Swedenborg with that of Kabbalah.
For our final representative of Christian Kabbalah, we are back with a
Catholic scholar, in the figure of the German philosopher Franz Josef
Molitor (1779–1860). Like Rosenroth and Oetinger before him, Molitor
collaborated with Jewish scholars and developed his kabbalistic program over
decades of research into primary Jewish sources. His four-volume Philosophie
der Geschichte, oder über die Tradition (Philosophy of History, or On Tradition,
1827–1853) was the nineteenth century’s most erudite and profound con-
sideration of the Kabbalah’s significance for Christians, earning Scholem’s
praise as “the crowning and final achievement of the Christian Kabbalah.”35
8 Conclusion
What has become clear is that Scholem’s negative image of a Christian
Kabbalah primarily engaged in evangelical activity against the Jews requires
some modification. While it is justified on the surface by the overt declara-
tions of Pico and Reuchlin (no doubt balancing on a knife edge, ever aware
34
Miklós Vassányi, Anima Mundi: The Rise of the World Soul Theory in Modern German
Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 128ff; Eva Johann Schauer, “Friedrich Christoph
Oetinger und die kabbalistische Lehrtafel der württembergischen Prinzessin Antonia in
Teinach,” in Mathesis, Naturphilosophie und Arkanwissenschaft im Umkreis Friedrich Christoph
Oetingers (1702–1782) ed. Sabine Holtz, Gerhard Betsch, and Eberhard Zwink (Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005), 165–182. On Oetinger, see also Ernst Benz, Christian Kabbalah:
Neglected Child of Theology, trans. Kenneth W. Wesche (St. Paul, MN: Grailstone Press,
2004).
35
Scholem, Kabbalah, 200–201; Arthur Verlsuis, Theosophia: Hidden Dimensions of Christianity
(New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1994), 76. On Molitor, see also Katharina Koch, Franz Joseph
Molitor und die jüdische Tradition: Studien zu den kabbalistischen Quellen der “Philosophie der
Geschichte” (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006).
of the Inquisition), it misrepresents some of the Christian Kabbalists discussed

here, who each had his own motives, ranging from novel biblical interpreta-
tion, greater awareness of the prehistory of Christianity, Church reform and
the revitalization of religion, to insights into the theories of alchemy and the
practices of magic.36
Here Dan’s more irenic reading should be considered, with the suggestion
that even the early Christian kabbalist works included a different, additional
message: that non-biblical Jewish sources also held great relevance for their
Christian readers, not only as a way of strengthening and upholding their
faith, but as a way of discovering a deeper, more profound understanding of
the nature of their own religion. True, the aim of conversion often lurked in
the background, but with it also the hope of reinvigorating the Christian
religion, together with the possibility of personal transformation and spiritual
transfiguration. There is surely some historical irony in the fact that it was the
Christian kabbalists who were the first to publish and promulgate Jewish
esoteric material. With its implication of tolerance and even respect toward
the tradition of another religion, their belief in the relevance of Jewish
Kabbalah for its Christian counterpart is “very nearly unique in the history
of the three scriptural religions.”37
36
Cf. Yvonne Petry, Gender, Kabbalah, and the Reformation: The Mystical Theology of Guillaume
Postel (1510–1581) (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 82.
37
Dan, “The Kabbalah of Johannes Reuchlin,” 55–56, 68.
14
PARACELSIANISM
B r u c e T . Mo r a n
1 Paracelsus and Paracelsianism

Paracelsianism, although consisting of many elements and interpreted in
different ways, develops from the thinking of the Swiss German physician,
natural philosopher, and alchemist Philippus Areolus Theophrastus
Bombastus von Hohenheim, otherwise known as Paracelsus (1493/94–
1541). Following an early education that may have included instruction by
his father in the transmutation of metals, Paracelsus began a “great wander-
ing” throughout Europe that brought him into contact with both learned
and artisanal communities. Around 1515, he may have received a medical
degree at Ferrara, although evidence for this is sketchy. Nevertheless,
Paracelsus gained a reputation as a skilled physician; his successful treatment
of the well-known humanist printer Johann Froben (ca. 1460–1527) may
have been partly responsible for his appointment as city physician and
university lecturer at Basel. There he lectured in German, rather than
Latin, and his strong criticisms of traditional medicine, which included at
one point burning books, led to a hostile reaction from other university
physicians and forced his abrupt departure from the city. Controversy fol-
lowed wherever he went, however. Writings regarding the treatment of
syphilis, in which Paracelsus recommended the use of mercury rather than
medicaments made of Guajak wood, were denounced by the medical faculty
at Leipzig whose dean was a close friend of the merchant family Fugger (the
family that held the monopoly on the importation of the wood).
In the 1520s and 1530s, Paracelsus composed a series of texts; several of the
most famous are the Archidoxis, Opus Paragranum, Opus Paramirum, Grosse
Wundartzney, and the incomplete Astronomia Magna. These writings and
others, most often written in vernacular German, described the bases of a
new medical cosmology reviving an ancient view that connected the
156
Paracelsianism 157
universe at large (the macrocosm) with the human body (the microcosm).
According to Paracelsus, philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, and the virtue of
the physician were the pillars that supported true medicine. The physician as
philosopher and astronomer needed to recognize that “the firmament is
within man”1 and needed also to understand how each of nature’s parts
was designed to correspond to specific parts of the human body. Each
individual, Paracelsus claimed, contained in him- or herself all of existence,
and amounted to a synthesis of physical body, immortal soul, and sidereal (or
astral) spirit. The powers or virtues that operated in the world at large also
operated in the body. In fact, vital forces penetrated each thing in nature.
Astral emanations pressed upon all earthly things and gave them their divi-
nely designated signatures – their outward material signs indicating connec-
tions to certain parts of the microcosm. It was one of the principal tasks of the
Paracelsian physician to extract those powers from the greater world, usually
by means of the art of chemical separation (ars spagyrica), and to apply them to
specific parts of the body.
Traditions of ancient magic, medieval alchemy, folk medicine, and
Renaissance Hermetism influenced the ideas of Paracelsus, and much of his
writing took aim at the traditional standard bearers of learned philosophy and
medicine: Aristotle, Galen, and Avicenna. Although he referred to the
Aristotelian elements of earth, air, fire, and water, Paracelsus defined them
as natural wombs within which the first principles (or tria prima) of Sulphur,
Salt, and Mercury generated particular plants, animals, and minerals with the
guidance of an astral spirit. Paracelsus also rejected the traditional notion of an
imbalance of bodily humors as the cause of disease. Rather, he thought of
diseases as specific entities, identified by particular etiologies that pertained to
specific parts of the body. A primary cause of illness was the failure of an
internal archeus, or inner alchemist, to properly separate purities from impu-
rities in particular organs. When improper separation occurred, that part of
the body needed the help of a specific astral power prepared by separating a
healing virtue from a corresponding part of nature. In a process that he called
alchemia medica, Paracelsus described how alchemical techniques, especially
those involving distillation, separated spiritual virtues or hidden powers from
natural objects and brought them to bear upon diseases in the body. Each
illness required a specific remedy, and although medicines might be prepared
from plants and animals, mineral remedies were especially potent since they
1
Paracelsus, Volumen Medicinae Paramirum, trans. Kurt Leidecker (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1949), 3.
158 Bruce T . M oran
corresponded best to the sulphurous, saline, and mercurial origins of all

things.
Apart from describing a new medical cosmology, Paracelsus also com-
posed philosophical, anthropological, socio-critical, and theological works.
All these became part of his intellectual legacy. However, as we will see,
interpretations varied about the meaning of those texts, their novelty, and
even their authenticity. Debates still rage about them, and make the subject
of Paracelsianism the site of an independent intellectual domain.
Like lines of longitude and latitude, the term “Paracelsianism” constitutes
a kind of grid that helps us navigate around a certain terrain – in this case, the
historical landscape of alchemy, chemical medicine, magic, and mysticism.
Unlike lines of longitude and latitude, however, there is no settled agreement
concerning the precise location of this grid or whether its lines can even be
clearly drawn. If one invokes Paracelsianism as a way of identifying traditions
that are solely connected to original ideas unambiguously described by
Paracelsus in texts of unquestionable authorship, we might refrain from
using the reference at all. On the other hand, we might mean by the term
all the interpretations, explications, commentaries, and general discussions
based in texts attributed to Paracelsus by authors who refer to Paracelsus as in
some fashion relevant to occult, mystical, magical, or practical traditions. If
the term is used in this way, then clearly there is a lot to talk about – so much
in fact, and so much of it contradictory, that constructing a category such as
Paracelsianism becomes a descriptive refugium miserorum, a nebulous term
ready to hand when nothing more precise springs to mind.
Producing imaginative patterns so as better to comprehend and reason
about human actions and experiences is the work of historians. But we have
to be careful not to let our imaginations run away with us. Recent scholarship
is sensitive to these issues.2 Some have tried to distinguish “particular”
Paracelsianisms on the basis of differing translations and interpretations of
Paracelsus’s texts. Others admit difficulties in establishing clear-cut cate-
gories. The editors involved in the most far-reaching attempt to collect
representative examples of early Paracelsianism, Wilhelm Kühlmann and
Joachim Telle, have observed that the language of Paracelsus (often obscure
2
References to some of the most useful studies may be found in the Suggestions for Further
Reading at the end of this volume. I have also relied on discussions by, among others,
Stephen Bamforth, Udo Benzenhöfer, Andrew Cunningham, Ute Gause, Carlos Gilly, Kurt
Goldammer, Dietlinde Goltz, Ole Grell, Gundolf Keil, Julian Paulus, Horst Pfefferl, Stephen
Pumfrey, Hartmut Rudolph, Heinz Schott, Siegried Wollgast, and Illana Zinguer that
appear as individual contributions within edited volumes. References to these collected
editions also appear in the Suggestions for Further Reading.
Paracelsianism 159
and packed with neologisms) prevented any institutionalized tradition from

coming into being.3 In terms of the texts that relate to Paracelsianism, the
editors note that we are not dealing with a clearly authentic authorial oeuvre,
but with a “mushroom-like proliferating web” of “pseudo or deutero
Paracelsica.”4 Practices associated with Paracelsianism have also been recog-
nized as having led separate lives. Some in the early modern era did invoke
Paracelsus as an intellectual forerunner, especially in applying chemical
principles to medicine and in turning away from ancient humoral pathology.
However, strains of chemical medicine existed within traditional alchemy as
well as within ancient and Arabic medical practice. Some suspected that even
the Paracelsian tria prima of Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury had earlier, alchemical
roots. The French physician and alchemist Bernard George Penot (ca. 1530–
ca. 1620) suggested at one point that there was nothing new in Paracelsus,
and that Paracelsus had copied “word for word” what the alchemist Isaac
Hollandus had written about the three principles and had also closely fol-
lowed what the alchemical author Basil Valentine had written about the
same.
2 Magic and Nature

Sometimes Paracelsus mattered less as a chemical physician than as an
advocate of religious and political reform. Some found in him a social
revolutionary. Others saw the devil incarnate. In this last sense, being labeled
a Paraclesian (Paracelsista) was to endure sharp abuse. From some points of
view, Paracelsians belonged to a category of “otherness” – one that was
forged out of an anxiety about the loss of control over traditional intellectual
and linguistic standards, particularly in medicine and philosophy, and a fear
that forms of trusted knowledge were under attack. At the beginning of the
seventeenth century, the German physician, alchemist, and schoolteacher
Andreas Libavius (ca. 1550–1616) distinguished between the perceptions of
Paracelsus himself and those of a group he preferred to call Neoparacelsians.
Neoparacelsians, he noted, despised the ancients, attacked Galenic medicine,
recommended magic along with “Kabbalah,” practiced magic by means of
signs, words, and characters, and, finally, declared themselves the monarchs
of arcana. What is characteristic of Paracelsianism in this sense is a subversive
epistemology based in magic. Nowhere in the list of Paracelsian
3
Der Frühparacelsismus Erster Teil, ed. Wilhelm Kühlmann and Joachim Telle (Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer Verlag, 2001), 4.
4
Der Frühparacelsismus Zweiter Teil, ed. Kühlmann and Telle (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer
Verlag, 2004), 5.
characteristics does Libavius mention what some have wished to preserve as

the practical center of a Paracelsian tradition, namely, making chemical
medicines. The proper name for people who did that, he insisted, was
alchemist.
Libavius’s depiction may have been harsh and one sided, but it was true
that many Paracelsians represented a way of thinking based in magic.
According to this worldview, one reflective of older occult traditions,
human beings condensed the entire macrocosm within themselves and
possessed, as a consequence, an inner knowledge of nature and her powers.
As we have seen, Paracelsus thought that each individual contained within
him- or herself all existence. Each was a synthesis of physical body, immortal
soul, and sidereal (or astral) spirit. For many followers of Paracelsus, that
combination had cognitive consequences and made it possible for each
person to recognize the vital connections that linked one part of the world
to another and, thereafter, to manipulate nature’s hidden virtues for specific
purposes.
Paracelsus believed that both nature and human beings were magicians.
Nature, he thought, disclosed the secret powers within things by means of
external signs, or “signatures” (i.e., the actual shape, coloring, texture, etc.)
of an object. The physician-magus had learned to read these signs, discover-
ing nature’s language through the study of astronomiam, medicinam, philoso-
phiam, physiognomiam, chiromantiam, and the like. Thus, one magician taught
another, and nature (Magierin) revealed to the human being (Magier) her
secrets. The physician-magus pulled heavenly, vital powers out of nature and
then transferred those powers to corrupted parts of the body.5
The magical side of Paracelsianism is particularly obvious in the writings of
the early seventeenth-century physician Oswald Croll (ca. 1563–1609). In
two writings especially, the “Admonitory Preface” to his Basilica Chymica
(1609) and in a treatise on the doctrine of signs, Croll described essential
components of nature’s magical structure as well as a method, based in
personal experience and revelation, by which such a structure was to be
learned. Croll’s texts wove together strands of Florentine Neoplatonism,
Hermetism, and German mysticism, each of which condensed realms of
matter, spirit, and soul into a single divine unity, mixing thereby the sacred
with the profane. The physician, Croll argued, needed to know the internal,
invisible, or astral structures of things in the greater world and to understand
5
Heinz Schott, “Magie-Glaube-Aberglaube: Zur ‘Philosophoa Magna’ des Paracelsus,” in
Paracelsus und seine internationale Rezeption in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Heinz Schott and Ilana
Zinguer (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 24–35.
Paracelsianism 161
how these related to the organization of the body. Intellectual discovery

followed, he claimed, not from reading and interpreting books, or even from
accumulated experience, but from personally experiencing the divine –
either directly communicated by God through revelation or by becoming
awakened to the divine messages concealed in the natural world. For
Libavius, the scheme described by Croll was epistemologically dangerous
on the one hand, and diabolical on the other. If personal inspiration satisfied
for cognitive innovation, Libavius wondered, how could one avoid a multi-
tude of opinions being expressed as a result of personal fantasy? “Take away
teachers and books, and allow anyone to philosophize on his own [and] you
will have a lovely philosophy indeed.” Such a philosophy was the contri-
vance of the devil, Libavius thought, “so that he may either abolish or pervert
every system of learning, and he himself may rule at his own pleasure.”6 From
such a perspective, it was easy to link Paracelsians to other personally inspired
enthusiasts of the period, such as the Anabaptists, whose views, many
claimed, led to social and religious discord.
Paracelsianism, then, gained definition through controversy as it seemed
to break with institutionally established social, textual, educational, and
linguistic norms. It advocated a revision of methods in acquiring knowledge,
especially as related to the knowledge of nature and the body, by arguing for
the relevance of personal experience as opposed to the type of book learning
that conveyed the concretized views of disciplinary authorities. Its insights
were tinged by hermetic and alchemical influences and its expressions were
largely directed against academic traditions of Galenism and Aristotelianism.
It found fertile soil among social critics and religious dissidents, especially
anti-confessional enthusiasts, and it inspired an array of writings defending
new sources of intellectual legitimacy in the study of medicine and natural
philosophy.
3 Problems of Texts, Translations, and Traditions

Depending on the early modern sources, the number of texts supposed to
have been written by Paracelsus ranged from around two hundred forty to
about four hundred. Some texts were reported to have circulated in manu-
script but have never been discovered. Some were supposedly so illegible or
contained so many unintelligible signs that they were discarded and never
published. Some amounted to fragmentary transcriptions made by students
6
Bruce T. Moran, Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical
Cultures with Polemical Fire (Sagamore Beach, ME: Science History Publications, 2007), 219.
and servants. Some were of questionable authenticity even from the start, and
some texts lacked parts or whole sections. In establishing traditions of
Paracelsianism, the curious thing is that the early editors, translators, and
publishers of texts attributed to Paracelsus were, in many respects, more
important than Paracelsus himself. Paracelsus wrote at a time when Germans
were just deciding on the syntactical rules that would guide their written
language. Editors made their own judgments concerning the meaning of
obscure words and phrases, and sometimes contrived entirely different
wordings in the process of editing and translation. Particularly disturbing
were the disparities that peppered the early Latin and German editions of a
text called De Vita Longa. Modern German translations face the same pro-
blems in representing obscure, linguistically tortured phrases, as comparisons
of the Paracelsus editions of Karl Sudhoff, Bernard Aschner, and Will Erich
Peuckert attest.
Among the early editors, Adam von Bodenstein, Johann Huser (ca. 1545–
ca. 1600), Gerhard Dorn (ca. 1530–1584), and Michael Toxites (ca. 1515–
1581) stand out most prominently. The early published collections of Huser
and Toxites fueled early Paracelsian fervor by combining elements of medical
reform with what Joachim Telle called “transconfessional theo-alchemy.”7
To Huser, Paracelsus was the “German Trismegistus,” possessing revealed
alchemical-cosmological knowledge. Dorn announced Paracelsus as “the
philosopher of our time, not undeservedly called thrice great with
Trismegistus,” and established Paracelsus within the cultural context of
medieval and Renaissance alchemical writers.
However, some of the texts referred to by Dorn as directly connected to
Paracelsus have origins that are anything but certain. Nevertheless, Dorn
used such writings to establish Paracelsus as a kind of irenic-theological
alchemist connected to the hermetic prisca sapientia. In one work, his
Congeries Paracelsicae Chemiae de Transmutationibus Metallorum (1581), Dorn
interpreted the words of Christ, “my peace I give to you, my peace I leave
with you,” as a reference to the divinely established order in nature that
moved all things toward perfection. Paracelsus, he claimed, viewed the
principal arcanum in medicine to lie in the transmutation and perfection of
natural things and, in this way, had sought the root of peace and all natural
harmony established by God within creation. Since celestial spirits combined
with elements to produce specific bodies, the Paracelsian physician acted as
an alchemist, separating form from matter and reapplying celestially derived
7
Joachim Telle, “Johann Huser in seinen Briefen . . .,” in Parerga Paracelsica, ed. Joachim Telle
(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991), 159–248; 178.
Paracelsianism 163
spiritual forms to other parts of the material world. Celestial, life-giving

powers were most concentrated in metals. Accordingly, Dorn proclaimed
in the name of Paracelsus that a universal medicine drawn from metals and
minerals by means of separation could transmute bodies to the greatest degree
of perfection, renewing and extending life itself. Adam von Bodenstein, who
lost his job as a university physician at Basel following the publication of his
own edition of Paracelsian texts, was also motivated by alchemical interests.
For him, it was the writings of Arnold of Villanova and Agrippa of
Nettesheim that proved convincing and that underscored the theoretical
and practical possibility of transmutation.
In the hands of these editors and others, Paracelsianism took on different
flavors. In some cases, editors altered Paracelsus’s difficult vocabulary or
added their own commentaries, arguing for a text’s relevance within specific
intellectual traditions. Von Bodenstein attempted to make Paracelsus toler-
able to Aristotelians while presenting Paracelsus as a harbinger of a “golden
age” in which ancient knowledge, once the possession of Hermes, was
rediscovered and put to work for a common purpose. Gerhard Dorn and
Michael Toxites linked Paracelsus to Hermes and to a tradition of secret
knowledge stemming from the hermetic Emerald Tablet. At the same time,
the French commentator Jacques Gohory (1520–1576) argued that
Paracelsus, in addition to being a hermetic magus, was also a Neoplatonic
philosopher in the tradition of Ficino. Attempts to alter Paracelsian texts for
specific social or intellectual purposes have persisted into the modern era as
well. In the twentieth century, Paracelsus became an icon of the German
racial spirit in the Blut und Boden literature of the Nazi regime. In seeking to
rehabilitate tainted writings thereafter, the much respected modern editor
Kurt Goldammer (1916–1996) openly removed specific references to Jews
from the first popular German edition of a Paracelsus text after the war, Vom
Licht der Natur und des Geistes, published by Reclam as a low-cost
pocketbook.8
Editors and commentators not only took differing intellectual approaches
to Paracelsus’s texts but sometimes disapproved of one another’s editions.
Gohory and the Basel publisher Pietro Perna rejected Dorn’s Latin transla-
tions, while Dorn himself railed against the deficiencies of Gohory’s French
renderings. Some parts of Paracelsus’s writings were simply untranslatable.
Uncertainty abounded concerning what Paracelsus actually wrote, and in this
respect part of the experience of Paracelsianism included attempts to create
8
Paracelsus, Vom Licht der Natur und des Geistes eine Auswahl, ed. Kurt Goldammer (Stuttgart:
Philipp Reclam, 1979), 37.
Paracelsus lexica in which obscure references might find some clarity by

means of being linked to other citations. Bodenstein was one of the first to
offer such an interpretative guide in his text Onomasticon, published in 1566 as
a supplement to the Paracelsian Opus Chirurgicum. Explanatory glossaries
accompanied other texts, and further publications by Michael Toxites (one
of the most philologically sensitive editors), Leonard Thurneisser, and
Gerhard Dorn sought as well to shed light on Paracelsus’s linguistic darkness.9
With each new translation, interpretation, and glossary, another current
within the turgid flood of Paracelsianism emerged.
4 Severinus and the French Paracelsians

Nevertheless, some currents proved stronger than others, and one particu-
larly strong Paracelsian tradition flowed from a text written by the Danish
physician Petrus Severinus (1540/2–1602) called the Idea medicinae philoso-
phicae (1571). There, Severinus linked Paracelsian medical theory to ancient
authorities and gave shape to a more systematic expression of Paracelsian
thinking. He also fashioned a compromise between humoral pathology and
chemical cures. It was especially Severinus’s notion of seeds, or semina, that
caught the attention of later commentators. Semina were seedlike “reasons”
(rationes seminales), altogether imperceptible to the senses, possessing the
preordained plan for each physical thing. As such, they existed as interme-
diaries between divine ideas and material bodies. They shared both spiritual
and corporeal characteristics, and accounted for both healthy and morbid
physical change in the human body. Semina were affected by what Severinus
called “tinctures.” These were pure forms that could be transferred from one
thing to another. Such tinctures within semina possessed the mechanical
knowledge (scientia mechanica) of the chemical processes by means of which
changes in the body took place. Thus, curing disease occurred by means of
“transplantation” (in which the vital tinctures in chemically prepared com-
pounds altered morbid tinctures in the body).10 Severinus’s philosophical
medicine was a primary vehicle for disseminating a broad tradition of
Paracelsian theory. In the hands of commentators like Johannes Pratensis
(b. 1543), Ambrosius Rhodius, Thomas Moffett (1553–1604), and William
Davidson of Aberdeen (ca. 1593–ca. 1669), Paracelsian ideas merged both
with academic natural philosophy and with the mystical cosmologies
9
Wilhelm Kühlmann, in Kühlmann and Telle, Der Frühparacelsisms Zweiter Teil, 18ff.
10
Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context,
and Influence of Petrus Severinus: 1540–1602 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004),
183ff.
Paracelsianism 165
constructed by Michael Maier (ca. 1568–1622), Robert Fludd (1574–1637),

and the early Rosicrucians. In Germany, Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), pro-
fessor of medicine at Wittenberg, accepted the Paracelain tria prima, approved
of the doctrine of the macrocosm and the microcosm, developed a notion of
“atoms” as formative forces within natural objects, and considered chemical
medicaments as the perfection of medicine. All the while he argued for the
continued relevance of Galen and Aristotle and did not reject ancient
humoral theory.
Paracelsians were often physicians and many Paracelsian physicians found
places and patrons at princely courts. The pile of works thought to be directly
connected to Paracelsus collected by the Elector of the Palatinate,
Ottheinrich, joined alchemical writings at court, including the pseudon-
ymous work of Raymond Lull, and stimulated the interests of the court
physician Adam von Bodenstein. Other early Paracelsians turned to the
Wittelsbachs in Bavaria, to August of Saxony in Dresden, to the nobility in
Bohemia, to the Bishops of Speyer, Salzburg, and Cologne, as well as to
members of numerous local noble houses for support and advancement.
Gerhard Dorn acquired the protection of the Cardinal de Grenvelle and
dedicated writings to the brother of the French king Henry III, François de
Valois.
In France, Johannes Guinterius von Andernach (ca. 1497–1574) empha-
sized a more practical approach to Paracelsian therapeutics. As a prominent
medical humanist, a translator of Galen, and respected professor of medicine
at Paris, he prepared, in 1571, an enormous text concerning the old and new
medicine strongly supportive of chemical medicaments. He argued that the
chemical principles Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury differed only slightly from
ancient elements and claimed that chemical procedures transformed poiso-
nous matter into wholesome substances. The recently translated French
edition of Pietro Andrea Matthioli’s (1501–1577) commentary on the
works of Dioscorides also spurred debate. The book included reference to
the use of stones, minerals, and metals and explained how antimony, which
had been described by Paracelsus, could be rendered into an effective
purgative.
In Paris, the debate over the internal use of antimony inspired attacks on
suspected followers of Paracelsus, and the fear of clandestine support for
Paracelsian ideas within the university there led to the prompt condemnation
of an early advocate of antimony, Roch le Baillif (fl. 1578–1580).
Nevertheless, other physicians persuaded by different parts of chemical-
Paracelsian philosophy began to appear in Paris shortly thereafter, many
returning with the protection of the Huguenot turned Catholic king
Henry of Navarre. Prominent among this new medical entourage were Jean
Ribit (ca. 1571–1605), Theodore Turquet de Mayerne (1573–1655), and
Joseph Duchesne (ca. 1544–1609), also called Quercetanus. Although each
would stir continued medical controversy, the writings of Duchesne became
especially expressive of a particular variety of Paracelsian thinking.
Duchesne admitted that the ignorance and faults of some physicians and
apothecaries had caused the “chymici” to fall into disrepute, but that this was
no reason to condemn an entire art through which the secrets of God became
known. Duchesne explained that Paracelsus was no oracle, and that there was
much to disagree with in both his philosophy and his theology. Nevertheless,
he observed that Paracelsus “teacheth many things almost divinely, in
Phisicke [i.e., medicine] which the thankfull posteritie can neither commend
and praise sufficientlie.”11 It was Paracelsus the alchemist that Duchesne
admired most, and a great part of his dispute with the faculty of medicine
at Paris related to his defense of alchemy and metallic transmutation within
the context of a Paracelsian-based cosmology. The Paris debates show us
how difficult it is to strictly distinguish Paracelsian traditions among chemical
physicians. Libavius, who wished to defend the place of alchemy in medi-
cine, ultimately joined the debate as a Duchesne supporter and was imme-
diately condemned as someone who had joined the Paracelsian faction.
Regardless of how the intervention was seen by others – especially by one
of the leaders of the Parisian medical faculty, Jean Riolan (1539–1606) –
Libavius remained no friend to Paracelsus. He could, however, stand with
other chemical physicians at Paris and comment about another participant in
the dispute, the Paracelsian Turquet de Mayerne. Libavius observed that
Mayerne’s dignity, like his own, was preserved not by specifically defending
Duchesne, but by the effort that each had made to combine Hippocratic and
chemical medicine and by their mutual labors in picking out good remedies
from Paracelsian manure.
Medical chemists need not have been Paracelsians, unless, of course, it was
convenient for their enemies to label them as such. A difference of opinion
about the nature of true alchemy had led another doctor at Paris named
Pierre Le Paulmier (1568–1610) to attack Libavius as a Paracelsian. Libavius
explained in response that simply separating efficacious essences from che-
mical dregs did not make one a disciple of Paracelsus. If it did, one would
have to include Avicenna, Bulcasis, and even members of the Parisian school
in that company. In the case of another medical doctor named Nicolas
11
Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (1977; reprinted, Mineola: Dover Publications, 2002), 149.
Paracelsianism 167
Abraham de la Framboisier, the medical faculty at Paris during the reign of

Louis XIII seems to have worried about Paracelsian leanings, even though
the physician himself rejected “the sect of Paracelsus” and argued that he
derived his chemical remedies from Galen and Hippocrates. Suspicions of
Paracelsianism in this case were more a matter of religious distrust and envy
aroused by apparent royal patronage than a result of precisely defined intel-
lectual commitment.
Despite their problems in France, Duchesne and other French Paracelsians
continued to play important roles in the interpretation and transmission of
Paracelsianism. After leaving France, Mayerne became chief physician to the
English king James I. Elsewhere in England, John Hester (d. 1593) translated
the tracts of Duchesne and others. In so doing, he promoted chemical
preparations included in works by the Italian physician Leonardo Fioravanti
(1518–1588) and the German Philip Herman. Another Englishman, a minister
named Thomas Tymme (d. 1620) also translated large sections of Duchesne’s
works into English, especially his discussions of Paracelsian cosmology.
Tymme, like R. Bostock, who defended Paracelsian principles and the
macrocosm-microcosm analogy in a book of 1585, drew something spiritual
from Paracelsus’s works and found there as well an anthropology and natural
philosophy removed from, and consequently not indebted to, ancient
heathen texts.
5 Spiritual Paracelsianism
The spiritual side of Paracelsus had been emphasized as well by early editors.
A few, such as Toxites, Dorn, and another defender of Paracelsus, a physician
named Samuel Siderocrates, shared in common a connection to the German
university town of Tübingen, and each had taken a strong position against
the orthodox Lutheranism that flourished there. Because of that connection,
early Paracelsian writers within the Tübingen intellectual community may
have influenced later Tübingen dissidents probably responsible for compos-
ing some of the earliest Rosicrucian writings. In some instances, the spiritual
and mystical side of Paracelsus completely swamped Paracelsian chemical-
medical philosophy. The mystical interpretation of Paracelsus was especially
useful to religious radicals such as Valentin Weigel (1533–1588) and his
pseudo-Weigelian imitators. It also influenced trans-confessional theologians
such as Johann Arndt (1555–1621) and Christoph Hirsch (i.e., Josephus
Stellatus), as well as the early Rosicrucian enthusiast Adam Haselmeyer.
To Haselmeyer, both the mythical Christian Rosencreutz and Paracelsus
had promised evangelical freedom to a world of the future, and Haselmeyer
proclaimed accordingly a new religion, the Theophrastia Sancta, viewed as a

kind of perennial religion practiced in occult circles until Paracelsus had
publicly proclaimed its meaning. The foundation of the religion was the tria
cabalistica prima, the three kabbalistic principles of Bitten, Suchen, and
Anklopfen (asking, seeking, and appealing) that Paracelsus had designated in
the Philosophia Sagax as the means to all natural knowledge. The living word
of God sealed within the human being was, on the basis of this theology, far
more important than what was written in Scripture. In fact, without the
human spirit to enliven it, the Bible itself became a mere a collection of dead
letters. To the external trappings of Christendom, some advocated a renewed
“church of the spirit” in which the illumination of the spirit found its
fulfillment outside a strictly, church-bound Christian context and led to a
restoration of knowledge through the possession of pansophic wisdom. The
real church thus existed apart from either Protestant or Catholic commu-
nities; in constructing such a view, texts associated with Valentin Weigel, the
pastor of Zschopau in east Saxony, drew on material ready to hand in the
writings of Paracelsus.
At least in part, Weigelian theology comprises yet another strip in the
complicated latticework of early Paracelsianism. Treatises and sermons
whose content differed substantially from Catholic and mainline Protestant
opinion began to appear in the 1570s. In the early seventeenth century, the
presses of several publishers churned out “Weigelian” books. Some of those
books, however, were not actually written by Weigel and sorting out the
genuine from the apocryphal has become a primary task of Weigel scholars
ever since. Of those texts most directly linked to Weigel, influences stem-
ming from medieval mystical traditions and, after 1578, from Paracelsian
natural philosophy predominated. Other Weigelian texts had a more apoc-
alyptic message, insisted on inward knowledge, and conflated Paracelsus,
Kabbalah, and magic. Institutionalized Protestantism made no distinction
concerning authorship. It viewed all the writings as consistent with a theol-
ogy of the inner word and therefore well suited to the mystical ravings of
personally enlightened spiritualists and to the subjective epistemologies of
religious radicals.
In Paracelsus, Weigel seems to have encountered such notions as the light
of nature and the light of grace. Both were forms of revelation, the first by means
of inspired experience, the second by means of direct divine disclosure, and
Weigel seems to have based his own views concerning the processes of
human understanding upon them. He also found in Paracelsus anthropolo-
gical notions relating to man as a microcosm of the universe produced from
limus terrae. Other ideas sharing elements with Paracelsian religious writings
Paracelsianism 169
were more disturbing. By contrasting a heavenly flesh, which is eternal, to an

earthly mortal flesh, Weigel judged that the flesh of Christ was not that of
Adam. The flesh of Christ, therefore, was not from the earth, not from the
seed of man, but from heaven. Christ had a heavenly body born of Mary, a
heavenly Eve.
Paracelsus had stated similar opinions. In his text Liber de Sancta Trinitate,
which seems to have had an active life in manuscript, Paracelsus described
how God was originally alone and without any beginning. Thus, the divine
separation into three persons was not eternal, and initially there was only one
being, one divinity, one person. God remained alone until he wished to
multiply and manifest himself, at which point there came into being three
persons, three beings, three qualities and forms, all the while remaining,
nonetheless, one God, one creator. Paracelsus also described how God
separated a female form from himself, represented as a himmlische weib or
frau gottes, which was understood not as a separate divinity, but the means by
which God the Father produced the second person of the Trinity. Embedded
here, as well as in the Christologies of other religious writers such as Melchior
Hofman (d. 1543) and Casper Schwenkfeld (d. 1561), was a revolutionary
and millennial conception of the church. By distancing Christ’s flesh from
human flesh, Weigel joined those who cast into doubt the possibility of
reforming the old Adam. There had to be a new covenant in which the heart
would replace the external Jerusalem as the dwelling place of God. To this
end, Weigel recognized three stages of the world ending finally in the age of
the Holy Spirit. At that time, each person would become a separate Jerusalem
and a divine temple, and there would no longer be a need for ordained
preachers or other teachers.
Paracelsianism could be aligned with mystics such as Schwenkfeld and
Weigel, but it was also appealing to some who took part in more orthodox
theological debates surrounding the symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist.
For them, it has been argued, Paracelsus became a kind of “Christian Magus”
developing a knowledge of God through the study of nature. Despite
Protestant links, Catholics too supported the publication of Paracelsian
texts. In both theological camps, Paracelsian ideas found fertile ground
already prepared by a heritage of Neoplatonic and mystical Renaissance
philosophy.
6 Later Traditions
Aside from making chemistry relevant to medicine, other themes – philo-
sophical, mystical, and religious – connected later writers to the works and
thoughts of Paracelsus. One tradition connected Paracelsus not only to an

explanation of disease as specific entities with specific etiologies, rejecting
thereby the ancient doctrine of humors, but also annexed Paracelsian notions
to explications of physiological processes in the idiom of chemistry. This
aspect of what later became known as iatrochemistry developed especially in
the seventeenth century in the writings of Jean Baptiste van Helmont (1579–
1644), Franciscus de le Boë Sylvius (1614–1672), Raymond Vieussens (ca.
1635–1715), and many others. Expressing a natural philosophy in terms of
vitalism and macrocosmic influences and upholding chemical analogies
related to the human being inevitably involved reference to Paracelsus. For
van Helmont, no part of nature was entirely inert. Especially in a text
published posthumously called Ortus medicinae (1648), he invoked the (by
then well worn) idea of spiritual seeds, or semina, and coined new terms such
as “gas” and “blas” in attempts to define the spiritual, life-giving, and
activating parts of physical existence – some of it innate in bodies, some of
it derived from the stars. In some places, aspects of Paracelsian thinking
joined in a mixture of new and old medical opinions. By the end of the
seventeenth century, Paracelsian views could be found side by side those of
Galenists, iatrochemists, and even Cartesians in encyclopedic discussions of
the causes and cures of disease.12 Throughout the same period and beyond,
alchemical texts continued to enlist Paracelsus and the tria prima in descrip-
tions of vitalist cosmologies and discussions of transmutation. As part of a
lineage of magical savants aware of inner relationships and forever maneu-
vering between matter, spirit, and soul, Paracelsus became a staple reference
among esotericists, mystical philosophers, and spiritual alchemists in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Neoplatonic and Paracelsian themes combined by the religious mys-
tic and Philosophus Teutonicus Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), in numerous
prophetic and mystical writings, helped generate thereafter wide currents
of Christian theosophy and Naturphilosophie. Many of those same themes
concerning the spiritual parts of matter and the threefold nature of the human
being as composed of body, soul, and spirit continued into the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries in the theistic philosophy of Franz von Baader
(1765–1841), the works of the post-Romantic poet-alchemist Alexander
von Bernus (1880–1965), and in the anthroposophical writings of Rudolf
Steiner (1861–1925).
12
For example, Johannis Dolaei . . . Encyclopedia Chirurgica Rationalis. . . (Francofurti ad
Moenum: sumtibus Friderici Knochii, 1689).
15
ROSICRUCIANISM
Hereward Tilton
1 Introduction: Gnosis and Transfiguration in Rosicrucianism

Disparate groups have assumed the Rosicrucian mantle across the four
centuries of development of this esoteric current; consequently, the task of
defining Rosicrucianism is a challenging one. In both scholarly and esoteric
literature, Rosicrucianism has been portrayed as the purveyor of a gnosis
originating in the ancient gnostic and hermetic milieu, that is to say, an
esoteric knowledge promising salvation through the freeing of the spirit from
its bondage to matter. The prevalence of this portrayal owes much to the
thought of Carl Gustav Jung, who advanced the influential thesis that the
alchemical art practiced in Rosicrucian circles was a conduit for such gnosis.1
Jung’s view echoes a heterodox Protestant polemic of the seventeenth
century, when the Pietist Gottfried Arnold sought to ally Rosicrucianism
with the suppressed teachings of a supposedly authentic primitive church.2
Gnosis is certainly a central motif in the modern construction (and post-
modern deconstruction) of Western esotericism as a field of discourse formed
by Christian apologetics.3 Nevertheless, there is little in pre-twentieth-century
Rosicrucianism of the world-rejecting flight from matter or heavenly ascent
through salvific knowledge that was central to ancient Gnosticism – which like
esotericism is a problematic category with origins in a heresiological agenda.
Prior to the rise of the neo-gnostic Lectorium Rosicrucianum in the 1930s, when
the Demiurge emerged among the Neoplatonic cosmologies that were a staple
of Rosicrucianism, he was the benevolent architect of Plato rather than the
dark creator god of the gnostics. Nor is the presence in the Rosicrucian corpus
1
See Gerhard Wehr’s essay on Jung in this volume.
2
Gottfried Arnold, Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzer- Historie (Frankfurt: Thomas Fritsch,
1729).
3
See Wouter Hanegraaff’s contribution on “Gnosis” in this volume.
171
172 Hereward Tilton
of other motifs associated with ancient Gnosticism (such as the androgyne and
the ouroboros) evidence of a lineage stretching back to antiquity via the
gnostic heresy of the Cathars. Rather, these motifs are derived via Boehme
and Paracelsus from the alchemical corpus, and their employment by the
medieval alchemists cannot be considered proof of the secret practice of a
heretical “spiritual alchemy.” Jung’s references in this regard are not to a
consciously transmitted tradition but to a largely unconscious process of
collective individuation corresponding to the precession of the equinoxes.4
As the main conduit of the notion of Rosicrucianism’s gnostic lineage, Jung’s
testimony on this matter must be carefully distinguished from a purely histor-
ical enquiry, lest we become unwitting purveyors of an esoteric tradition rather
than agents for its historical analysis.
Once this caveat is heeded, the esoteric teachings of the major Rosicrucian
groups appear to center less on gnosis and more on “transfiguration,” that is,
on the initiate’s achievement of quasi-divine status and powers through the
transformation of the human body into a semi-spiritual condition. While
some latter-day Rosicrucians have interpreted such transfiguration as a
gnosis,5 the sources of this doctrinal element lie primarily in the Christian
and alchemical traditions rather than the ancient gnostic milieu. A second
and related characteristic of Rosicrucian lore is the notion that the beings
thus transfigured have banded together to exert a benevolent influence on
the course of world history.
Pseudo-historical fantasies also seem to constitute something of the essence
of Rosicrucianism, and they have certainly played a key role in establishing and
legitimizing authority within the main Rosicrucian groups considered here.
While the task of untangling these fantasies from the historical record is an
important one, the urge to demystify should be tempered by an awareness that
Rosicrucianism is an esoteric current in which artifacts of the imagination
convey truths very different from those of modernity’s dominant intellectual
paradigms. Moreover, such artifacts may exercise their own considerable
influence on the course of history, as the events surrounding the dawn of
Rosicrucianism in seventeenth-century Germany reveal.
2 Rosicrucian Origins amid the Counter-Reformation

The dawn of Rosicrucianism was heralded across Europe by the publication
in 1614 of the anonymous Fama Fraternitatis, which described the opening of
4
Carl Gustav Jung, Aion: Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte (Zürich: Rascher, 1951).
5
For example, the Lectorium Rosicrucianum and the S.R.I.A., cf. infra.
Rosicrucianism 173
the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz, the founder of a medieval fraternity of

learned monks dedicated to the reformation of theology and the sciences.
According to the Fama, the Liber T. was found clasped in the hands of the
“venerable and undecayed” corpse of Rosenkreutz, who was not afflicted by
disease but was “summoned by the Spirit of God” in an Enochian fashion.6
The most treasured of the Rosicrucian fraternity’s texts after the Bible, the
Liber T. contained the intellectual fruits of Rosenkreutz’s pilgrimage to
Arabia and Africa, where he studied under the wise men of the city of
Damcar and the “elemental inhabitants” of Fez.7 As such, this marvelous
book depicted “a microcosm corresponding in all motions to the macro-
cosm” – just like the burial vault itself, which was lit by “another sun” and
structured in accordance with a Neoplatonic cosmology.8 According to the
Fama, the Liber T. and other works secreted within the tomb held the
primordial knowledge granted by God to humanity – alchemy, Kabbalah,
and magic – and through their rediscovery “a door will open for Europe” to a
new era of the knowledge of God and nature. In this era, it shall no longer be
said “something is true according to philosophy, but false according to
theology”; rather, the divine signatures in nature will be deciphered by
those who recognize that they possess an image of the macrocosm within
themselves.9
With its promise of the restoration of a prisca sapientia or primordial
wisdom, the Fama Fraternitatis stands within the hermetic tradition inherited
by the German late Renaissance from Ficino and the Italian magi. However,
its chief pedigree is to be found in the work of Paracelsus and pre-Paracelsian
alchemy. The prominence of Paracelsian influence is such that the Fama tells
us that a “dictionary” by the sage of Hohenheim is found within the tomb.10
This statement gave rise to early suspicions that the Fama’s account was
allegorical in nature, for the tomb was purportedly closed nine years prior
to Paracelsus’s birth. Hence the fraternity’s Liber M., perused by Paracelsus
himself, was held by some to be the liber mundi or book of the world, a source
of divine revelation equal to Scripture. Likewise, the Fama’s description of
Rosenkreutz’s journey to retrieve the prisca sapientia can be read as an
allegorical account of the transmission of alchemy and other antique sciences
to Europe via the Arabs. The influence of alchemical lore is particularly
evident in the motif of the tomb’s opening, which bears a close resemblance
6
Johann Valentin Andreae, Fama Fraternitatis (Haarlem: Rozekruis Pers, 1998), 92.
7
Andreae, Fama, 74, 76.
8
Andreae, Fama, 88, 90, 92.
9
Andreae, Fama, 72, 98.
10
Andreae, Fama, 92.
174 Hereward Tilton
to a tale associated with the Arabic Tabula Smaragdina, in which the Emerald
Tablet is found clasped in the hands of Hermes as he lies in state in his tomb.11
What is more, Christian Rosenkreutz’s perfectly preserved corpse and the
106 years of his life suggested to readers that the Rosicrucian fraternity
possessed a transfiguring alchemical panacea, no doubt employed by the
brethren in fulfillment of their first law – to heal the sick gratis.12
The legend of Christian Rosenkreutz related by the Fama Fraternitatis and
the second manifesto, the Confessio Fraternitatis (1615), did more than estab-
lish the authority of a religious and natural philosophical program. This
clever marriage of allegory with contemporary events such as the 1604
supernova led to a widespread belief in a conspiratorial Protestant fraternity
with extraordinary natural magical powers, playing a role equal and opposite
to that of the Jesuits in the fractious religious and political affairs of the day.
Indeed, the Rosicrucian manifestos and the plethora of published responses
they provoked should be understood in the context of rising antagonism
between the Protestant Union and Catholic League within the Holy Roman
Empire. Nascent Rosicrucianism was nurtured above all by Calvinist
Germany, which not only provided a safe haven for modes of thought
inimical to the burgeoning Counter-Reformation, but was pervaded by a
medievalist nostalgia for a world unriven by the divide between the secular
and the sacred.
The historical record points with little equivocation to the source of the
manifestos: the “society of intimate friends” surrounding the Tübingen
theologian Johann Valentin Andreae and his mentor, the Paracelsian
Tobias Hess.13 Indeed, Andreae had already composed his famous alchemical
allegory, the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, by 1607.
Ostensibly describing the seven-day journey of Christian Rosenkreutz to a
mysterious royal wedding, the Chemical Wedding employs a variety of
alchemical symbols, mirroring both the stages of the alchemical process and
the progress of the Christian soul’s pilgrimage through the world. The origins
of the Rose Cross motif are laid bare when Rosenkreutz, summoned to the
wedding by an angelic figure, places four roses in his hat and a red band
“crosswise” on his shoulders.14 This may well be an allusion to Andreae’s
own coat of arms, which features four flowers divided by a cross. However,
11
Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, “Scriptum Alberti super Arborem Aristotelis,” Theatrum
Chemicum, Vol. 2 (Strasbourg: Zetzner, 1659), 458.
12
Andreae, Fama, 82.
13
Carlos Gilly, Cimelia Rhodostaurotica (Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 1995), 78–79.
14
Johann Valentin Andreae, Chymische Hochzeit: Christiani Rosencreutz. Anno 1459 (Strasbourg:
Lazarus Zetzner, 1616), 14.
Rosicrucianism 175
hermetic symbolism is ambiguous and multivalent in nature, and another

likely source for the motif is a tract by Paracelsus, the Book on the Resurrection
and Glorification of Bodies. There the author portrays the rose as a symbol of the
transfiguration or spiritualization of the human body through both the blood
of Christ and the Philosopher’s Stone, the agent of alchemical
transmutation.15 This portrayal draws in turn on medieval employment of
the rose as a symbol of the perfected red Philosopher’s Stone, which was
understood to be a paradoxical fusion of heavenly spirit and earthly matter.
The Stone’s nature was likened by the medieval alchemists to the body of the
resurrected Christ, a subtle, incorruptible entity akin to the spiritual body
received by the faithful on the Day of Judgment.
Some authors have portrayed Andreae’s circle as the true “Brethren of the
Rosy Cross”;16 however, Andreae himself spoke of the fraternity as a virtual
entity, constituted by all those inspired to defend the program of the
manifestos.17 In the eyes of other “insiders” to the virtual nature of early
Rosicrucianism, the fraternity was an invisible Christian fellowship in the
mystical Franckian sense of “a spiritual and invisible body of all the partakers
of Christ.”18
The statements of the Confessio Fraternitatis concerning the invisibility and
invulnerability of the Rosicrucian brethren, and those of the Fama concern-
ing their near-omniscience, contributed greatly to the potency of the man-
ifestos in the popular imagination. This in turn facilitated the diffusion of
conspiracy theories, such as Jesuit accusations that Rosicrucians were seeking
world government through an alliance with Islam. Nevertheless, the influ-
ence of the manifestos and the prospects for their intellectual and spiritual
program soon waned with the descent of the empire into the maelstrom of
the Thirty Years War (1618–1648).
3 The Gold- und Rosenkreutz and the Counter-Enlightenment

The first sign of Rosicrucianism’s eighteenth-century reemergence was the
publication in 1710 of The True and Complete Preparation of the Philosopher’s
15
Paracelsus, Vita Beata, Theologische Werke 1 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 440–457; Roland
Edighoffer, “Rosicrucianism I,” Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, Vol. 2, ed.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 1012.
16
Hans Schick, Das Ältere Rosenkreuzertum (Berlin: Nordland Verlag, 1942), 69; Gilly,
Cimelia, 76.
17
Johann Valentin Andreae, Turris Babel (Strasbourg: Lazarus Zetzner, 1619), 37; cf. Hereward
Tilton, “Regni Christi Frater: Count Michael Maier and the Fraternity R. C.,” Aries: Journal
for the Study of Western Esotericism 2.1 (2001), 3–33.
18
Tilton, Regni Christi Frater.
176 Hereward Tilton
Stone, a tract supposedly stemming from the “Order of the Golden and Rosy
Cross” that appeared under the pseudonym of “Sincerus Renatus” (“genuine
rebirth”). The author is generally held to be a Silesian pastor by the name of
Samuel Richter. It is not clear whether an actual secret society lay behind
Richter’s work; however, the detailed and sometimes peculiar rules of the
order supplied by Richter impart the impression of the existence of a cult
based on the spiritualizing, life-extending effects of the Philosopher’s
Stone.19
More evidence – albeit similarly inconclusive – for the emergence of
Rosicrucianism as a genuine secret society is supplied by the Testament of
the Fraternity of the Rosy and Gold Cross, a document of Bohemian provenance
written prior to 1735, which reiterates many of the fraternity’s rules set forth
in Richter’s work. It also traces the origins of the prisca sapientia to the sons of
Noah in the manner of the Renaissance philosopher Francesco Patrizi, and it
names Bezalel, chief architect of the tabernacle, as the first imperator of the
Rosicrucian Order.20 The later dovetailing of Rosicrucian and Freemasonic
myths of origin was probably facilitated by the prominent place of Bezalel
and Solomon within this earlier lineage, and the myths of origin of the
Masonic Gold- und Rosenkreutz of the later eighteenth century also have
recourse to Patrizi’s history.21
Although the Testament also includes chapters on necromancy and the
construction of surveillance devices, the predominant concern of the order it
describes was the manufacture of the Philosopher’s Stone. Following a
centuries-old alchemical trope, the author of the Testament refers to
Moses’s creation of an aurum potabile or “potable gold” through the pulver-
ization of the Golden Calf.22 Aurum potabile was essentially a liquid form of
the Philosopher’s Stone, in which an apparently incorruptible substance –
gold – had been irrevocably dissolved and its divine virtues made available to
human digestion. Hence, in the Testament the potion that Moses gave the
Israelites to drink is identical with the Philosopher’s Stone imparted to every
Rosicrucian brother at the end of his seventh year of instruction, which is
said to extend his life by a period of sixty years.23 The plethora of alchemical
19
Sincerus Renatus [Samuel Richter], Die Warhaffte und vollkommene Bereitung des
Philosophischen Steins (Breslau: Fellgiebel, 1710), 99–106.
20
Testamentum der Fraternitet Roseae et Aureae Crucis . . . Anno 580 (Vienna: Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Cod SN 2897), 1–2, 14–15.
21
Michael Stausberg, “Zoroaster im 18. Jahrhundert: zwischen Aufklärung und Esoterik,” in
Aufklärung und Esoterik, ed. Monika Neugebauer-Wölk (Hamburg: Meiner, 1999),
135–136.
22
Testamentum, 2–3.
23
Testamentum, 26.
Rosicrucianism 177
recipes and laboratory instructions associated with eighteenth-century

Rosicrucianism suggest many such Philosopher’s Stones were forms of
colloidal gold, that is, gold in a suspended nanoparticular form.24
Although they were promulgated in the early seventeenth century as part of
what Frances Yates perceived to be a proto-Enlightenment,25 by the eight-
eenth century Rosicrucian doctrines had become an anachronism in the face of
the advance of mechanistic science and Enlightenment philosophy, which
discarded the ambiguous esoteric discourse of alchemy and rejected divine
inspiration as a legitimate path to scientific knowledge. From around 1763, the
Gold- und Rosenkreutz emerged within Freemasonic circles as an absolutist,
reactionary force at a time in which aristocratic and ecclesiastical authority was
being eroded by a democratic, republican, and materialist radical fringe.
Organized into an opaque pyramidal hierarchy, this grouping spread eastward
from the German-speaking lands to Hungary, Poland, and Russia, proving
attractive not only to conservatives among the nobility and royalty but also to
traditionalist clergy. Its emphasis on strict obedience to an unknown authority,
which conducted surveillance through informants and control through the
confession of personal secrets, reflected a vision of an ideal social order that is
more reminiscent of Bentham’s panopticon than Andreae’s utopianism. Indeed,
the Gold- und Rosenkreutz instruction for circle directors states that the main-
tenance of oaths of secrecy is itself a means of the initiate’s promised transmu-
tation from an earthly to a “spiritual” human.26
The Masonic Gold- und Rosenkreutz, like its non-Masonic predecessor,
portrayed the content of the prisca sapientia in terms of natural magic, alchemy,
and Kabbalah; these are the concerns of the influential book of emblems
associated with the order, the Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians, which presents
an amalgam of alchemical-Paracelsian natural philosophy and Christian kab-
balistic motifs drawing from the work of early theosophers such as Heinrich
Khunrath and Jacob Boehme.27 Despite its theosophical inclinations, how-
ever, the primary interest of the Masonic Gold- und Rosenkreutz lay with
laboratory alchemy, which it distinguished sharply from “mechanistic”
chemistry.28 It was each initiate’s duty to conduct laboratory alchemical
24
Hereward Tilton, “Of Ether and Colloidal Gold: The Making of a Philosophers’ Stone,”
Esoterica 9 (2007), www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeIX/EsotericaIX.pdf
25
Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972),
220–233.
26
Johann Joachim Christoph Bode, Starke Erweise (Rome [Leipzig?]: no publisher given, 5555
[1788]), 122–123.
27
Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer (Altona: J. Eckhardt, 1785), 31, 56.
28
Augustin Anton Pocquieres de Jolyfief, Der Compaß der Weisen (Berlin: Christian Ulrich
Ringmacher, 1779), 44–45.
178 Hereward Tilton
experiments and transmit any discoveries to the head of his cell. In the words of
an ex-member’s exposé, the Secret History of a Rosicrucian, the goal of this
collective labor was to produce the alchemical agent by which the
Rosicrucian’s “earthly body is transformed into a spiritual body.”29
To new initiates of the Gold- und Rosenkreutz, their unknown Rosicrucian
superiors were not only guardians of the philosophia perennis and possessors of
the Philosopher’s Stone but also transfigured beings in contact with the
angels. Hence, the order’s leadership derived its authority not only via an
unbroken lineage to the first inspired magi but also through its vertical
proximity to the divine in a cosmos conceived in Neoplatonic terms.
Indeed, the documents of the Gold- und Rosenkreutz themselves confirm
the contention of detractors that the order’s myths of origin, doctrine, and
structure functioned as the means to political power of a manipulative cabal,
the chiefs of which appear to have been the Prussian court intrigants
Bischoffwerder and Wöllner.30
4 Rosicrucianism in a Secular Age

If the Gold- und Rosenkreutz can fairly be defined in terms of a medievalist,
absolutist reaction to the Enlightenment, its nineteenth-century successors
demonstrate a greater accommodation of the ascendant secularizing para-
digm through their incorporation of doctrinal elements such as evolutionary
theory, proto-psychoanalytic theories of sexuality, women’s liberation, and
Nietzschean philosophy. While Rosicrucianism during this period consti-
tuted an alternative to the Eastern orientation of Blavatskian Theosophy
through its focus on the Western esoteric traditions, the influx of Hindu and
Buddhist ideas via the nineteenth-century Orientalists also had a considerable
impact on the form of Rosicrucian doctrine. Furthermore, growing scholarly
interest in ancient Gnosticism was reflected in the increasing prominence of
gnostic conceptions within Rosicrucian groups.
Despite these changes in emphasis, the motif of transfiguration and the
notion of a band of transfigured beings exerting benevolent influence on
world history continued to form the centerpiece of Rosicrucian doctrine.
The undermining of the opaque, ambiguous language of alchemy by the
more transparent scientific terminology of the modern age went hand-in-
hand with a decline in the popularity of laboratory alchemy, which became
29
Heinrich C. Albrecht, Geheime Geschichte eines Rosenkreuzers (Hamburg: n.p., 1792), 228.
30
For a typical polemic against the Gold- und Rosenkreutz from the “Enlightened” viewpoint
of the Illuminati, see von Löhrbach, Die theoretischen Brüder (Athen [Regensburg?]: Montag
und Weiß, 1785).
Rosicrucianism 179
just one among a myriad of magical, mystical, quasi-scientific, and broadly

religious paths to Rosicrucian transfiguration. Indeed, alchemical symbolism
is encountered more frequently in the modern Rosicrucian literature in the
context of a non-laboratory “spiritual alchemy.” Particularly influential in
this regard were the portraits of medieval alchemy as a mystical proto-
Protestant heresy put forward by Mary Atwood and the Freemason Ethan
Allen Hitchcock, which left their mark on the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia
(S.R.I.A.)31 and subsequent groups.
Founded in 1867 by Robert Wentworth Little, the S.R.I.A. began as a
decidedly middle-class Victorian initiatory society dedicated to the study of
mystery religions, Gnosticism, alchemy, the Kabbalah, and Christian mysti-
cism, among other themes deemed beneficial to the elucidation of
Freemasonic rites and symbolism.32 Admitting only Master Masons, its nine-
fold grade structure derives from that of the Gold- und Rosenkreutz and
centers on the initiates’ rejuvenating mystical encounter with their own
mortality – hence the Secret Words of the seventh Adeptus Exemptus
grade, mors janua vitae (“death is the gate of life” on the “pathway to
Divine existence”).33 This encounter is conceptualized with recourse to a
neo-gnostic discourse (the divine spark in matter constitutes “the germ of
infinite improvement”)34 and a spiritual alchemy whose goal is supposedly
identical with that of religion (“spiritualization . . . or the redemption of spirit
whilst still dwelling in matter”).35 In a work highly regarded by the S.R.I.A.,
The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries (1870), Hargrave Jennings wrote of
this liberation of the divine spark in terms of an alchemical transfiguration by
which the Rosicrucian attains a body of light akin to that of Enoch and
Elijah.36
Founded in 1888 by S.R.I.A. members William Wynn Westcott and
Samuel Liddell Mathers, the influential Hermetic Order of the Golden
Dawn differed from its predecessor in its focus on practical magic, as well
as its admittance of women and other non-Masons. Nevertheless, it also
shared some important similarities with the S.R.I.A.: Headed by three chiefs,
its grade system was derived from the Gold- und Rosenkreutz and possessed a
31
For example, Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia: Grade III°. Practicus (s.l.: s.p., 1953–1965), 22.
32
William Wynn Westcott, “Historical Account of the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, July
11th, 1919,” in Soc. Ros. in Anglia, Metropolitan College: Transactions (London: The Avondale
Press, 1919), 8–11.
33
Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, College of Adepts: Grade VII°. Adeptus Exemptus (s.l.: s.p., 1953–
1965), 4–5.
34
Adeptus Exemptus, 6.
35
Practicus, 24.
36
Cf. Genesis 5.24, Hebrews 11.5, 2 Kings 2.11, and Matthew 17.1–3.
180 Hereward Tilton
second division of grades focused on the symbolism of the Rosicrucian vault.

The initiatory rituals for the first division of grades or Golden Dawn in the
Outer were derived from the infamous Cipher Manuscript, which appears to
have been the work of S.R.I.A. Frater Kenneth Mackenzie, left unfinished at
his death in 1886.37 The spiritual path of the initiate detailed therein follows
the alchemically conceived Kabbalah derived from the Aesch-Mezareph pub-
lished in the seventeenth-century Kabbala Denudata. Enoch and Elijah repre-
sent two alternative paths of ascent within this initiatory journey, the aim of
which is “to purge matter and exalt it,” as the Cipher Manuscript expressly
states.38 Developed by Mathers, the impressive rituals of the Inner Order or
Ordo Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis were drawn from the account of the
discovery of the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz given in the Fama
Fraternitatis. Centered on the mysteries of Christ and Osiris, these rituals
took place within a microcosmic vault adorned with kabbalistic, alchemical,
and astrological symbolism, which also served as a place for individuals to
strive for self-transformation through the practice of theurgy.39
At its height at the fin-de-siècle, the Golden Dawn attained a Bohemian
fashionableness, counting among its members William Butler Yeats and the
celebrated actress Florence Farr, as well as the noted occultists Arthur
Edward Waite and Aleister Crowley. Like the Gold- und Rosenkreutz, the
Golden Dawn’s leadership claimed to possess privileged access to spiritual
beings and to represent an unbroken, authentic esoteric lineage. Issued
from the upper echelons of an opaque hierarchy, these claims served both
to legitimize the order’s doctrines and to invest its leaders with personal
power. Hence, Mathers declared he was an “ambassador” in astral contact
with the Secret Chiefs of the Order, whom he believed to possess “terrible
superhuman powers,”40 while Westcott maintained that the Cipher
Manuscript stemmed from an authentic and ancient German Rosicrucian
lineage.41 The manuscript refers to both Brothers and Sisters of the Order,
which Westcott claimed was proof “that in older times, as at the present
day, women rose to high rank and attainments in the Secret Knowledge of
37
Robert A. Gilbert, “Provenance Unknown: A Tentative Solution to the Riddle of the
Cipher Manuscript of the Golden Dawn,” in The Complete Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript,
ed. Darcy Küntz (Edmonds, WA: Holmes Publishing Group, 1996), 19–25.
38
Küntz, The Complete Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript, 110.
39
Cf. the descriptions by Mathers and Westcott in Israel Regardie, The Complete Golden Dawn
System of Magic, Vol. 5 (Santa Monica: Falcon Press, 1987), 17–28, 29–34.
40
Samuel Liddell Mathers, Manifesto, reprinted in Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden
Dawn (London: Taylor and Francis, 1972), 129.
41
V. H. Sapere Aude [William Wynn Westcott], The Historical Lecture, in Küntz, The Golden
Dawn Source Book, 1996), 48; Gilbert, “Provenance Unknown,” 17.
Rosicrucianism 181
the Order.”42 Ironically, in 1903 the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
disintegrated amid scandals and disputes arising from its convoluted sexual
politics.43
5 The Twentieth Century: Competing Visions

Rosicrucianism in the twentieth century has a tortuous history of such
disputes and schisms, yet a handful of the myriad groups emerged with an
international mass following through the exploitation of new methods for
promotion and commercialization. The doctrine of Max Heindel’s
Rosicrucian Fellowship, founded in Seattle in 1909, was largely derived
from the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, who at the time of Heindel’s visit to
Berlin was still a member of the Theosophical Society. The Rosicrucian
Fellowship achieved considerable success, in part through Heindel’s canny
employment of correspondence courses. It seems Heindel was loathe to keep
the contents of Steiner’s secret teachings to himself and later claimed to have
received them directly from an “Elder Brother of the Rose Cross,” a
transfigured human who visited him in his lodgings in Berlin.44 Whatever
their true origin, these teachings center on the unfolding of divine powers in
the human spirit through a series of existences in progressively higher bodies.
Mensch eventually becomes Übermensch through the development of an astral
body known variously as the Philosopher’s Stone, the Golden Wedding
Garment, and the soma psychikon, which is akin to the “spiritual body”
mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15.44.45 According to Heindel, the evolution
of human civilization is guided by such transfigured beings.
A Dutch splinter group of Heindel’s Rosicrucian Fellowship, the Lectorium
Rosicrucianum, was founded in 1935 by Zwier Leene and his brother Jan (better
known by his pen name Jan van Rijckenborgh). With around fifteen thou-
sand members worldwide, this group professes a dualist neo-Catharism,
although it also incorporates elements of anthroposophy, Hindu Tantra, and
millennialist beliefs in the coming of the Age of Aquarius. It draws directly on
ancient gnostic doctrine in its goal of returning the divine spark in humanity
to its heavenly origins. The means of this return is again the soma psychikon, the
42
Westcott, The Historical Lecture, 49.
43
For more information on the Golden Dawn, see the essay by Egil Asprem in this volume.
44
Augusta Foss Heindel, Memoirs about Max Heindel and the Rosicrucian Fellowship (Oceanside,
CA: The Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1997), 3–5.
45
Max Heindel [Carl Grasshof], The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception (Chicago: Macoy
Publishing, 1910), 516; Max Heindel [Carl Grasshof], Gleanings of a Mystic (Oceanside,
CA: The Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1922), 181; Max Heindel [Carl Grasshof], Ancient and
Modern Initiation (London: no publisher given, 1931), 107.
182 Hereward Tilton
vehicle achieved through transfiguration in the sense of a Christian-gnostic

rebirth or “the rebuilding of the original divine man.”46 The individual’s
moral conduct plays an integral role in his or her journey to transfiguration
and includes the observation of biblical strictures, abstention from drugs, and
vegetarianism. Although its basic ideas are centuries old, the Lectorium
Rosicrucianum has recourse to some distinctly modern terminology. For exam-
ple, to deliver humanity from the perishable dialectical world and its evil
rulers, the Aeons, a “new gnostic world-brotherhood” is magically creating a
“radiation field” sustained by a system of fire-temples that facilitates the inner
liberation of the masses and their binding with the “Christ-radiation.”47
The doctrine of the largest contemporary Rosicrucian order, the Ancient
and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), shares many of the concep-
tions of its competitors, albeit clothed in slightly different garb. AMORC
was founded in New York in 1915 by Harvey Spencer Lewis, who worked in
advertising and successfully employed his commercial skills to promote his
brainchild. Like the Rosicrucian Fellowship, the success of AMORC has in
part been built on the operation of correspondence courses. Remote, astral
contact with the Cosmic Masters is possible once the initiate reaches the
higher degrees, just as Heindel’s Fellowship also promised.48 Lewis con-
structed a familiar legitimizing myth: While sojourning in Toulouse, he was
initiated into the Ordo Rosae Crucis by an old Hierophant R+C, who gave
him the task of taking the order’s teachings to America.49 According to
Aleister Crowley, the garbled French of the authorizing charter allegedly
issued by the Rosicrucians made Lewis “a laughing stock,”50 but in time he
created a successful myth of origin with a focus on the “mystery schools” of
Pharaoh Thutmose III. Today, AMORC promotes the evolutionary emer-
gence of a “spiritualized humanity” principally through the use of meditative
techniques. While Lewis allegedly performed the alchemical transmutation
of zinc into gold in 1916,51 the order’s alchemy is primarily spiritual and in
recent decades has taken on distinctly Jungian overtones. As such, it provides
46
Catharose de Petri [Hennie Stok-Huizer], Transfiguration (Haarlem: Rozekruis Pers, 1979),
9–14; Jan van Rijckenborgh, Elementary Philosophy of the Modern Rosycross (Haarlem:
Rozekruis Pers, 1984), 109.
47
van Rijckenborgh, Elementary Philosophy, 104–105.
48
Harvey Spencer Lewis, Rosicrucian Manual (Charleston: Lovett Publishing Co., 1927), 74.
49
Harvey Spencer Lewis, “History of the Order,” The American Rosae Crucis 1.7 (1916), 11–15.
50
Robert Vanloo, “O.T.O. and A.M.O.R.C.,” Noch Mehr Materialien zum O.T.O. (Munich:
Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Religions- und Weltanschauungsfragen, 2000), 76.
51
Harvey Spencer Lewis, “A Demonstration of Alchemy,” The American Rosae Crucis 1.7
(1916), 17–20.
Rosicrucianism 183
a meditative path to psychic integration and the advent of a new “spiritual

man” and “spiritual woman.”
6 Conclusion: A Cabal of the Transfigured

Despite varied sociohistorical contexts, there is evidently a unity in the
diversity of Rosicrucian teachings across the four centuries of this esoteric
current’s existence. The adoption of a subtle or spiritual body through a
process of transfiguration is a demonstrably central motif with dual origins in
the coniunctio oppositorum of alchemy and orthodox Christian teaching on the
resurrection body of Christ and the faithful. Although the terminology
applied – Invisible Church of Christ, Secret Chiefs, mystic Third Order,
Great White Brotherhood, and so on – has been diverse, the notion of a
benevolent conspiracy of transfigured or angelic beings has also remained a
central component of Rosicrucian doctrine. Access to these beings and their
mysteries has often been the reserve of a secretive esoteric hierarchy – and for
this reason more than any other, the mantle of Rosicrucianism has lent an
authority and legitimacy that at times allows earthly interests to flourish
under its cover.
16
JACOB BOEHME AND CHRISTIAN

THEOSOPHY
1 Introduction
The term “theosophy” literally means “wisdom of God.” This can be
interpreted either as “God’s wisdom” or as “wisdom about God.” As we
shall see, this ambiguity is actually crucial to understanding theosophy. Not
only are both interpretations correct, in the end – at least in the Christian
theosophy of Jacob Boehme – they come to mean the same thing.
The first person to use the term “theosophy” seems to have been Porphyry
(ca. 234–ca. 305), and since then the word has been used by many authors in
many ways, positively and pejoratively.1 It is now most famously associated
with the Theosophical Society of Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891).
However, “Christian theosophy” is something quite distinct from
Blavatsky’s movement.
Christian theosophy is an early modern, Protestant German mystical
movement.2 It can be seen as a precursor to both German Romanticism
and German philosophy, especially Idealism. Indeed, Hegel himself said of
Boehme that he was “the first German philosopher; the content of his
philosophizing is genuinely German [echt deutsch].”3 The main Christian
1
See Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2000), 3.
2
The idea of an identifiable tradition of Christian theosophy dates back to the seventeenth
century. For more information, see Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, 10–19; and
Wouter Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), 107–147. It must also be noted in the present context that two of Boehme’s most
significant interpreters, the Frenchman Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803) and the
German Franz von Baader (whom I will shortly discuss) were Catholics.
3
G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie [1805] Vol. 3 (G. W. F. Hegel
Werke, Vol. 20), ed. Eva Moldenhauer und Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1986), 94.
184
J a cob B oe hme and C hri sti a n Th eo so ph y 185
theosophers are all German, though the movement had a significant influ-
ence in England and France.
There is general agreement among scholars as to the intellectual streams
that coalesce to form theosophy: medieval German mysticism, alchemy,
Paracelsism, and Kabbalism.4 Of the authors who are recognizably theoso-
phical, some of the early figures include Valentin Weigel (1533–1588),
Heinrich Khunrath (1560–1605), and Johann Arndt (1555–1621).5 The
supreme exemplar of the tradition, however, is the famed cobbler of
Görlitz, the philosophicus teutonicus, Jacob Boehme (1575–1624). Indeed, the
Christian theosophical tradition may, for all intents and purposes, be con-
sidered the Boehmean tradition, and it is Boehme and his thought that are the
focus of this essay.
In the year 1600, Boehme had an experience of mystical gnosis. Gazing at a
gleam of light reflected in a pewter vessel, he was suddenly opened to an
immediate experience of the Being of all beings. He remained silent for
twelve years, then began writing the work that would come to be known as
Aurora, oder Morgenröte im Aufgang. Boehme intended this only as a personal
exercise, but he showed the work to friends who then circulated it. In time,
he acquired a number of influential admirers, who spread his teachings and
acted to protect him. This was necessary, for Boehme was often attacked
during his years of literary productivity, principally at the hands of the hateful
local pastor Gregorius Richter. During the years 1618 to 1624, Boehme was
astonishingly prolific, producing a great number of works and carrying on an
extensive correspondence. What were Boehme’s influences? There is con-
siderable evidence that he read alchemical works, the writings of Paracelsus
and Weigel, and possibly some kabbalistic texts. However, we really do not
know when he encountered these. Boehme’s friends included a number of
Christian kabbalists and Paracelsists.
Initially, Boehme had only a small following in Germany, but he became
quite influential in England, first through the translation and publication of
his works by John Sparrow (1615–1665), whose editions are still in print.
John Pordage (1608–1681) was the center of the first Boehmean movement
in England, which gave rise to the Philadelphian Society, led by Jane Leade
(1624–1704). Such luminaries as John Milton, Isaac Newton, William Blake,
and the Cambridge Platonists read Boehme. His first notable German fol-
lower was Johann Georg Gichtel (1638–1710), who published an edition of
4
See Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, 7; Arthur Versluis, Theosophia (Hudson, NY:
Lindesfarne Press, 1994), 98; David Walsh, The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment
(Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, 1983), 11.
5
See Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, 6–7, 12–13.
186 Glenn Alexander M age e
Boehme’s writings in 1682 and wrote theosophical works of his own. Other
significant early German followers (or sympathizers) include Quirinus
Kuhlmann (1651–1689), Friedrich Breckling (1629–1711), and Gottfried
Arnold (1666–1714). But Boehme’s greatest impact on the history of ideas
would come much later.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Jena became a major
center of interest in Boehme. Many of the greatest figures of the German
Romantic movement were present in Jena at this time, including F. Schlegel,
A. W. Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and F. W. J. Schelling. All of these
men read Boehme. Schelling’s interest in Boehme was likely encouraged by
his friend Franz von Baader (1765–1841). Often called “Boehmius redivi-
vus,” Baader would become the most significant and influential Christian
theosophist of the nineteenth century. Boehmean ideas were communicated
to Hegel by Schelling in Jena, and they exercised a strong influence on him.6
Arguably it is through Hegel – whose bastard children include Marxism,
existentialism, and certain strains of modern conservatism – that Boehme has
had his greatest influence; not just on the history of ideas, but on the
formation of the modern world.7
Though Hegel admired Boehme, he also called him “a complete barbar-
ian” (vollkommen Barbar).8 This was due to Boehme’s peculiar mode of
expression, which consists almost entirely in the use of strange, homey
images. (The reader will shortly encounter examples of this in abundance.)
In addition, his prose style is plodding and awkward. Indeed, “barbaric” is a
term one encounters a lot in discussions of Boehme.9 He is certainly a
“barbarian” in that his thought is, as Hegel observed, genuinely Germanic
and (as Faivre points out) owes nothing to classical sources. It is thoroughly
Teutonic in character; earnest and unsophisticated, utterly lacking in irony or
literary pretensions of any kind.
Without question, Boehme is also among the most difficult of mystical
authors. The account that follows, which attempts to explain his major ideas,
6
See Glenn Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2008); and Magee, “Hegel’s Reception of Jacob Boehme,” in An Introduction to Jacob
Boehme, ed. Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei (London: Routledge, 2013).
7
See Walsh, The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment, and also Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic
Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2001). For more details on Boehme’s life, readers should consult Andrew Weeks, Boehme
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
8
Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie,92.
9
See, for example, Alexandre Koyré, La Philosophie de Jakob Boehme (Paris: Vrin, 1971), 503;
Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, 7.
barely scratches the surface. And the reader should proceed with the follow-
ing authorial admission in mind: No one really understands Jacob Boehme.
2 The Key to Christian Theosophy

In Hegel’s remarks on Boehme, he states that the mystical shoemaker
exemplifies the “Protestant principle of placing the intellectual world within
one’s own heart and in one’s self-consciousness gazing upon, knowing, and
feeling all that formerly was [conceived as] beyond.”10 The key to Christian
theosophy is that it seeks “wisdom about God” by understanding God on
analogy with the transformation that takes place in the human soul when we
overcome self-will and achieve religious illumination.
Of course, this is immediately quite puzzling. God, after all, is a being,
whereas the transformation in the soul is a process. But the recognition of this
“problem” is the first step in understanding theosophy, for Boehme does
indeed conceive God as in process. However, he is careful to say that this
process is atemporal: It does not take place in time. This too is extremely
puzzling – nor can it cease to be. In beginning from the experience of
spiritual transformation in his own soul and then attempting to know the
nature of God, Boehme is trying to put into words the experience of gnosis,
which can never adequately be expressed. (See the Introduction to this
volume, and the entry “Gnosis.”)
Of course, an atemporal process is a contradiction in terms. The real
process takes place in the soul of the believer, in which the path to illumina-
tion unfolds one day at a time. Boehme does indeed write as if an analogous
process takes place in God, leading to the creation of the universe. However,
he continually reminds us that he writes this way because of the limitations of
the human intellect, describing in a piecemeal (stückweise) fashion what is in
fact one and timeless. Thus, when Boehme writes of stages in the “process”
that is God, he is actually writing of inseparable, atemporal moments or
aspects of God. The language of “moments” comes from Husserlian phe-
nomenology, and Boehme’s procedure is, in fact, phenomenological: He
offers us a phenomenology of the human spirit, as it moves from a state of
fallenness to a state of illumination and salvation. Then he applies this, by
analogy, to God.
In brief, we begin in a condition of radical self-centeredness, holding
implicitly that we are all, that there is nothing greater than ourselves. Then
10
Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, 94. See Magee, “Hegel’s Reception of
Jacob Boehme.”
we discover inside us a conflicting impulse to surrender self-will and open

outward in engagement with something greater. These two impulses coexist,
and must coexist. The latter would not be felt at all if it were not for the
former – and the former continually reasserts itself out of fear of the latter, out
of fear of the “loss of self” implied in surrender. One who has become keenly
aware of this conflict is tormented by it, at one time falling into self-
centeredness, then regretting it and resolving to turn toward the light, then
backsliding.
A person in such a condition is headed for a crisis, and for Boehme this
comes in the form of the Schrack. A term peculiar to him, Schrack is often
translated into English as “flash,” and Boehme writes of it as a fire flash or
lightning flash (Blitz).11 This is the spiritual turning point, but Boehme is not
entirely clear about what it involves. Most probably, the flash consists in our
realization that we are powerless to reconcile the conflict in our souls, that we
can really do nothing. This desperation precipitates a radical form of surren-
der, in which we simply give ourselves over to God. We abandon self-will
and all vain and covertly self-willed (i.e., self-reliant) attempts to break the
power of selfish impulse. “The self” vacates the soul, leaving a vacuum that is
filled by God. This event is the “second birth.”
What follows is a deep and intense experience of love: a state of intoxicat-
ing openness and connectedness to all things. Our egoistic selfhood having
departed, we are really not there anymore. Yet, in another sense, we are now
truly there, because we are no longer spiritually opaque and are now fully
present to Being. We feel an impulse to express this, to preach, to shout it
from the housetops. We feel impelled, in short, to become sayers of Being –
as Boehme did when he put pen to paper. In this act, the indwelling spirit of
God confronts itself. And the man himself is complete. He becomes a true
being – truly substantial and embodied. Though his new and true body is not
of this material world.
This entire process involves, for Boehme, seven steps – although this will
not be clear from the account above. Further, the lines of demarcation are
inherently fuzzy, a fact Boehme was well aware of. In any case, what is
remarkable is that Boehme essentially takes this understanding of the stages of
illumination in the human soul and uses it as a template for understanding
God himself, and the process of creation.12 In acquiring this wisdom about
God, we acquire God’s wisdom. As we shall see, this is because our
11
On the origins of Schrack, see Week’s Introduction to Boehme, Aurora (Leiden,
Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 43.
12
See Walsh, The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment, 54. See also pp. 51–52, 71.
acquisition of wisdom about God, achieved through self-knowledge, is

implicated in God’s own awakening – his own self-knowledge.
Readers familiar with other mystical traditions will immediately recognize
parallels: In my inmost self I am identical with Absolute Being; insight into
my own true self (or soul) thus gives me insight into Absolute Being.
However, Boehme does not understand God as a characterless “beyond.”
Boehme’s God is not Brahman. Nevertheless, this is essentially the point from
which Boehme’s God begins.
3 Ungrund, Three Principles, and Sophia

If we ask why we should believe that knowledge of our own awakening
should give us a key to understanding God, Boehme would answer that God
is a conscious being (indeed, the conscious being). But consciousness arises
only through opposition. Consciousness is consciousness of something.
Furthermore, self-consciousness only arises through the encounter with
otherness. It is only through encountering an other that opposes or frustrates
me in some fashion that I turn inward and reflect on myself. “Nothing may
be revealed to itself without opposition,” Boehme tells us.13 If God is a
conscious being, then something that is not God must stand opposed to him.
The obvious implication is that God requires creation to be conscious.
Further, Boehme’s logic dictates that God could only be self-conscious
through his encounter with this other.
Of course, some will object to Boehme’s assumption that God’s conscious-
ness is structurally similar to our own. God’s consciousness, so they will claim,
is radically different: God was perfectly conscious and self-conscious prior to
creation. The problem with this claim is simply that a consciousness conscious
of nothing is unconscious. It is an abuse of language to claim that God, or
anything, can be conscious without an other. This sort of empty assertion,
which we are supposed to take on faith, is typical of orthodox theology and
shows it to be far less rational than Boehme’s “irrational” mysticism. Of course,
one could take the Aristotelian position that the object of God’s consciousness
is himself: that he is pure self-consciousness. But then two problems arise. First,
how can self-consciousness be achieved without prior consciousness of an
other? Second, what can God’s self-consciousness really consist in, given that
conventional theology insists there is no distinction within God? Every act of
self-consciousness involves a division within the subject: “I” think about “my
self”; this thought, memory, emotion, and so on.
13
The Way to Christ, Seventh Treatise, “On Divine Contemplation,” i. 8.
It is, in fact, precisely by positing distinction within God that Boehme

attempts both to explain God’s self-consciousness, and to uphold the tradi-
tional Judeo-Christian doctrine of the transcendence of God. Boehme does
very often speak as if God achieves consciousness through creation. And yet
equally often he retreats from this, for this position leads to two problems.
First, it suggests that prior to creation God is not conscious, which in turn
suggests that God, the supreme being, creates under some kind of compul-
sion – clearly an unacceptable conclusion. In addressing this problem,
Boehme walks a fine line, on the one hand positing a dark, unconscious
will within God and simultaneously insisting on God’s absolute freedom.
Second, Boehme’s position seems to suggest that creation “completes” or
perfects God – another dangerous idea. And this implies, further, that crea-
tion is part of the Being of God. In Aurora, Boehme states that “you must
elevate your mind in the spirit and consider how the whole of nature . . . is
the body of God [der Leib Gottes].”14 On the other hand, he tells us elsewhere
that “The outer world is not God. . .. The world is merely a being [Wesen] in
which God is manifesting himself.”15 Of course, there is no real contra-
diction here: Even if the world is God’s body, there is a distinction between
the body and the spirit, the animating soul. Nature is God’s body, but the
body is not all. In Signatura Rerum (1622), Boehme compares creation to an
apple growing on a tree: Obviously, it is not the tree itself, but it is the fruit of
the tree.16
And yet questions linger. Isn’t it correct to say that producing the fruit is
the telos (end or goal) of the tree, and that with the emergence of the fruit, the
tree completes or perfects itself? Yet in the same text Boehme insists that God
did not create in order to perfect himself. This leads to a further, deeper
question. Boehme makes it clear that nature is an expression of the Being of
God, in the sense that the basic principles informing nature are analogous to
the aspects of God’s Being. But if nature is an expression of God’s Being,
what is God apart from this expression? The unexpressed God would seem to
be inchoate, merely potential. In short, incomplete and imperfect.
Boehme’s first step in addressing these problems looks typically kabbalistic:
He distinguishes between God as he is in himself and God as he appears to us,
or God manifest. “God as he is in himself” Boehme calls Ungrund. Literally,
this means “Unground” or “Not-ground.” Sometimes it has been translated
as “Abyss.” Like the Ein Sof of the kabbalists, Ungrund is completely without
14
Aurora, ii. 16.
15
Antistifelius, ii. 316
16
Signatura Rerum (SR), xvi. 1.
form or determination of any kind. Grund immediately calls to mind “ground

of being,” and this is precisely what we expect God to be. But Boehme’s
choice of Ungrund warns us not to predicate even something this indefinite
of God.
Indeed, Ungrund is not a being at all. In Mysterium Magnum (1623),
Boehme tells us, “In his essence [Wesen] God is not an essence [Wesen].”17
The German Wesen can be translated as “essence” or as “being.” Hence,
Boehme may be understood here as saying “God in his essence is not a being”
(or, “God in his Being is not a being”). In other words, as he is in himself God
is not. In the same text Boehme states, “in the dark nature [within the
Ungrund] he is not called God.”18 But how can the supreme being not be
a being? How can God not be God? The answer to these riddles is to be
found, again, in Mysterium Magnum. Just after telling us that “God in his
essence is not a being,” Boehme writes that God as Ungrund is merely “the
power or the understanding for being – as an unfathomable, eternal will in
which all is contained, but the same all is only one, and desires to reveal
itself.”19 Boehme tells us elsewhere that God “hungers after and covets being
[Wesen].”20
The only Being that God possesses as Ungrund is becoming: a pure potenti-
ality for becoming a being (i.e., a thing or substance). As Ungrund, God
therefore hovers strangely between Being and not-Being. We cannot say, for
example, that God as Ungrund “is” in the sense of “existing” in some
primitive sense, for “to exist” literally means to stand forth, emerge, become
manifest. But God as Ungrund has not done any of that yet. We are faced
with what appears to be an unfathomable mystery: Ungrund, as the primal
essence of God and the ground/not-ground of all, is and is not. Boehme says
of God “in himself,” as Ungrund, “he is nothing and all.”21 While the
Ungrund is utterly indeterminate, it contains (potentially) all determinations;
it is non-Being, and potentially Being and all beings.
The will to manifest, to become present, can only express itself from a
prior condition of concealment or absence. Boehme calls this darkness
(Finsternis), whereas the will to manifest is light (Licht). But the darkness is
not simply a state of concealment, it is an opposing will or tendency toward
hiddenness. There are thus two conflicting wills within God. Boehme also
uses the language of “contraction” and “expansion” to describe these wills,
17
Mysterium Magnum (MM), vi. 1.
18
MM, vii. 14.
19
MM, vi. 1.
20
Six Theosophic Points (STP), i. 27.
21
On the Election of Grace, i. 3.
and “indrawing” and “outgoing.” The dark will is contraction: God draws
into himself, unconscious and refusing manifestation. This is the “negative
moment” within God, and it is also obvious that Boehme is describing the
psychology of radical selfishness.
What is remarkable here is the idea of negativity within God. For Boehme,
God subsumes not just the negative, but absolute negativity: the primal will to
close, withdraw, refuse. But, as Pierre Deghaye writes, “Darkness means
suffering.”22 God suffers in the dark aspect, as do all beings that are domi-
nated by this quality of selfish, indrawing negativity. But this is a necessary
moment in God, and in any being: Beings – of whatever kind – are only
individual and substantial by virtue of possessing a “will” to separateness and
coherency (i.e., “contraction”). Something is an individual being only in
virtue of possessing some aspect, which can change from moment to
moment, of hiddenness or absence, out of which it manifests or gives itself.
Thus, “closing” or contraction (darkness) is matched by “opening” or
expansion (light).
But how does God turn from the darkness to the light? How is this
transition made? Through trial by fire. After all, how can there be light
without fire? “Fire is the origin of light,” Boehme says.23 This brings us to
another aspect of selfish will not touched on earlier: anger. Since Boehme’s
methodology is to argue by analogy from human psychology to theology, we
must consider the relation of selfishness and anger in an individual human
soul. Very often we find that part of the negative psychology of selfishness is a
destructive wrath directed at whatever is not the self, at otherness. Indeed,
the desire to harm or destroy that which is other simply because it is other is
the essence of evil. And, yes, the “absolute negativity” described above as a
moment intrinsic to God is, indeed, evil.
Thus, for Boehme, the indrawing, dark will kindles a fire within God, and
this fire is God’s wrath or anger (Grimm, Zorn). But just as light emerges from
fire, so can love emerge from wrath. In human psychology, this happens
when the nihilating wrath that follows the anguish of extreme, solipsistic
selfishness essentially exhausts itself. What must occur in God for him to
become God, and what can occur in a human soul, is an exhaustion of selfish
will, leading to a kind of surrender to the light. The light, again, represents an
outgoing will to manifest, to “give oneself.” This surrender is the birth of
love (Liebe) within God, but it is also a kind of death.
22
Pierre Deghaye, “Jacob Boehme and His Followers,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed.
Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 219.
23
MM, xxvi. 27.
So far we have discussed two of Boehme’s “three principles,” darkness and

light (although as should now be clear, he has multiple ways of describing
them). We have seen that these principles conflict with each other, but that
this conflict is necessary and ultimately results in a kind of reconciliation. The
third principle, in fact, just is the reconciliation of the first two. Deghaye
refers to the “perpetual alternation” of light and darkness as itself constituting
the third principle, which is also “our universe.”24 Nature as a whole is to be
understood as “attunement” or equilibrium of the two opposing principles.
But these three principles are also present in every individual being. If
Boehme believes that the Being of God involves his expressing himself in
the created world, in an other, this is only possible if the other truly is other. As
I have said, this is only possible if it is characterized, at the deepest level, by
self-will, by the desire to exist for itself. Thus, the dark principle is inherent in
the Being of beings; the root of self-will, and the evil that inevitably springs
from it, are necessary to existence, and to the self-actualization of God. If
God had created all things so that they must turn from darkness to the light,
then those things would entirely accord with the light-will of God and would
not be truly “other” than him.
In speaking of the third principle as “our universe,” we must be cautious,
however. For Boehme, the birth of God, or God’s manifestation, takes place
“prior” to the creation of nature. So that the entire drama I have just
described – of the fire kindled in darkness, the surrender to the firelight,
and the reconciliation of darkness and light – all takes place within God.
When God opens to the desire to “give himself,” to manifest, he first
produces the virgin Sophia (Wisdom). Boehme speaks of her as a mirror in
which God beholds himself. However, we must be careful in speaking of
Sophia as an “image” of God. Faivre points out that “in this period Bild
meant not only ‘image,’ but also ‘body’” – and he notes that Boehme even
employs “image” and “substance” (or being, Wesen) interchangeably.25
Sophia, as the image of God in which he beholds himself, is not an
imitation or copy. Instead, she is an imago, a mature expression of the
Being of God.
A mirror is a means of seeing oneself, and Boehme’s treatment of Sophia
appears to be a mythic way of speaking about God’s self-knowledge. The
moment of surrender or self-giving in God paves the way to his self-
awareness. The divine surrender is a kind of emptying of all that was
contracted and compacted within God as the dark nature. What was within
24
Deghaye, “Jacob Boehme and His Followers,” 227.
25
Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, 139.
God was, in fact, all – or the potential for all. (Remember: “he is nothing
and all.”) The potential is always the absent, the hidden, the latent; the
actualization of potential is the manifest, the present. For Boehme, it is as if
the light produced from the fire in the dark nature (which he refers to as a
“dark fire”) illuminates the hidden potencies of God.
What God “sees” in Sophia, Boehme’s hypostasis of the divine self-
knowledge, is the ideas of everything that he can create. These ideas are
specifications of his own being, and they are the first stage in creation. Thus,
Sophia is consubstantial with God. And this means that if Sophia is the
receptacle of the forms of creation, then created nature is a concrete mani-
festation of God: God come to presence as physical reality. Again, we need to
avoid thinking of this as a temporal sequence. But if we are consistent in
resisting the temptation to take Boehme’s mythic language literally (more
consistent, perhaps, than he was), then we must concede that there is no
“creation” in the conventional sense at all. Instead, the “act” of creation is
really just nature itself: nature understood as the Greeks conceived it, as
phusis, as a living, growing process, rather than simply as a collection of objects
(which is the sense conveyed by the Latin natura).26
The formation of nature out of the logoi in Sophia just is the process by
which each thing “grows toward” its ideal image – and remember that Bild
(image) is Wesen (being). The ideal is manifest in and through the real, spirit
through matter. This manifestation is not the process by which the divine
produces an image of itself, in the sense of a mere “appearance” issuing from a
contrasting “reality.” Rather, it is the process by which God emerges from
himself, out of concealment, in an eternal recurrence.
Now, the foregoing account has emphasized the emergence of God
within the Ungrund in terms of Boehme’s three principles. Again, he tells
us that these three are present in all of reality: in God and creation.
Unsurprisingly, Boehme attempts to identify them with the Christian
Trinity, and also with the trinity of elements in Paracelsus: Salt, Sulphur,
and Mercury. What remains to be discussed, however, is Boehme’s sep-
tenary account of God and creation: that of the seven “source spirits”
(Quellgeister). He also refers to these as “qualities” (Qualitäten). The rela-
tion between the three principles and the seven qualities has puzzled
countless readers. I will attempt to shed some light on these matters in
the next section.
26
On phusis, see Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and
Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 15–16.
4 The Seven Source Spirits

Over time, Boehme’s attempt to express the inexpressible evolved, just as he
believed the inexpressible itself evolves. Thus, we find that he gives multiple
formulations of his system of seven qualities. The account that follows is an
attempt to amalgamate these.
Boehme makes some points about the seven that never vary. For example,
he tells us not just that the seven qualities are interrelated, he speaks of each as
“contained” within the others. And in Aurora he writes:
These seven births [Gebärungen] in all are none of them the first, second,
third, and last; but they are all seven each the first, second, third, fourth, and
last. But I must set them down one after the other in a creaturely
[kreatürlicher] way and manner, otherwise you would not understand it.
For the Deity [Gottheit] is a wheel [Rad] with seven wheels made in one
another, wherein one sees neither beginning nor end.27
Boehme is suggesting that each of the qualities is an inseparable aspect of
what is really an organic whole. Thus, each quality implies the others, and
each is what it is only in its relation to the others. Once more, Boehme wants
us to understand that he is attempting to express in a piecemeal fashion what
is actually One, and is experienced by the mystic all at once.
The First Quality is Sour or Astringency (Herb, or Herbigkeit). This is the
“darkness” spoken of earlier: the moment in which God contracts himself. It
is the “indrawing” that is the foundation of bodily being.
The Second Quality is Sweet (Süss), the expanding, opening, light force that
stands opposed to the dark force of the Sour.
The Third Quality is Bitter (Bitter), arising from the conflict between the
first two. They cannot separate from each other, so these opposing forces
coalesce to form a kind of vortex: “They remain in each other as a turning
wheel.”28 From this turmoil results a terrible anguish within God, which is a
kind of friction. And where there is friction, heat results.
The Fourth Quality is Schrack, a term discussed earlier. Boehme also calls it
lightning (Blitz) and heat (Hitze; although Boehme may mean this as
merely the prelude to the fourth quality: anguish → heat → flash). The
Flash is literally central to Boehme’s account, flanked by the two triads of
qualities 1–3 and 5–7. And it is thus appropriate that he also identifies it with
the sun, and with the heart (a traditional alchemical correspondence).29 In
27
Aurora, xxiii. 18, and especially xiii. 71.
28
MM, iii. 15.
29
See SR, iv. 39.
the human soul, the anguished struggle with self-will produces the Flash: a
spiritual turning point, a radical surrender that is the birth of Christ in the
soul. In Six Theosophical Points (1620), Boehme observes that the same
process occurs in nature, when things grow and blossom, surrendering
themselves in manifestation to the power of the sun.30 In God, Flash
represents an analogous surrender to manifestation. It is in the central sun
of the fourth quality that the dark fire becomes a light fire. What had been
the energy of anguish “gives up” and releases itself as the bright light of
divine manifestation – all in a flash.
The heart-centered, sunlike blaze of self-surrender and “going outwards,”
ignited by the Flash, just is Love, the Fifth Quality. Readers will have noted
that there is a structural correspondence between the first, second, and third
qualities and Boehme’s three principles. Indeed, the three principles provide
a kind of template of the dialectic that plays out in the sequence of seven
qualities. This template can be expressed as “denying → affirming → recon-
ciling.” It repeats itself in qualities 5 through 7, such that 5–7 can be seen as
the “reverse” of 1–3. While qualities 1, 2, and 3 map on to principles 1, 2, and
3, in that order, with qualities 5–7 the reverse is the case: Qualities 5, 6, and 7
“express,” respectively, principles 3, 2, and 1. The correspondences among
the six qualities (excluding number 4, which has nothing to be paired with)
are thus as follows: 1/7, 2/6, 3/5. Boehme makes this explicit in Clavis – and
states that 1/7 is God the Father, 2/6 is the Son, and 3/5 is the Holy Spirit.31
It is not difficult to see how the fifth quality is the inversion of the third: It
is the dark fire become light fire. While Bitter “reconciles” Sour and Sweet,
it does so in a unity of suffering. Via the central Flash, the true reconciliation
is achieved in Love. God remains a being unto himself (the Sour is here
subsumed as moment), but at the same time he opens outward in the literal
externalization of otherness. This is the actualization of the inner potential of
God that had remained concealed within the dark quality.
The Sixth Quality is Sound (Ton, Schall). This is the expression of the
preceding spirits, which are all united in Love. In Signatura Rerum, Boehme
tells us that the seven qualities are repeated throughout all existence in the
form of “signatures.” These are the “external form of all creatures,” and he
calls them the “sound, voice, and speech which they utter.”32
Sound is thus the expression of God’s Love through the generation of all
forms of nature, each of which is a signature of God himself. Sound is thus
30
STP, v. 3–4.
31
See Clavis, ix. 75.
32
SR, i. 14.
J a c ob B oe hme and C hri sti an Th eo so ph y 197
equivalent to the logos (here in the sense not just of reason or form, but of
speech) and thus to Sophia. Just as in its sound a being expresses its essence, so
God’s sound or voice is an expression of his Being: “And God said, Let there
be light.” But the sixth quality is merely the “speaking” of God’s will to
manifest. Again, Boehme links the sixth quality with the second. Like Sweet,
Sound is affirming, opening, or “outgoing.” However, it is differentiated or
specified into a multiplicity of essences or signatures, each of which is an
“opening,” or form of manifestation.
Manifestation is finally concretized with the Seventh Quality, Body (Leib,
Corpus; Boehme also calls it Wesen). Qualities 1–6 are “contained” in the
seventh. This means that the seventh is a whole, and 1–6 are the inseparable
moments of that whole. When all six “combine” the seventh is “pro-
duced”: Body comes into being; God achieves corporeal expression in
nature. Just how these six are the “formula” for corporality is very obscure.
Two things, however, are clear. First, if Boehme means that all beings
possess this sevenfold structure, then all beings have both light and dark,
hidden and manifest aspects. Indeed, in Clavis Boehme characterizes 1–3 as
the “dark world,” 5–7 as the “light world,” and the fourth quality as the
“fire world.” This means that the three principles I have characterized as
“denying → affirming → reconciling” are expressed not just within each of
the two triads of spirits (1–3, 5–7) but also in the whole of the sevenfold
system. The “middle” spirit, the Flash (“fire world”), is the “reconciling”
element in the whole.
It is particularly important to bear in mind Boehme’s claim that Body is
“one” with the first quality, Sour. Recall that this was the quality of indraw-
ing and self-will. In the alchemical Opus that is God’s creation of nature (or,
the self-creation of God – it comes to the same thing), the spirits must
“compact” themselves to form a body. I remarked earlier that if God’s telos
is to express himself in something that is truly other, then God as Spirit must
express himself as body. But everything that is a discrete, individual body is a
particular expression of self-will, of the desire to exist for itself. (This is
literally true in the case of living things; figuratively true in the case of
non-living things.) Thus, the seventh quality “returns to” the first (recall
Boehme’s image of the wheel). But, to use a German term pregnant with
significance, the Sour is aufgehoben – canceled, but taken up and preserved.
The lowest element within Being – negativity or evil itself – is necessary for
the becoming of God and nature, for all that is. Sour is the prima materia with
which the Opus begins. The result is the Philosopher’s Stone: nature itself,
the visible expression of the Being of God.
5 The Vocation of Man

As we have seen, God is characterized fundamentally by the will to manifest
himself – and to manifest himself to himself. Boehme maintains that this will
is absolutely free, given that there is nothing else to limit it. At the same time,
of course, this absolutely free will is at first impotent, just because there is
nothing on which it might act – except itself. For Boehme, the expression of
God’s freedom is in willing his own determination: in moving, in effect,
from Ungrund to Grund, to foundation in determinate, individual, bodily
being.
However, this can occur only if God expresses himself as a being who may
freely choose either to empty his individuality to God or to consciously cling
to self-will. Only such a being is truly independent; truly an other to God.
Thus, the highest expression of bodily being is that which has the greatest
capacity for evil. The worldly manifestation of God can only be fully realized
in an individual who freely chooses, in full consciousness, to turn from
darkness to light. This, of course, is man: the determinate realization of the
inchoate freedom within the indeterminate Ungrund.
For Boehme, Adam (man) is God’s replacement for Lucifer, who fell
because he wished to be not merely an embodiment of the whole, but the
whole itself. Like the fallen angel, man is a perfect microcosm of the whole.33
In the Garden, Adam possessed the wisdom of God: knowledge of the
primordial forms of all things contained within God’s great mirror, Sophia.
However, Adam possessed this knowledge without consciousness; that is, he
did not know that he knew it. And in so far as he remained in this state, Adam
could not be an adequate imago of God. The divine agent who brings an end
to Adam’s naïveté is Lucifer, in the form of the serpent. Adam and Eve then
eat of the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which
represents consciousness of duality or opposition.
The fall of man is the transition from divine – but unconscious – perception
of the whole, of the One, to a perception of the multiplicity of things in their
separation and division. For Boehme, his vision of 1600 was a momentary
recovery of the original standpoint of Adam. When he attempted to express
what he had glimpsed in that vision, he could only do so, as he often states, in a
piecemeal form, expressing what is One in the form of three or seven. This is a
reflection of Adam’s fallen state, and Boehme is a child of Adam. Yet in
continuously reflecting upon the wisdom of God, Boehme moves toward
the very thing Adam lacked: conscious possession of that wisdom. It is thus
33
See MM, ii. 5.
17
FREEMASONRY
J a n A . M. S n o e k
1 Introduction
Perhaps the best way to characterize Freemasonry is in terms of what it is not,
rather than what it is. First of all, it is not a religion, at least not in the Western
sense of the concept. One neither converts to Freemasonry, nor does it have
any teachings or dogmas. If a candidate for Freemasonry belongs to a religion,
this does not change when he becomes a Freemason. Moreover, the Masonic
“work” consists in the initiation rituals that change the status of the candi-
date, first from an outsider to an Apprentice Freemason, then to a Fellow of
the Craft, and finally to the rank of Master Mason. Different systems of so-
called “higher degrees,” developed in the course of the centuries, offer still
more initiation rituals. Although the rituals have changed in the course of
time (and in different ways in different countries, producing varying tradi-
tions throughout the world), they are guarded as precious treasures, handed
down from generation to generation.
However, there exists no official interpretation of the rituals which is held
to be universally valid. Every member has the right – and, indeed, the duty –
to interpret them in his own way. Consequently, Freemasonry has no
particular intrinsic aim. All it aims at is the initiation of new members – on
the one hand because it would disappear if it acquired no new members, but
much more importantly because Freemasonry simply is the practice of these
rituals, which are no longer truly secret. Today one can find most of them on
the Internet, including the so-called traditional secrets: the words, signs, and
hand grips by which the members of a particular degree can recognize one
another. The only secret – which will always remain, because it cannot be
divulged – is what it is like to experience these rituals as a candidate.
Freemasonry, then, is first and foremost a method for inducing a particular
kind of experience in candidates. Two methods, in fact, are involved: the
200
Freemasonry 201
initiation method and the allusive method. Three sorts of symbolism also play
a role: building symbolism, light symbolism, and center symbolism.
The initiation method involves the use of rituals that belong to the larger
class of “rites of passage,” which all have three stages: separation, transition,
and incorporation.1 The candidate is first separated from his former status,
which puts him in a liminal state in which he has no status at all. After this, a
new status is conferred on him. In initiation rituals, these stages are usually
symbolically expressed as a process of dying, abiding temporarily in the
metaphysical world, and finally being reborn in a new state. Such rituals
are known in almost all cultures.
The allusive method is similar to the symbolic approach, but it uses texts
instead of images.2 Within a text, for example that of a ritual, words from one
or more sources (the referential corpus) are quoted, but in such a way that
someone who does not know the source will not recognize that something is
quoted. However, if one knows the referential corpus well, one will recog-
nize it at once. The text quoted is in its turn in some way linked to one or
more further texts. For example, if the Bible is used as the referential corpus –
as is often the case in Masonic rituals – the footnotes, which have been
standardized since the Middle Ages, link certain verses, sometimes in chains
of considerable length. If the text pronounced in a Masonic ritual is “[This]
blazing star . . . goes before us like that Pillar of fire that blazed to guide the
people in the desert,”3 one should not only recognize this as quoting Exodus
13:21–22 but also see the further links to Isaiah 4:5–6, from there to Matthew
2:1–12 and Luke 2:1–20, and from there to Revelation 22:16. None of these
biblical passages represents the true meaning of the ritual text, but each one of
them may add significance to it, if the person hearing it recognizes the link. It
thus may also add a specifically Christian meaning (for someone to whom
that would be meaningful) to a text quoted from the Old Testament, without
forcing such an interpretation on, for example, a Jewish member.
The most central symbol in Freemasonry is the Temple of Solomon, the
building of which is described in 1 Kings 5–9 and 2 Chronicles 2–7. On the
one hand, the Bible contains allusive links to other building stories, making it
a symbol for, among others, the World (Genesis 1, since the architect of both
1
See Arnold Van Gennep, Les Rites de Passage (Paris: Nourry, 1909). English translation by
M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1960).
2
See Joannes A. M. Snoek, “De allusieve methode / The Allusive Method / La méthode
allusive,” Acta Macionica 9 (1999), 47–70.
3
Quote from Thomas Wolson [= George Smith], Le Maçon Démasqué, 1751, in The Early
French Exposures, ed. Harry Carr (London: The Quatuor Coronati Lodge, 1971), 442.
202 Ja n A. M. Snoe k
is God) and the body of Christ.4 This Temple, symbolizing the World, is
regarded as still incomplete, thus demanding from everyone that he con-
tribute to its completion.
In light symbolism, the opposition between light and darkness is used to
represent a number of similar oppositions besides light-darkness: good-bad,
happiness-sorrow, and so on. Furthermore, the natural sources of light, the
heavenly bodies, all move across the sky from east to west, which makes the
East the symbol of the source of light. Since God is supposed to be the source
of light, God is also supposed to reside in the East. This symbolism is found,
for example, in the symbolic orientation of the lodge room: the Master,
representing God (referred to as the Great Architect of the Universe), sits in
the East. This is claimed to be so, regardless of the real orientation of the
room used. Apprentices and Fellow Crafts are said to travel from the West to
the East to search for the Light, whereas Masters travel from the East to the
West to spread the Light to the World.
In center symbolism, it is the Center, not the East, that is the place where
God resides. The center of the lodge room is marked by a drawing of symbols
on the floor, referred to as the Tracing Board. In the eighteenth century, the
Master sat directly at the east side of the Tracing Board, combining his
position in the East with one in the Center. The candidate “travels” around
the Center. Each of these five components of the Masonic method can be
found outside Freemasonry, but when all five are found together, one can be
rather sure that one is dealing with either Freemasonry proper, or something
derived from it.
So far we have seen two of the main roots of Freemasonry: the Christian
tradition (the Bible used as referential corpus of the allusive method and
initiation rituals) and the stone mason’s craft (building symbolism). The third
root is Western esotericism, of which many traces can be found in the rituals.
For example, the Christian kabbalistic theme of the conversion of the
Tetragrammaton of the Old Testament (JHVH) into the Tetragrammaton
of the New Testament (INRI) forms a red thread running through many
degrees from the first three onward. The perfect stone, which one must
become in order to be built into the Temple, was in the British rituals called a
“perfect ashlar.” It was also understood as the “key stone,” referring to both
the cornerstone of the temple and the keystone of a vault under the temple.
In the eighteenth-century French rituals, this stone was called a “cube,” even
though one cannot build a building from cubic stones. The reference, no
doubt, was to the cube as it occurs in the seventeenth-century emblem
4
See respectively 1 Chronicles 28:19 and John 2:19–21.
Freemasonry 203
books, where it clearly represents the alchemical Philosopher’s Stone.

Rosicrucianism provided Freemasonry with the concepts of an initiatory
brotherhood and of a secret of great value, which must be searched for and
kept secret from outsiders. In the end, in Freemasonry this secret is no more
than the experience of the initiation rituals, something that cannot be dis-
closed by any means other than initiation itself.
2 The British Formative Period

Freemasonry has no founder or founding date, and no canonical form.
Indeed, around 1600, the time when it can be identified with certainty, at
least two distinct forms existed, one in Scotland and one in England. A
century and a half later, an Irish form is also present, while in England at
least three forms coexisted. Therefore, right from the point it can first be
identified by historians, there never was one Freemasonry, but instead a
variety of Freemasonries.
The number of theories about the origins of Freemasonry runs into the
dozens. Probably the most famous is the thesis first formulated by Robert
Freke Gould and his friends in the 1880s. According to this theory, at first
there were simple “operative” stonemasons, who had their craft and their
lodges but did not “speculate” about their craft or their working tools (i.e.,
they did not interpret them symbolically). Then, at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, more and more “gentlemen masons” became members
of the lodges. These men introduced the speculative element, out of which
arose modern “speculative” Freemasonry. This theory was regarded as fact
for about a century, but we know now that it is wrong. First, Freemasonry
significantly predates 1717. Second, the early Freemasons were all but simple
folk. The term “Freemason,” short for “Freestone Mason,” refers to the
highest trained members of the craft, the sculptors and architects, who were
allowed to work with freestone, the most expensive material. Third, it is also
clear now that these freestone masons did speculate about their craft, its tools,
and so on. Thus, Freemasonry was speculative right from the start – and that
explains precisely why gentlemen masons were interested in it in the first
place. They did not introduce the speculative element; rather, they learned it
from the stonemasons. Consequently, we should no longer oppose specula-
tive to operative masons, but rather gentlemen masons to stone masons, all of
whom were speculative masons, while the latter group was also “operative.”
The oldest Masonic documents are the “Old Manuscript Constitutions.”
Among the oldest are the “Constitutions of the Masons of York” (1352,
1370, 1409), the Ordonnances des masons de Londres (1356), the “Constitutions
of the Carpenters Guild of Norwich” (1375), the “Regius MS” and the
“Cooke MS” (both from between 1425 and 1450), and the Constituciones artis
geometricae secundum Euclidem (fifteenth century). From 1583 onward, there
are more than a hundred. Most of them are English and date from between
1675 and 1725. Especially these later ones often state that they should be read
during the “acception” of a candidate. This shows that these were related to
the English “acception” (see below), but we do not really know much of the
context of the older ones, except that they served to defend the claims of the
Freestone Masons on high-level wages.
In 1598 and 1599, William Schaw, the King’s Master of Works and
General Warden of the Craft, signed new statutes for the lodges of the
Masons in Scotland. From the information these texts give, there can be no
doubt that these are Masonic lodges, more or less in the modern sense. In the
statutes of 1599, Schaw confirmed that the lodge of Edinburgh was the
oldest. The lodge of Kilwinning, however, did not agree. It took some
years before a successor to Schaw decided that both would receive the status
“time immemorial,” meaning that no one living could remember a time
when the two did not exist. Thus, we must assume that at least these two
lodges existed around the middle of the sixteenth century, but possibly
earlier.
The archives of the Mason’s Company of London go back quite some
time. After a gap, they continue from 1619 onward. Almost at once there
now occur terms that did not appear before the gap: “the making of Masons”
(1621), Masons are “accepted” (1630), and the acception (1645–1647, 1649–
1650). There is no reason to assume that the acception was an invention of
1621 only; rather, it had probably been around for some time. In 1646, Elias
Ashmole wrote in his diary: “I was made a Free Mason at Warrington in
Lancashire.” And in 1682 he noted: “I rec[eive]d a Sumons to appe[ar] at a
Lodge to be held the next day, at Masons Hall London. . .. I was the Senior
Fellow among them (it being 35 years since I was admitted).” All the
members mentioned in Ashmole’s first entry were senior members of the
Mason’s Company of London, as well as members of the acception. And
from the lodge mentioned in the second entry, we now know that there is a
continuous link to the four lodges that James Anderson (in the second edition
of his Constitutions of 1738) claims to have united in 1716, forming the
beginning of the development leading to the “Premier Grand Lodge.”
In 1666, workmen from the building trade came to London to begin
reconstruction after a great fire destroyed the central parts of the city. Some
of them joined the London lodges, which flourished as a result. At the end of
1714, building activity in London came to an end, as no money was left to
Freemasonry 205
support it. The workmen departed, leaving the lodges of London with only a
few members. According to Anderson’s Constitutions of 1738, Sir
Christopher Wren had been elected Grand Master in 1685. However, in
1716 the lodges in London found “themselves neglected by Sir Christopher
Wren.” Anderson’s complaint is not surprising, if we remember that in 1716
Wren was 84 years old. Still, the lodges believed they had to assemble to
discuss their problems. Set against this background, Anderson’s story of what
happened in 1716 and 1717 makes eminent sense:
[Four London lodges] and some old Brothers met at the Apple-Tree
[Tavern], and having put into the Chair the oldest Master Mason [present]
([making him for that evening what we would] now [call] the Master of a
Lodge) they constituted themselves a Grand Lodge pro Tempore in Due
Form, and forthwith revived the Quarterly Communication of the Officers
of Lodges ([which Quarterly Communications are also sometimes] call’d
the Grand Lodge) [and] resolv’d to hold the Annual Assembly and Feast,
and then [i.e., at that next Annual Assembly] to chuse a [new] Grand Master
from among themselves.5
According to Anderson’s report (the only account of the event that we
have), what happened on St. Johns Day (June 24) in 1717 was definitely not
the foundation of a new organization, but simply the continuation of an old
one. There can be little doubt that in the decade following this event, the
Grand Lodge was reorganized into a form that had not existed in London
before. First, it became completely independent from the London Company
of Masons. Second, it considerably modified and simplified its ceremonial
practice to adapt it to its new, less educated target group, the gentlemen
masons. However, there was no significant discontinuity between the
Quarterly Communications before and after 1716, apart from the gap caused
by Wren’s inactivity.
According to Anderson, it was on St. John’s Day 1717 that the aforemen-
tioned London lodges met and chose Anthony Sayer as their new Grand
Master for 1717/18. Soon, the most important and influential members
would become John Theophilus Desaguliers, James Anderson, and George
Payne. Anderson was a minister of the Church of Scotland. Desaguliers was a
minister of the Church of England, assistant to Isaac Newton, and a member
of the Royal Society. After Sayer, Payne and Desaguliers became Grand
Masters in three successive years during the formative period. In 1721, the
5
James Anderson, The New Book of Constitutions of the Antient and Honourable Fraternity of Free
and Accepted Masons (London, 1738), 109.
Duke of Montague became the first aristocratic Grand Master. From that
point on, all further Grand Masters were aristocrats.
At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth
centuries, the Scottish and English forms of Freemasonry seem to have
discovered and influenced each other. As a result, whereas previously they
seem to have had only one initiation degree each, there now developed a
two-degree system, which we find referenced in Anderson’s Constitutions of
1723. The acception of London origin had now become the first degree,
which the Scotsman Anderson called “Entered Apprentice,” whereas the
Scottish “Master Mason or Fellow in the Craft” became the second degree,
now called “Fellow Craft or Master Mason.” In London around 1725, the
contents of these two degrees were redistributed over three degrees, now
called “Entered Apprentice” (containing part of the old first degree), “Fellow
of the Craft” (containing the rest of the old first degree), and “Master Mason”
(containing the old second degree). Only one thing could persuade the
lodges to work with the new three-grade system: In 1730, its rituals were
published as Samuel Prichard’s Masonry Dissected.
In 1723/24, the Grand Lodge of Ireland was formed; in 1736, the Grand
Lodge of Scotland followed. In 1725, the old lodge in the City of York
formed itself into the Grand Lodge of All England. When a conflict arose
within William Preston’s Lodge of Antiquity, the Grand Lodge (the
“Moderns”) expelled it. In 1779, Preston founded the Grand Lodge of
England, South of the River Trent, on a warrant by the York-based Grand
Lodge. Within this Grand Lodge, Preston created in 1787 the Ancient and
Venerable Order of Harodim. It has now become clear that this Harodim/
York tradition of English Freemasonry is the source of most English high
degrees, as well as the Royal Order of Scotland and the Adoption Rite.
In the eighteenth century, large numbers of Irish day laborers lived in
London. Because of their low social status, they were often not admitted into
the lodges of the Premier Grand Lodge. If they were, they must often have
been quite surprised at the rituals that took place there. From the 1730s
onward, they began forming lodges of their own, which from 1750 to 1752
united in a separate English Grand Lodge, referring to itself as that of the
“Antients.” Of course, their lodges too needed printed rituals, and thus
exposures of these were published in the 1760s. The two most important
ones were Three Distinct Knocks of 1760 and Jachin and Boas of 1762.
After more than half a century of rivalry between the Moderns and the
Antients, an attempt was made to merge these two English Grand Lodges. In
1813, they merged into the United Grand Lodge of England and Wales with
the Duke of Sussex as Grand Master. The Lodge of Reconciliation was
Freemasonry 207
formed to effectuate the merger. In the process, it created new rituals for the
United Grand Lodge, which were first published in 1825.
3 Freemasonry Conquers the World

In 1720/21, there existed an unofficial lodge in Rotterdam, composed of
British Freemasons. However, the spreading of Freemasonry to the
Continent and the rest of the world really started after 1725. Lodges were
founded in Paris in 1726, Mannheim in 1727 (?), Madrid in 1728, Gibraltar
and Bengal in 1729, The Hague in 1734, among many others. Next, other
colonial powers, such as France and the Netherlands, started founding lodges
in their colonies as well. From 1732 onward, lodges were attached to military
regiments.
In 1717, the French concluded an alliance with England. Soon after,
everything English became in vogue in France – including Freemasonry.
The first lodges in Paris, founded from 1726 onward, were Jacobite ones,
probably working within the Harodim tradition. From 1729, however,
Hanoverian lodges, working in the tradition of the Moderns, were founded.
The first Grand Masters of the French Grand Lodge were British Jacobites. (It
was not until 1738 that the first French Grand Master was elected.) The
Masons were soon under police investigation, on the orders of the king. In
1737, the police official Hérault succeeded in obtaining a copy of a ritual used
by one of the Paris lodges. He published it on December 5 of that year. The
following year it was reprinted, together with other materials, as part of a
volume titled La Réception Mystérieuse.
However, with Freemasonry becoming ever more popular in France,
better printed rituals were required. As a result, in 1744 no less than four
exposures were published. Le Secret des Francs-Maçons by the Abbé Perau gave
the rituals for the first two degrees of the tradition of the Moderns, while Le
Catéchisme des Francs-Maçons by Louis Travenol (writing under the name
Leonard Gabanon) added the third degree. Both established a new style of
presentation – narrative rather than catechetic – adding much more detail
about the rituals than older accounts had contained. The rituals presented in
La Franc-Maçonne do not seem related to any known Masonic tradition, and it
tells the story of the initiation of women in Adoption lodges. Le Parfait Maçon
presents rituals of the first four degrees of the tradition of the Harodim. In
1745, Le Sceau Rompu gave a number of corrections to Le Secret and Le
Catéchisme, after which L’Ordre des Francs-Maçons Trahi merged all three
into one. Therewith, the French version of the rituals of the Moderns was
established, and it was this form that now spread rapidly over the whole of the
European continent, almost completely replacing whatever traditions might

have been in place in lodges founded earlier.
The first Masonic knightly order, the Ordre Sublime des Chevaliers Élus, was
founded in France in 1730 (or shortly after). Around the same time, the first
Scots Masons Lodges appeared in England. The Italian painter Jacopo Fabris
was initiated into one of them. In 1742, Fabris in his turn founded the Scots
Masters lodge L’Union in Berlin. From there, this degree of Scots Master
(probably of Harodim origin) spread over the Continent. Soon new degrees
were created, especially in France, England (Harodim tradition), and
Germany. These degrees were at first mainly practiced in normal lodges,
but soon separate bodies (Scots lodges, chapters, etc.) were formed that
accumulated a number of these, now called “high degrees” and usually
ordered them into a system, or “Rite.” Examples of these are the Strict
Observance (1751/63–1782, Germany), the Swedish Rite (1756/59,
Sweden), the Bavarian Illuminati (1776–1785, Germany), the Rectified
Scottish Rite (1778, France), the French or Modern Rite (1786, France),
the York Rite (1797, United States), and the Ancient and Accepted Scottish
Rite (1801, United States).
In the second half of the eighteenth century, Freemasonry flourished all
over the globe. And during this same time, of course, major changes in the
Western worldview were underway. In 1789, the French Revolution caused
Masonic activity came to a halt in France for ten years. Napoleon then
attempted to create a new world order but was defeated in 1815. It is striking
to see that in a large number of Western countries, the Masonic rituals were
dramatically changed during this period, reflecting a culture that was now
predominantly middle class, rather than aristocratic. In Germany, the rituals
“Schröder” of 1801 were among the first to reflect this new bourgeois
outlook. They were followed by those for the Craft degrees of the Ancient
and Accepted Scottish Rite, written in 1804 in Paris. The new rituals for the
United Grand Lodge of England, approved in 1816, were marked by a
bourgeois moralism that anticipated the Victorian era.
Instead of aiming at inducing a mystical experience in the candidate, the
new rituals reflected the conviction that proper moral behavior can be
learned simply by the repetitive performance of proper model behavior.
For example, in the third degree, the candidate is identified with Hiram
Abiff, the architect of the Temple of Solomon, who, according to the
Masonic tradition, was murdered shortly before the completion of the
work. The eighteenth-century rituals made clear that Hiram was in fact
God, so that the candidate experienced a Unio Mystica. In the ritual of the
Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, however, Hiram is reincarnated in the
Freemasonry 209
human candidate. In the ritual of the United Grand Lodge of England,

Hiram steadfastly refuses to give his murderers the Master’s Word, thus
showing the model behavior of a man. The Swedish and American rituals
escaped this process, at least for a while.
The nineteenth century was the heyday of colonialism, and Freemasonry
came to be used as a tool to assimilate conquered peoples to Western culture.
Jews had been initiated into lodges from the 1730s onwards, and the first
Muslim to be initiated was probably the Persian diplomat Askar Khan Afshar,
in Paris in 1808. Both Jews and Muslims knew the most central symbol of
Freemasonry, the Temple of Solomon, from their own Holy Scriptures, so
that the Masonic ritual could make at least some sense to them. But this was
not the case with those of non-Western religious backgrounds. For them,
Freemasonry could only mean something if they had assimilated strongly to
Western culture. It thus took until the 1840s before the first non-Westerner,
a Parsee from India, was initiated. And since Freemasonry is implicitly
monotheistic, working “to the Honor of the Grand Architect of the
Universe,” it took until the 1870s before Hindus were admitted. The
majority of the non-Christian members – Jews and Muslims included –
seem to have used Freemasonry intentionally as a tool of emancipation, to
get recognition from members of the dominant culture with whom they
dealt on a daily basis.
4 Conclusion: The Social Significance of Freemasonry

During the seventeenth century, the British Isles were almost constantly
harassed by civil war over matters both political and religious. By 1720,
many intellectual men had had enough. The Masonic lodges were much
more interested in the quality of the craftsmanship of their members than in
their convictions. Thus, when the lodges reorganized between 1715 and
1725, the gentlemen found them attractive, not in the least because of their
intrinsically tolerant attitude. Also, by initiating candidates from different
social classes, and adopting the procedure of electing a new Grand Master or a
new Master of a lodge, the lodges were in fact experimenting with a form of
democracy. As a result, they did promote at least certain aspects of the
Enlightenment, although their ritual practice remained at the same time
firmly rooted in the Western esoteric tradition.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, large numbers of “culture
bearers” were Freemasons. In the twentieth century, the market for alter-
native spirituality increased rapidly, while Freemasonry, which had formerly
shown a remarkable potential to adapt itself to changing contexts, now
18
SWEDENBORG AND
SWEDENBORGIANISM
Jane Williams-Hogan
1 Introduction
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) is best known for his theological writings
published between 1749 and 1771. The eight-volume Secrets of Heaven
(1749–1756) was written in Latin and published anonymously in London.
According to Swedenborg, this work contained the inner meaning or spiri-
tual sense of Genesis and Exodus and reestablished the link between the
spiritual and natural worlds, which he believed had been severely weakened
by the decline of the Christian Church.
Revealing these secrets of heaven was Swedenborg’s essential mission. He
believed that the Lord’s Word, now unsealed, permitted him to view, as an
eyewitness in the spiritual world, the Last Judgment described in
Revelation.1 He recorded these observations in works on The Last
Judgment (1758 and 1763). In his final work, True Christianity (1771), he
proclaimed the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. Swedenborg
published a total of eighteen theological titles. Several were multivolume
works. Heaven and Hell (1758) is perhaps the best known. In Marriage Love
(1768), he dropped his anonymity for the first time. He signed it “Emanuel
Swedenborg, A Swede” and did the same for the remaining three titles he
published.
According to Swedenborg’s testimony, his call required that he live
simultaneously in the spiritual and natural worlds for the last twenty-seven
years of his life – an astounding claim. What prepared him for this task, what
might possibly lend credence to it, and what has been its impact? I will
address each of these questions in turn.
1
Swedenborg referred to the Bible as the Lord’s Word.
211
212 J an e W i l l i a m s - H o g a n
2 Swedenborg’s Background, Employment,

and Philosophical Project
Swedenborg was born on January 29, 1688, in Stockholm. He was the son of
Lutheran Bishop Jesper Swedberg (1653–1735) and his wife Sarah Behm
Swedberg (1666–1696).2 His father had a long and illustrious but somewhat
controversial career in the church. His mother, who came from a family of
iron mine owners, died when he was eight years old. The family moved to
Uppsala in 1692, where Swedenborg was raised and attended the university.
He graduated in 1709 with a degree in philosophy. His passion, however, was
mathesis and mechanics. In 1710, he left on a five-year student trip, exploring
mathematics and astronomy in England, Holland, and France. He returned
in 1715 and launched Sweden’s first scientific journal, Daedalus Hyperboreus
(published 1716–1718). During this period, he worked with Christopher
Polhem (1661–1751), the noted Swedish inventor.
In 1716, Swedenborg was appointed an Extraordinary Assessor to the
Board of Mines by King Karl XII. The king’s death in 1718 delayed his
appointment, and Swedenborg was not actually seated on the board until
1724. He worked there diligently until 1747, when he retired to devote
himself to his “call.” Swedenborg published four philosophical works during
this same period: his three-volume, philosophical and metallurgical work The
Principia, Iron, and Copper and Brass (Leipzig and Dresden, 1734); The Infinite:
The Final Cause of Creation (Leipzig and Dresden, 1734); The Dynamics of The
Soul’s Domain (two volumes, Amsterdam, 1740–1741); and The Soul’s
Domain, (three volumes, The Hague and London, 1744–1745). These
works were all part of the same intellectual project, and Swedenborg per-
sonally traveled abroad to publish them. Swedenborg began the last work
because he was dissatisfied with his first attempt to “show the soul to the very
senses.”3 In all these works, he wanted “to demonstrate truths by the
analytical method . . . [so] an access will be open and a way laid down to
faith” for “those who never believe anything but what they can receive with
their intellect [reason].”4
In Swedenborg’s own view, this project failed for two reasons: First, the
more he pursued the soul through what he saw as its mirror, the body, the
2
Swedenborg and his siblings were ennobled in 1719 and changed their family name. He will
be referred to as Swedenborg throughout this essay.
3
Emanuel Swedenborg, The Infinite: The Final Cause of Creation and The Mechanism of the
Operation of the Soul and Body (London: The Swedenborg Society, 1965), 230.
4
Emanuel Swedenborg, The Animal Kingdom, Vol. 1, trans. James John Garth Wilkinson
(London: W. Newbery, 1843), 14–15. Reproduced by the Swedenborg Scientific
Association, 1960.
Swedenborg and Swedenborgianism 213
farther away it seemed, because the deeper he probed, the greater complexity
he found. Nature, the soul’s mirror, although profoundly orderly, none-
theless did not reveal its secret. Second, the more Swedenborg searched –
even with the advanced analytical principles he had constructed for this
purpose – the clearer it became to him that while these principles could
indeed shine increasing light on the intricate working of the body, they were
not equal to the task of illuminating the soul. Thus, he abandoned this project
in 1745.
3 Swedenborg’s Call and Claim

In addition to the reasons just outlined, Swedenborg also abandoned this
course because he believed he had received a “call” to pursue another
project, although he was unsure exactly what it involved. He was certain,
however, that it was God who was calling. Swedenborg’s call came while
he was abroad publishing The Soul’s Domain in The Hague and London
(1743–1745). It began in the form of vivid dreams. The dreams started in
The Hague in March 1744 and continued after Swedenborg settled in
London in May. He wrote in a private journal in October 1744, after
months of intense dreams that called him to account for his intellectual
hubris and emotional barrenness, “Christ said that I ought not to undertake
anything without him.”5 Before returning from London to Sweden in
1745, Swedenborg published a small work titled The Worship and Love
of God.
In Stockholm, he resumed his work at the College of Mines and began to
study the Bible in Hebrew and Latin. In an unpublished manuscript titled The
Messiah About to Come, Swedenborg assembled passages from the Bible that
seemed to speak to him. The manuscript was written in Latin. However, in a
note in Swedish on the last page, he stated:
November 17, 1745. I began to write.
Lord Jesus Christ, lead me to and on the way on which Thou willest that
I shall walk.
Be ye holy: be ye gifted with the Spirit of God and Christ; and be ye
persevering in righteousness. This will be the testimony of the Kingdom of
God.6
5
Swedenborg’s Journal of Dreams, ed. William Ross Woofenden (New York: Swedenborg
Foundation, 1977), §278.
6
Emanuel Swedenborg, The Messiah About to Come, A Posthumous Work, trans. and ed. Alfred
Acton (Bryn Athyn, PA: The Academy of the New Church, 1949), 105.
For the next two years, Swedenborg continued an intensive study of the
Bible and wrote more than five thousand pages, which he never published.
Among them is an eight-volume work called The Word Explained, a Bible
index of correspondences, and a diary of his “spiritual experiences.”
Through this effort, Swedenborg profoundly changed his understanding
of the nature of the Bible, and in particular the story of Genesis. He moved
from believing that it recorded the creation of the physical world and
humanity to understanding that it told of every human’s potential spiritual
birth, or what he would term “regeneration.”
In 1747, not long after he was offered the position of president at the
College of Mines, Swedenborg decided to retire. He wrote to the king,
asking that someone else be named in his place. His request was granted, and
he was awarded a pension equal to half his salary. He left the college for the
last time on July 17 and a week later set sail for Holland.
When Swedenborg boarded the ship at the age of fifty-nine, he was
embarking not just on a new journey, but on a new career. Years later, he
was to give it a name: “Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ.” In January 1748,
after a series of experiences in the spiritual world that deepened his under-
standing of God, Swedenborg changed the name by which he referred to
God from “God Messiah” to “the Lord Jesus Christ.” The importance of this
will be discussed later in the section on Swedenborg’s teachings. For the
moment, it is sufficient to say that in Christian literature, the idea that Jesus
Christ is Lord is relatively commonplace. However, the name “Lord Jesus
Christ” is not. After this revelation, Swedenborg continued his studies for
another ten months. In the fall of 1748, he decided to move to London,
where he would write the first volume of Secrets of Heaven.
Swedenborg’s call did not result in an immediate announcement of
spiritual insight or revelation to a troubled world. Instead, it led instead to
a period of study and reflection, similar to the one by which he had prepared
himself for the different phases of his philosophical project. What was added
in this new preparatory period was prayer – prayer in which he sought
guidance from the God he felt called to serve. It is interesting and important
to note that the prose he wrote, as a visionary and theologian, was not ecstatic
but was instead logical and measured. As Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
wrote in his poem, “Emanuel Swedenborg”: “In dry Latin he went on
listing, the unconditional last things.”7
7
Jorges Luis Borges, “Swedenborg,” in Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision, ed. Robin
Larsen (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1988), 353.
4 Swedenborg’s Theological Period

In September 1749, Swedenborg anonymously published in Latin his first
volume of theology, Arcana Coelestia or Secrets of Heaven. In it he stated:
The Word in the Old Testament contains secrets of heaven, and every
single aspect of it has to do with the Lord, his heaven, the church, faith, and
all the tenets of faith; but not a single person sees this in the letter. . .. The
truth is, however, that every part of the Old Testament holds an inner
message.8
He went on to say that this is because the Word is the Lord’s and is therefore
living, and on that account, divine. “Without this interior life, the Word in
its letter is dead.”9 In this, the Word is like a human being, with an inner and
outer self. The outer self without the inner is dead, like a body without its
soul.10
A key aspect related by Swedenborg of the inner wisdom of Genesis is that
the six days of creation in the first chapter identify the stages of spiritual
growth necessary to achieve a heavenly life in paradise.11 He further states
that no one could know this unless aided by the Lord. He states that the
whole of the spiritual realm was opened to him for several years prior to the
volume’s publication.12 With these opening paragraphs, Swedenborg’s New
Christianity made its debut.
The year 1757 was monumental within Swedenborg’s theological period.
He reported that it was the year that the last judgment took place. Not only
had a last judgment been foretold in the biblical book of Revelation, it was
generally assumed that it would take place in this world. Swedenborg,
however, wrote that because the judgment was spiritual, it took place in
the spiritual world, and that what necessitated this judgment was the separa-
tion of the life of faith from the life of charity among departed spirits and in
the Christian churches on earth. This separation effectively prevented the
Lord’s love and wisdom from flowing through heaven into the world of
spirits and, finally, to men and women on earth. Swedenborg believed that
the completion of Secrets of Heaven, in which the internal sense of the Word
was now visible in the natural world, also allowed light to shine in the
spiritual world. This permitted spirits who had been waiting in that world
8
Emanuel Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven, trans. Lisa Hyatt Cooper (West Chester, PA:
Swedenborg Foundation, 2010), §1–2.
9
Secrets of Heaven, §3.
10
11
12
because they were uncertain of their true spiritual nature to see it clearly.
They now saw their fundamentally good or evil nature and then sought
permanent homes for themselves with those who were of a similar disposi-
tion, either in heaven or hell. This lifting of the veil in the spiritual world
reordered it and allowed spiritual light to flow into the minds of everyone in
the world. As a result, according to Swedenborg, human spiritual freedom
was restored.
In 1758, Swedenborg traveled to London, where the following works
were published: Heaven and Hell, New Jerusalem, Last Judgment, White Horse,
and Other Planets. He requested that one thousand copies of each should be
printed.13 None of these was exegetical in nature. Swedenborg returned to
Sweden in 1759, traveling through Gothenburg on his way to Stockholm. In
Gothenburg, an event occurred that would identify him as the author of
these strange and fascinating religious books that were circulating in Europe.
The event occurred on July 19 when Swedenborg was dining at the home of
one William Castel. During the dinner, Swedenborg left the company and
went out into the garden. On his return, he appeared troubled. When
questioned, he reported that a serious fire was burning in a district in south-
ern Stockholm. Over the next two hours, he reported the progress of the fire
to the assembled guests. Finally, at eight o’clock, he exclaimed: “Thank God,
the fire is extinguished, the third door from my house!”14
Given the extraordinary nature of Swedenborg’s account, he was sum-
moned by the governor the next day, Sunday, to give a detailed description
of what had occurred in Stockholm. Two days later, messengers from
Stockholm, more than three hundred miles away, brought news of the fire,
and the details they gave confirmed Swedenborg’s clairvoyant description.
News of this event gradually circulated in Sweden and eventually spread to
the Continent.
As he published more books throughout the 1760s, people began to
identify Swedenborg, the clairvoyant, as their author. In Amsterdam, in
1763, he published The Lord, Sacred Scripture, Life, Faith, Supplements, and
Divine Love and Wisdom; in 1764, Divine Providence; and in 1766, Revelation
Unveiled. Swedenborg published additional works in Amsterdam during the
last years of his life: Marriage Love (1768), Survey (1769), Soul-body Interaction
(also 1769), and True Christianity (1771). After publishing this last work he
traveled to London, where he suffered a stroke in December. Bedridden
13
It should be pointed out that a print run of one thousand copies was substantial in the
eighteenth century.
14
Cyriel O. Sigstedt, The Swedenborg Epic (London: Swedenborg Society, 1981), 216.
during his last months, Swedenborg died on March 29, 1772. Shortly before
he died, Swedenborg was asked by a friend, a Mr. Thomas Hartley (1709?–
1784), whether everything he had written was true. Swedenborg replied, “I
have written nothing but the truth.”15 Despite the “dry Latin” of his prose,
his works possess a quality that is somehow beguiling and arresting.
Otherwise it is hard to account for the need, on the part of some critics, to
ridicule and denounce them, often after making initially positive assessments.
5 Swedenborg’s Teachings
This brief summary covers the topics of God, creation, humanity, freedom,
and salvation. Swedenborg’s New Christianity is revolutionary. To begin
with, it offers a radically new interpretation of the Trinity. The Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit are not three distinct persons united in the Godhead, as is
taught in traditional Christianity. Instead, True Christianity states: “These
three, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are three essential compo-
nents of one God. They are one the way our soul, body, and the things we do
are one.”16 In addition, the Lord Jesus Christ is the one God of heaven and
earth, the Creator of the universe and the Savior of humanity. In Divine Love
and Wisdom, Swedenborg describes God as life itself, whose divine essence is
love and wisdom.17 God created the universe and humanity from love, by
means of wisdom. He created the universe and the world as a finite habitation
for humanity. In Divine Providence, Swedenborg writes that the end or
purpose of that creation was “a heaven for the human race.”18
What distinguishes humanity from the rest of finite creation is the fact that
human beings were created with freedom and rationality so that they could
choose to acknowledge God and love him in return.19 Swedenborg describes
love in this way: “The essence of love is that what is ours should belong to
someone else. Feeling the joy of someone else as joy within ourselves – that is
loving.”20 A loving God longs to be conjoined to his creation, but this is only
possible if the desire is mutual, because mutuality is the essence of all love.
Love must be freely given and received to be called love. It cannot be forced,
15
Sigstedt, The Swedenborg Epic, 431.
16
Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christianity, trans. Jonathan S. Rose (West Chester, PA:
Swedenborg Foundation, 2008), §163.
17
Emanuel Swedenborg, Divine Love and Wisdom, trans. George F. Dole (West Chester, PA:
18
Emanuel Swedenborg, Divine Providence, trans. George F. Dole (West Chester, PA:
19
Swedenborg, Divine Providence, §97.
20
Swedenborg, Divine Providence, §47.
demanded, or compelled. Thus, according to Swedenborg, for people to

achieve salvation and dwell in God’s heaven after death, it is necessary for
them to acknowledge the following:
(1) There is one God . . . and he is the Lord God the Savior Jesus Christ. (2)
Believing in him is a faith that saves. (3) We must not do things that are
evil. . .. (4) We must do things that are good. . .. (5) We must do these things
as if we ourselves were doing them, but we must believe that they come
from the Lord working with us and through us.21
Here we see that in the New Christianity, human beings are granted
cooperative efficacy in their own salvation. Human beings, endowed with
the gifts of freedom and rationality, construct during their own lifetime their
eternal home either in heaven or in hell. In the afterlife, no one is cast into
hell, because all freely follow their inmost love to whatever society permits
them to find their greatest happiness. This is so because the opening sentence
of Divine Love and Wisdom states: “Love is our life.”22
In endowing humanity with freedom, God opened the possibility that he
and his way could be rejected. With the gift of freedom, human beings can
choose to love themselves and the world more than they love the Lord and
the neighbor. Swedenborg’s writings teach that not only can this choice be
made, but that the history of the world certainly suggests that many, in fact,
have chosen to reject God. Over time, this can flood the world with evil,
making it difficult for anyone to choose the good. Because the salvation of
the human race is God’s uppermost concern, he is continually re-presenting
himself to humanity through new revelations accommodated to their chan-
ging states and the world’s spiritual climate, in order to maintain human
freedom.
Swedenborg taught that in the beginning, God and humanity dwelled
together in mutual love and spoke the same language. Human beings could
see spiritual reality in natural things – they understood what corresponded in
nature to living spiritual truths. Gradually, however, they began to believe
these abilities were self-created, rather than gifts from God. In this way, they
ate from the forbidden tree and could no longer live in the garden. Outside
the garden, they used their understanding less and less to access spiritual truths
21
Swedenborg, True Christianity, §3.
22
Swedenborg, Divine Love and Wisdom, §1. It is important to point out here and, in what
follows, that Swedenborg’s writings clearly teach that “through the good and truth which
are from the Lord all are saved who live in mutual charity, whether they are within the
church or without it. (That the Gentiles who are without the church and who are in good
are equally saved.)” Swedenborg, Secrets of Heaven, §3380.
and employed it instead to control the natural world. As the natural world
became the focus, laws were required to maintain social order, and the
relationship to spiritual concerns was maintained through ritual. This is
exemplified by Moses on Mount Sinai, receiving from Jehovah the Ten
Commandments and the laws for the “children of Israel.” When ritual lost its
spiritual meaning and was practiced essentially for worldly gain, the way to
heaven was closed. God came on earth in human form to visibly show “the
way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). According to Swedenborg, “the
Lord came into the world to subjugate the hells and to glorify his human, and
the passion on the cross was the final combat whereby he fully conquered the
hells and fully glorified his human.”23
God, in taking on the body through Mary, gained an evil heredity. Armed
with his infinite love, during his life he was drawn into internal combat with
the hells. He finally overcame them on the cross and, thus, restored human
freedom in spiritual matters. According to Swedenborg, this was accom-
plished by the Lord Jesus Christ, who rose glorified on the third day, for the
sake of all humanity. Viewed as the one God of heaven and earth, he has the
power to save all who call to him in temptation.
However, after the Council of Nicea, the worship of one God in three
persons brought discord to Christianity and ultimately led to a fatal separation
of faith and charity at the time of the Reformation. With only a glimmer of
spiritual life left in the world, Swedenborg believed he was called to reveal
the spiritual life contained in God’s Word; to allow God to re-present himself
to a humanity that was discontented with mystery and wished to know the
workings of both nature and spirit through reason. Swedenborg taught that
finite men and women can wrest the secrets from nature with their own
God-given powers; however, the secrets of living spirit can only be revealed
by the infinite God who is life itself.
Swedenborg stated in his last work, True Christianity, that he believed he
was called by the Lord to receive the teachings of the New Church in his
understanding, and to publish them through the press.24 While he published
his writings and distributed them widely, he never attempted to found a
church. He wrote that “now it is permitted to enter with understanding into
the mysteries of faith.”25 His works were published, he said, for those who
23
Emanuel Swedenborg, Doctrine of the Lord, trans. John F. Potts (West Chester, PA:
24
Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christianity, Vol. 2, trans. Jonathan S. Rose (West Chester, PA:
25
Swedenborg, True Christianity, §508.
saw the Lord in themselves and who wanted to explore spirit with both heart
and mind.
Swedenborg’s description of the world, created by God’s infinite love, is a
world of uses: a human world of mutual service. This is true both in heaven
and on the earth. One of the most important uses, according to Swedenborg,
is marriage.
6 Swedenborgianism
When Swedenborg died in 1772, perhaps a handful of people had accepted
his religious writings as the word of God – a few in Sweden and a few in
England. The development of the New Church in these two countries
progressed differently because of the different degree of religious freedom
in each, and the social class most interested in Swedenborg’s religious teach-
ings. In Sweden, the firm control of the Lutheran Church over religious life
made the development of Swedenborgian organizations difficult. Several
developed nonetheless among the upper class in Sweden at the end of the
eighteenth century, although they were short lived. Public confessional
Swedenborgianism was not possible until 1874 when freedom of religious
association was legalized.
By contrast, much greater religious freedom existed in England and in the
English-speaking world generally, so the story of Swedenborgianism in these
lands is quite different. Swedenborg’s works could be translated from Latin
into the vernacular, and this was actually begun before his death. Two men
are primarily responsible for the development of the New Church in
England: John Clowes (1743–1831) and Robert Hindmarsh (1759–1835).
Clowes was an Anglican priest who never left that faith, although he con-
verted many to the New Church. Hindmarsh was a Methodist who was
instrumental in establishing a distinct New Church organization. Both men
had never met Swedenborg.
In July 1787, men and women in favor of separating from the “old”
Christian churches drew up organizational rules, an order of government,
and – most importantly – the spiritual principles of the New Church. On July
31, they held their first worship service, which included both holy supper and
baptism. With this service, the first New Christian congregation was estab-
lished. In 1788, the need for an ordained priesthood became apparent. In
June of that year, an ordination service was held, and two men thus became
the first ministers of the New Church. In 1789, the first General Conference
was held in the chapel they had obtained in East Cheap. The purpose of the
meeting was to endorse common principles of faith whereby they might
establish the General Conference and promote the development of the New
Church. Among the seventy or eighty people in attendance at this first
General Conference and who signed the principles of agreement were the
poet and artist William Blake (1757–1827) and his wife Catherine. While
individuals from all classes were drawn to Swedenborg’s writings in Great
Britain and the British Empire, they took hold primarily among the middle
class.
Although issues soon developed within the membership, interest in the
New Church continued to grow. Finally in 1810, Swedenborgians were able
to agree on both the form of the Conference, congregationalism, and the
principles of faith. Almost all Swedenborgian organizations in the world trace
their lineage back to the British Conference. By the end of the nineteenth
century, there were seventy-three such societies and sixty-three hundred
members in Great Britain. The Conference had spread throughout the
British Empire as well. There were societies in Australia, New Zealand,
and South Africa, which are still in existence. There are nineteen Conference
societies in Great Britain today, with a membership of 590.
Swedenborg’s religious writings arrived in North America in 1784.
Immediate interest in them developed, and groups of readers met in
Philadelphia and Boston. The books moved west with the opening of the
Northwest Territory, and Cincinnati soon became an important
Swedenborgian center. In Philadelphia in 1817, the General Convention
was founded, the first of three separate American organizations. Like the
British Conference, it was congregational in form. As American society
pushed across the continent, so did Swedenborgianism. A Swedenborgian
college was established in Urbana, Ohio, in 1853. By 1900, societies were
operating coast to coast. The membership total was 6,926. In 2012, twelve
associations, made up of multiple societies, had a total membership of 1,531.
Almost from the beginning of the New Church in Great Britain, differ-
ences had been brewing about principles of organizational structure. These
rose to the surface in the United States after the Civil War. In 1876, another
Swedenborgian organization, this one favoring episcopal principles, was
established in America. It was called the Academy Movement, and education
was an important emphasis for this group. In the 1880s, its members estab-
lished a college, secondary school, and elementary school outside
Philadelphia. For a time, it was possible within the loose structure of the
Convention to remain together. However in 1890, a separation occurred
whereby 347 members of the Academy Movement withdrew from the
Convention. At stake were not only organizational principles but also how
Swedenborg’s religious writings were to be viewed – as merely inspired or
authoritatively revealed. This new movement – later called The General

Church of the New Jerusalem – accepted Swedenborg’s writings as author-
itatively revealed and has been international since its founding. As of this
writing, it is a worldwide organization with a membership of 5,368 and a
broader community of approximately 20,000 individuals.
In the twentieth century, two additional organizations were established.
The Lord’s New Church was founded in the United States in 1937, an
international group with a current membership of less than one thousand.
The other is the New Church of Southern Africa, founded in 1970. This
latter group had approximately twenty-five thousand members in 1990.
There are also a number of small, independent New Church organizations
in many nations in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe, as well as in Australia
and India.
Swedenborgian groups are found all around the world, and the total
number of Swedenborgians in 2014 was approximately fifty thousand.
However, Swedenborg’s influence cannot be assessed merely by looking at
organizational membership figures alone. Since their first publication,
Swedenborg’s religious writings have influenced a wide range of artists and
thinkers: William Blake, Immanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Arthur
Conan Doyle, Henry James Sr., Jorge Luis Borges, Carl Jung, Honoré de
Balzac, Helen Keller, W. B. Yeats, August Strindberg, and countless others.
Obviously the degree of influence is not the same for each person who read
and absorbed some of Swedenborg’s innovative religious ideas. Nonetheless,
their broad cultural impact is undeniable. This speaks well for the “charisma
of the book.”26
26
This is a term developed by the author to identify the locus of “charisma” within
Swedenborgianism.
19
MESMER AND ANIMAL MAGNETISM
Adam Crabtree
1 Discovery of Animal Magnetism

In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Franz Anton Mesmer
(1734–1815) devised and promoted a healing method that he called
“animal magnetism.” For approximately seventy-five years following its
initial proclamation in 1779, animal magnetism flourished as a medical
and psychological specialty, and for another fifty years it continued to be
a system of influence, having a profound impact on medicine, psychol-
ogy, and psychical research.
The seeds of thought that gave rise to animal magnetism are found in
Mesmer’s 1766 thesis Dissertatio physico-medica de planetarum influxu, which he
wrote for his doctorate in medicine at the University of Vienna. Although he
chose the title “Physical-medical Dissertation on the Influence of the
Planets,” Mesmer was not interested in the occult and attempted to develop
a theory of human health based on what he believed were purely physical,
scientifically observable factors. Here he expounded his belief that just as
there are tides in the ocean, so must there be tides in the human organism
caused by the celestial bodies. He called this generalized influence “animal
gravity.” Noting what he considered to be a similarity between gravity and
magnetism, Mesmer attempted to cure the sick through the application of
iron magnets. Using the terminology of the day, he called the carrier of
magnetic influence “magnetic fluid,” which he believed was the foundation
of life itself and the principle by which organic bodies carry out their vital
functions. He asserted that the inhibition of this vital force produced disease.
Mesmer therefore developed a technique to remove obstructions to the free
flow of magnetic fluid in the body. After a period of experimentation in
which he used mineral magnets to dissolve the blocks, he became convinced
that the “magnet” of choice in healing is the physician’s own body, which is
223
224 A d am Cr a b tr e e
capable of channeling the invisible fluid pervading the universe into the
patient’s body. This constituted his theory of “animal magnetism.”
Mesmer began his healing practice in Vienna, but after coming into
conflict with both the medical establishment of that city and the family of
one of his patients, he moved to Paris in 1778. There he gave his theory its
first complete formulation, set up two clinics, and attempted to gain accep-
tance for his ideas from the local medical authorities. His hopes were not
realized, however. Although Mesmer’s ideas and clinics remained popular
among the general public, his work eventually came under investigation by
two officially appointed commissions and was judged devoid of scientific
merit.1
In his foundational work, Memoir on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism,
written in 1779, Mesmer laid out his doctrine of healing through animal
magnetism and stated, among other things, that “the facts will show that,
following the practical rules that I will establish, this principle can heal
disorders of the nerves immediately, and other disorders mediately.”2
Despite this mention of “nerves,” Mesmer was not claiming that magnetic
healing had a psychological basis. In fact, we look in vain in Mesmer’s works
for a discussion of anything like states of consciousness. Mesmer was no
psychologist. Although he had a flare for the dramatic (background music
from the glass harmonica played during healing sessions, the mysterious
healing tub or “baquet,” purple robes, iron wands, etc.), Mesmer had little
interest in the mental side of healing. He had no curiosity about what was
going on in the minds of his patients. Mesmer noted that some of his patients
“fainted” when being magnetized, but he never asked them about what they
were experiencing. Mesmer mentioned “will,” but only in connection with
the mental attitude of the magnetizer while applying magnetic “passes”
(flowing movement of the hands over the body), and he was never noted
1
For details about Mesmer’s life and contemporary responses to his ideas, see Jean Vinchon,
Mesmer et son secret (Paris: Amédés Legrand, 1936); Robert Amadou, Franz Anton Mesmer:
Animal Magnetism (Franz-Anton Mesmer: Le magnétisme animal) (Paris: Payot, 1971); Alan
Gauld, A History of Hypnotism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Adam
Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Frank Pattie, Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: A Chapter
in the History of Medicine (Hamilton, NY: Edmonston Publishing, 1994); and Bertrand
Méheust, Somnambulism and Mediumship (Somnambulisme et médiumnité), 2 vols. (Le Plessis-
Robinson: Institut Synthélabo, 1999). For a bibliography of Mesmer’s writings and other
works on animal magnetism and related matters, see Adam Crabtree, Animal Magnetism, Early
Hypnotism, and Psychical Research, 1766–1925: An Annotated Bibliography (White Plains, NY:
Kraus International Publications, 1988).
2
Franz Anton Mesmer, Memoir on the Discovery of Animal Magnetism (Mémoire sur la découverte du
magnétisme animal) (Geneva and Paris: Didot le jeune, 1779), 83.
M e s me r a n d An i mal Ma gn e t i sm 225
for his bedside manner, tact, or political savvy. What Mesmer did have was
the creative imagination to devise a novel way of thinking about healing and
the single-minded drive to gain acceptance for his system in the face of
powerful professional opposition. It was left to the Marquis de Puységur,
one of Mesmer’s most enthusiastic pupils, to take animal magnetism (or
“mesmerism” as it came to be called) to its next, more psychological stage.
2 Puységur’s Approach to Animal Magnetism

In 1784, Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur (1751–
1825), an aristocrat and artillery officer, took a training course offered by
Mesmer in Paris intended to prepare one to do healing work using the
techniques of animal magnetism. On returning to his estate at Buzancy
near Soissons, Puységur immediately began to practice what he had learned
to alleviate the ills of local residents.
Among the first he treated was a peasant of his estate named Victor Race,
who was suffering from fever and congestion of the lungs. Puységur noticed
that while he was applying the magnetic passes, Victor had fallen asleep.
However, his sleep was not a normal one, for Puységur could still commu-
nicate with him. In his written account of his experiences, Puységur called
this hitherto undefined condition “magnetic sleep”: a sleep-waking kind of
consciousness. In sharp contrast to Mesmer, who made no inquiries about his
patients’ state of mind, Puységur showed himself to be quite interested in
Victor’s subjective experiences. He considered the effects of Victor’s ideas on
his illness, and he suggested mental images to Victor that he thought would
aid in the healing process. Puységur observed that Victor could recognize
tunes that Puységur hummed mentally – but he discovered the next day that
Victor had no memory of the incident. The words he used to describe this
novel state show Puységur’s psychological bent: “magnetic sleep,” “mag-
netic crisis,” “peaceful sleep,” “magnetic state,” “state of somnambulism,”
and “magnetic somnambulism.”3
The characteristics of magnetic sleep according to Puységur are as follows.
a A sleep-waking kind of consciousness

Puységur noted that after administering the magnetic passes, Victor seemed
to fall asleep, yet he was also “awake” enough to continue to communicate
with him. Puységur used the word “somnambulism” because of the
3
Marquis de Puységur, Memoir for the History of Animal Magnetism (Mémoire pour servir à
l’histoire et à l’établissement du magnétisme animal) (Paris: Dentu, 1784).
similarity between magnetic sleep and natural sleepwalking or somnambu-

lism. For Puységur, the difference between natural and magnetic somnam-
bulism is that the latter is developed through induction by a magnetizer and
results in a special connection or “rapport” with the magnetizer. With
natural somnambulism, on the other hand, the subject does not respond to
attempts at communication. Natural somnambulists may speak, drink, eat,
read, write, distinguish colors, and carry out various other mental tasks, but in
contrast to magnetic somnambulists they are not able to connect with others.
b Rapport and suggestibility

In a follow-up volume, Puységur wrote about a special connection that
occurs between magnetizer and magnetized: “In this state, the ill person
enters into a very intimate rapport with the magnetizer, one could almost say
he becomes a part of the magnetizer.”4 Magnetic rapport, he said, causes the
somnambulist to respond to and obey only the magnetizer and experience
the approach of others as so uncomfortable that if anyone else touches the
somnambulist, he or she will awaken. Rapport was considered an essential
feature of magnetic sleep. It was accompanied by suggestibility, by which the
somnambulist would execute tasks at the suggestion of the magnetizer. In
practice, magnetic healers often used suggestion to get patients to perform
various remedial procedures (e.g., drinking a specific tea at a specific time).
c Lack of memory, divided consciousness, and change in personality

Victor found that on the day after his treatment, he could recall nothing of
what had happened. Puységur discovered that this amnesia typically followed
magnetic sleep, and that it persisted despite his assiduous attempts to “tie their
ideas together in their passing from one state to the other.” From this, he
concluded that “the demarcation is so great that one must regard these two
states as two different existences.”5 He also discovered that there was a
continuity of memory within the individual in the state of magnetic sleep,
and that although the waking person could remember nothing of the mag-
netic state, the somnambulist could remember both the waking state and all
that had occurred in previous magnetic states, indicating that the memory
chain of the somnambulist was quite separate from that of the waking person.
4
Marquis de Puységur, Continuation of Memoirs for the History of Animal Magnetism (Suite des
mémoires pour servir à l’établissement du magnétisme animal) (Paris and London: no publisher,
1785), 17.
5
Puységur, Memoir, 90.
Often the somnambulist would speak about himself in the waking state
with a certain detachment, as though referring to another person, confirming
Puységur’s sense that he was dealing with “two different existences” – a
phenomenon later referred to as “divided consciousness” or “double con-
sciousness.” The two consciousnesses were characterized by a striking con-
trast in personality traits. Puységur said of Victor that in the magnetized state,
he was no longer a naïve peasant who could barely speak a sentence. The
transformation of personality was so great and Victor’s wisdom so augmented
that Puységur found himself relying on the magnetized Victor for advice in
his healing work.
d Paranormal phenomena
Puységur said of Victor, “I do not need to speak to him. I think in his
presence, and he hears me and answers me.”6 Puységur reported other
phenomena that would today be called “paranormal.” He wrote of som-
nambulists who could perceive objects and conditions not available to the
senses, exercising a “sixth sense” activated in magnetic sleep. This sense
allowed them to diagnose their own illnesses and those of others and to
prescribe effective treatments. Puységur speculated that the somnambulist’s
sixth sense accounted for the lack of memory in their normal state for what
happened in the magnetic state: “With six senses (if one can put it that way)
they can recall the sensations gained through the five senses, but with five
senses, they cannot remember ideas formed with six.”7
Puységur was in the habit of using this capacity in his somnambulists to
help him determine the illness and remedy for the patients who came to him.
He was enthusiastic about the potential for good in this sixth sense and had
implicit faith in the accuracy of the pronouncements of magnetic somnam-
bulists. Puységur also believed that magnetic somnambulism could be
induced at a distance, but he hesitated to do so since he feared this could
cause confusion and perhaps harm the magnetic subject.8
Puységur’s “discovery” of magnetic sleep was a momentous event in the
history of psychology. It goes far beyond the scope of this essay to trace the
profound effects this innovation had on the development of psychiatry and
psychotherapy.9 I will only say that it resulted in the establishment of a new
6
7
8
Puységur, Continuation of Memoirs, 113.
9
Puységur developed a remarkably “modern” theory of the nature of emotional disorders. See
Marquis de Puységur, Are Not the Mad, the Insane, Lunatics and the Frenzied Simply Disordered
Somnambulists? (Les fous, les insensés, les maniaques, et les frénétiques ne seraient-ils que des
way of explaining mental disturbances and anomalies: what I call the alternate-
consciousness paradigm. This new paradigm supplemented two already exist-
ing ones: the organic paradigm that conceives of such phenomena in terms of
physiological states, and the intrusion paradigm that sees them as the result of
the intervention of spirits or the application of magical spells.
Although the introduction of the magnetic-sleep dimension of animal
magnetism was momentous for the subsequent development of psychologi-
cal theory in the West, Puységur did not deny or neglect the fluidic aspect of
Mesmer’s system, and he continued to use techniques involving magnetic
passes in his healing work. He maintained a complex view of mesmeric
phenomena and refused to reduce his approach to any one school of thought.
This inclusive understanding of animal magnetism contrasts sharply with the
attitude of some practitioners in the decades following his death in 1825. The
most notable attempt to reduce magnetic phenomena to a simple formula
was that of James Braid (1795–1860), who emphasized the fascination-con-
centration aspect of magnetic sleep and attributed all mesmeric phenomena
to the effects of suggestion.10 Although Braid was not the first to attempt to
reduce everything to suggestion, he gave staying power to his speculations by
inventing a nomenclature built around his novel term “hypnotism.”
Although Braid’s denatured form of animal magnetism gained considerable
support in more conservative medical quarters, it remained doubtful to many
that mesmeric phenomena and hypnotism were equivalent.11
3 Mechanism or Mysticism?
Animal magnetism entered the scene at a time of great intellectual and
cultural ferment. Its launching pad was France, which was abuzz with
excitement about scientific progress and a lively interest in ideas relating to
the potentials of the human spirit. At the same time, a variety of mystical
philosophies were much discussed, including the ideas of Emanuel
Swedenborg. Churches and local societies promoting Swedenborgianism
somnambules désordonnés?) (Paris: J. G. Dentu, 1812). For more see Crabtree, From Mesmer to
Freud, 76–82.
10
James Braid, Satanic Agency and Mesmerism Reviewed (Manchester: Sims and Dinham, Galt
and Anderson, 1842), and Neurypnology: Or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep Considered in
Relation with Animal Magnetism (London: John Churchill, 1843).
11
See, for example, W. F. Barrett, E. Gurney, and F. W. H. Myers, “First Report of the
Committee on Mesmerism,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1 (1883), 217–229;
“Second Report of the Committee on Mesmerism,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research, 1 (1883), 251–262; and “Appendix to the Report on Mesmerism,” Proceedings of the
Society for Psychical Research, 1 (1883), 284–290.
abounded in the intellectual environment into which mesmerism was intro-

duced. The Martinists, who believed that “the material world was subordi-
nate to a more real spiritual realm in which primitive man once had ruled,”12
found mesmerism, particularly the Puységurian strain, to be congenial to
their speculations. Rosicrucians, millenarianists, Illuminati, and others were
drawn to the intriguing idea that a universal superfine fluid was the source of
life and health, and somehow under the direction of the human soul.
Despite the fact that Mesmer’s ideas were enthusiastically welcomed by these
groups, Mesmer himself was not to be counted in their membership. In fact, he
rejected the ideas of those who wanted to interpret his theory in occult or
mystical terms, insisting that his discovery was an advance in physical science.
He made his strongest statement in this regard in his 1799 Memoir: “Everything
[produced by animal magnetism] can be explained by the mechanical laws of
nature, and . . . all effects are due to modifications of matter and movement.”13
In the course of presenting his theory, Mesmer was at pains to disown
anything that might connect it with the occult, in the process rejecting
astrology – something he had already done in his doctoral dissertation – as
well as the involvement of spirits. The Memoir of 1799 gives one the
impression that Mesmer believed his theory was getting away from him,
being taken over by men with spiritual and/or occult axes to grind. So he
devoted the greater part of this work to stating his theory as clearly as possible
and opposing it to such “ignorant” and “superstitious” ideas.
His job was not made any easier by the founding of so-called societies of
harmony first in Paris and then in the provinces. The Paris society was
originally set up to funnel money to Mesmer in compensation for teaching
his courses on animal magnetism, but provincial societies were then formed
with different aims, focusing much more on the mutual encouragement of
practitioners and the development of treatment methods. These provincial
societies paid nothing to Mesmer and gradually their connection with him
grew weaker. At the same time, the influence of mystical, spiritual, and occult
systems, which were often the subject of discussion at meetings, grew stronger.
4 Magnetic Magic
In the early nineteenth century, certain thinkers came to see animal magnet-
ism as the continuation of ancient magical traditions. For them, “magic”
12
Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1968), 69.
13
Franz Anton Mesmer, Memoir of F. A. Mesmer, Doctor of Medicine, On His Discoveries (Mémoire
de F. A. Mesmer, docteur en médecine, sur ses découvertes) (Paris: Fuchs, 1799), 68.
involved mobilizing the invisible forces of nature. Carl Adolph von

Eschenmayer, Joseph Ennemoser, and Baron Jules Du Potet de Sennevoy
were influential spokesmen for this view.
Carl Eschenmayer (1768–1852) saw animal magnetism as a practical
demonstration of the truth of ancient magical beliefs. He hoped that with
the emergence of animal magnetism, magical practices that in the past had
been tinged with superstition could at last be correctly understood. Although
he took pains to deny that animal magnetism was the product of mysticism,
he did believe that it dealt with the same phenomena as the older magical
tradition and that, extraordinary as those phenomena might seem, they were
nonetheless natural.14
Joseph Ennemoser (1787–1854), a professor of medicine with a penchant
for anthropology, wrote prolifically on the history of magic and religion. He
was a dedicated practitioner of animal magnetism, and his Instructions in the
Practice of Mesmerism (1852) was one of the best German manuals on the
subject. He had a burning interest in the psychological dimensions of mag-
netic theory and the relationship of occult traditions to mesmeric phenom-
ena. Ennemoser too saw animal magnetism as a way to vindicate the old
magic, but unlike Eschenmayer, who denied that spirits intervene in the lives
of human beings, Ennemoser was open to this.15
The Baron Du Potet de Sennevoy (1796–1881) sensed from his youth that
he had an unusual ability to influence people. Having learned the art of
magnetization, he believed he had found the vehicle for putting this natural
ability into practice. Du Potet came to be considered one of the most notable
magnetizers of the nineteenth century. He taught mesmeric technique, and
his published lessons went through various editions. He also edited two
journals of animal magnetism, the short-lived Le propagateur du magnétisme
animal and the important Journal du magnétisme, and he was instrumental in
bringing mesmerism to England.
Inclined more to Mesmer’s than to Puységur’s approach, Du Potet
believed that mesmerism was not so much dependent on the exercise of
will as on the automatic action of magnetic fluid. According to Du Potet, the
“new” phenomena of animal magnetism had the same source as the magical
enchantments of witches and sorcerers in ancient times. Only the form of the
phenomena had changed, not their substance, the agent being the same in all.
And Du Potet claimed that that agent is thought before it has become action.
14
Carl Adolph von Eschenmayer, Testing the Seeming Magic of Animal Magnetism (Versuch die
scheinbare Magie des thierische Magnetismus) (Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1816).
15
Joseph Ennemoser, Introduction to the Practice of Mesmerism (Anleitung zur mesmerischen Praxis)
(Stuttgart and Tübingen: J. G. Cotta, 1852), 115–120, 227–229.
Thoughts can be planted in material objects such as seeds and then, at a time
intended by the thinker, can make their power felt by persons who come
near them. This, he asserted, was the principle that made amulets and blessed
tokens effective, and the reason why talismans, altars, and holy places influ-
ence those who come into their presence. Du Potet carried out magical
demonstrations of this power of thought. For example, he drew lines and
symbols with chalk on a wooden floor and used the power of his mind to
invest them with a specific meaning. Then he stationed volunteers within the
chalked areas and found that they reacted to the lines and symbols exactly as
he had intended. Their reactions were so strong and unambiguous that he
considered these experiments undeniable proof of his theory. But the power
of thought in the sense intended by Du Potet did not derive from mere
cogitation. One had to produce a concentration of personal force to
empower the thought with the energy to affect another person. Du Potet
saw thought as a mental creation invested with a “semi-material” envelope, a
creation conceived in the brain and sent out via the fingers into the person or
object touched. This, he said, is how magnetizers always operate, although
they do not realize what they are doing. He saw magnetism as the agent
invested by the soul with the power to affect matter. That is why to be
successful in magical (or magnetic) operations, it is necessary for the operator
to be vitally energetic and alive, fully alert in every sense – not preoccupied or
benumbed by excessive eating or drinking. Du Potet believed that the
human will needs to be awakened, and he explicitly associated the awakened
power with sexual energy.16 Du Potet believed that magnetizers were like
children playing with adult tools, not knowing how to use them, ignorant of
“the substance behind the form . . . the key that can open all the locks of
nature’s laboratories.”17
5 Mesmerism and Spiritism

Puységur was himself quite strongly influenced by the mystical philosophers
of the day. In 1785, he organized a society of harmony in Strasbourg called
the Harmonic Society of United Friends (Société Harmonique des Amis
Réunis), whose purpose was to train magnetizers, treat patients, and report
the results. Puységur wrote with appreciation about the Masonic Martinists
at Lyon, the work of Cagliostro in Paris and Rome, and the alliance of
16
See Julies Denis Du Potet de Sennevoy, Magic Revealed, or Principles of Occult Science (La magie
dévoilée, ou principes de science occulte) (Paris: Pommeret et Moreau, 1852).
17
Du Potet, Magic Revealed, 254.
Freemasonry with the followers of Swedenborg in Germany and Sweden.

He clearly felt a kinship with these metaphysical systems and believed them
to be compatible with his version of Mesmer’s animal magnetism.
Given this philosophic compatibility, it is not surprising that the
Swedenborgian society of Stockholm, called the Exegetic and
Philanthropic Society, became heavily involved with magnetic somnambu-
lism and set out to become an associate of the Strasbourg society of harmony.
Founded in 1786, the purpose of the Stockholm society was the promotion
of the teachings of Swedenborg, whose visions revealed a world of spirits,
good and bad, who secretly influence the conduct of ordinary human life. In
1789, the Stockholm society wrote a brief position paper laying out the
classical spiritistic view of the phenomena of magnetic somnambulism. It said
that the wisdom involved in diagnosis and healing requires an intellectual,
spiritual agency beyond the somnambulist himself. Since somnambulists are
not aware of acquiring this wisdom through any identifiable experience, the
processing must take place in another intelligent agent: a beneficent spirit.
If the Strasbourg society were to take up this challenge, it would have to
propose some arena of mental processing that was neither the conscious mind
of the somnambulist nor the mind of a spirit. In other words, it would have to
posit mental acts that occur within human beings, but outside of and
unavailable to consciousness. Needless to say, thinking about magnetic
sleep had not yet developed to such a sophisticated stage. As we shall see, it
would be much later, when a new form of spiritism (American spiritualism
with its table-turning phenomena) met with a more advanced form of animal
magnetism (magnetic and hypnotic experiments with double consciousness)
that this mystery at the heart of magnetic sleep could be solved.18
In the meantime, other forms of magnetic spiritism were developing.
Among those whose work in this tradition stands out are Johann Jung-
Stilling, Justinus Kerner, Guillaume Billot, and Louis Cahagnet.
6 From Spiritualism to Psychotherapy

The receptive climate for the American-based spiritualistic movement was
prepared in part by the practice of mesmerism in the popular culture of the
day – and in the minds of spiritualists, mesmeric ideas were closely linked
with their philosophy.
Spiritualism produced all kinds of remarkable phenomena. One of the
most puzzling of these was variously called (in English) “table moving,”
18
See Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud, 236–265.
“table tipping,” and so on. It grew directly out of spiritualistic experimenta-

tion and became widely practiced from 1853 on. People would gather
around a table, usually in the family home, join hands, and invite spirits to
communicate. Typically knocks would sound in the table or the table would
rise and fall on one leg, producing a percussive sound. The knocks or blows
would be interpreted as alphabetic code and messages would be recorded
from them. These were seen as telegraphed communications from spirits of
the departed.
Along with such phenomena came attempts to explain their cause. If the
messages were intelligible, and those who participated had no conscious
awareness of making them up, from what did they derive? It gradually
became apparent that whether the knocks or sounds were produced by a
“fluid” or unconscious muscular movements or something else, the mediums
involved must somehow be the unwitting source of the intelligent commu-
nication. How could this be possible? Today it may seem obvious that
unconscious mental acts were involved, but at that time no such conception
had yet emerged. This kind of explanation requires that there can be non-
conscious mental activity concurrent with normal thinking. In the literature
of the time, this novel idea was hinted at but not quite attained, with one
exception: the anonymously written pamphlet Second Letter of Grosjean to his
Bishop (Seconde lettre de Grosjean à son évèque) written in 1855.19
The author speculated that a medium, because of “weakness of the will,”
can have her thoughts separate into two streams, one conscious and the other
hidden from awareness, each with a life of its own. He believed that this
second, nonconscious stream of thought was the author of the messages
produced in table-moving phenomena. Thirty years later, Pierre Janet
would use the ideas in this pamphlet in support of his belief that hysterics
have a subconscious mental life that is active at the same time as their normal
consciousness and affects them in their daily lives.20
This theory was crucially important for the development of modern
psychodynamic psychotherapy. Up to this point, the alternate consciousness
of magnetic sleep could be considered dormant when the person was awake,
and active during magnetic sleep. Now it had to be acknowledged that the
alternate consciousness was also active when the person was in the normal
state, although that activity was unknown and unavailable to waking
19
The author may be Paul Tascher.
20
The story of this advance in psychological thinking is discussed at length in Crabtree, From
Mesmer to Freud, 236–265. See also Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The
History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 358–364.
awareness. This new view of the human psyche was first clearly formulated
by Frederic Myers21 and pursued by Pierre Janet and eventually Sigmund
Freud.
7 Conclusion
Mesmer conceived of animal magnetism as a theory and method for physical
healing. Puységur’s psychological turn radically altered the evolution of
animal-magnetic ideas, drawing attention to the mental states of those
who, as a result of mesmeric treatment, experienced a kind of “magnetic
sleep,” a condition that could be induced at will and employed to enhance
the healing process. The result was a complex history with three emerging
streams: a physical healing stream, a parapsychological stream, and a psycho-
logical stream.22 From this point of view, the history of mesmerism is a
history of the exploration of a variety of human potentials. All three streams
produced phenomena not easily integrated into Western culture. To date the
most broadly accepted is the psychological stream, with its exploration of the
nonconscious mental dimensions of human experience. But it seems fair to
say that recognition of the full potential of what was begun by Mesmer and
Puységur is yet to come.
21
Frederic W. H. Myers, “Automatic Writing–II,” Proceedings of the Society for Psychical
Research, 3 (1885), 1–63; “Human Personality,” Fortnightly Review, 38 (1885), 637–655;
and “Introduction,” in E. Gurney, F. W. H. Myers, and F. Podmore, Phantasms of the Living,
2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1886), vol.1, xxxv–lxxi.
22
It would probably be appropriate to recognize a fourth: a philosophical stream. Animal
magnetism had a substantial influence on the thinking of a number of nineteenth-century
philosophers, notably, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Du Prel. See, for example,
Glenn Alexander Magee, “Hegel on the Paranormal: Altered States of Consciousness in the
Philosophy of Subjective Spirit,” Aries 8 (2008), 21–36.
IV
The Nineteenth Century

and Beyond
M
20
SPIRITUALISM
Cathy Gutierrez
1 Introduction
The religious movement known as Spiritualism was officially inaugurated in
1848 in Hydesville, New York, when two young sisters, Kate and Margaret
Fox, attempted to communicate with an apparent poltergeist in their home.
Using a laborious version of Morse code called “alphabet raps” (one for “a,”
two for “b,” and so forth), the girls were able to interact with their ghost and
question him about the circumstances of his death. Kate and Margaret’s
enterprising older sister, Leah Fish, began arranging public displays of this
new talent and soon discovered that she too had a gift for talking to the dead.
Spiritualism changed dramatically over the next fifty-plus years in terms of
the modes of communication employed, and it developed a loose theology of
earthly and heavenly progression. Nevertheless, the central point of its rituals
and literature remained the same: that the living could communicate with
those across the threshold of death.
The ability to talk to the residents of heaven functioned effectively as an
amateur form of grief counseling: the American Civil War and high infant
mortality rates sent the bereaved to séances in droves to learn the fates of their
loved ones. Almost without exception, these were happy scenarios with the
departed thriving in the afterlife amid relatives and in the company of angels.
Children grew up in heaven, completing the life cycles that had been severed
on earth. They went to school, grew physically in their spirit bodies, and
occasionally even got married in the afterlife. Heaven was a bustling and busy
place that was generally portrayed as made up of seven consecutive tiers.
Instead of being instantly perfected upon death, the residents of heaven all
grew in knowledge and spiritual refinement, advancing through the tiers of
heaven and relating the practices and ethics of the afterlife to their living
friends and family.
237
238 Ca t h y G u t i e r re z
Access to the dead not only gave the grieving assurances about the well-
being of their loved ones, it also provided the opportunity to consult the
finest minds of history on current topics. William Shakespeare, Benjamin
Franklin, Francis Bacon, and Emanuel Swedenborg were among those fre-
quently called on to give advice from beyond the grave. Domestic concerns
were usually tended to in the more personal space of a séance in one’s home,
whereas larger public affairs took place along the lines of the tent revivals that
had swept America earlier in the century. Held outdoors or in theaters and
auditoriums, these events were open to the public as well as the press and
could attract thousands in a single evening. The medium, who functioned as
a conduit between the worlds of the living and the dead, would usually enter
a trance and let the voice of a visiting spirit speak through her. Since mediums
were frequently women, the ability to expound on politics and philosophy
was a quiet revolution in culture at the time. As Ann Braude has noted in her
seminal work Radical Spirits, mediumship was a mixed blessing for women:
They were allowed unprecedented influence on the public, but only on the
condition that they were entirely passive and understood not even to be
present at all. Braude has argued that Spiritualism had a direct impact on
women speaking in public, and that the movement for women’s rights was
positively and directly influenced by this tradition.1
Many scholars have commented that communication with the dead is
hardly specific to the phenomenon of Spiritualism and that giving it a specific
date of origin (such as the year of the Fox sisters’ “rappings”) artificially
separates Spiritualism from a long history of related occurrences. This is
undoubtedly true, yet the date is a marker of the ability to self-identify as a
spiritualist – as a member of a movement that brought with it a host of new
connotations in addition to the core ritual of talking to the dead. While
spiritualists resisted the institutionalization of Spiritualism’s practices and
codification of its beliefs, there was an ethos that permeated the movement
and that believers found to be reflected in heaven as well. This ethos could be
characterized as unrelentingly progressive, hopeful concerning the future of
both science and morality, and most often politically liberal. Heaven served
as a cultural model, a place that was not perfect but was advanced in wisdom
and spirituality. Communications from those in heaven reflected the fondest
hopes of the living, and what the living envisioned in heaven was remarkable
for its time: Heaven was completely inclusive of all people regardless of race,
religion, or even individual behavior. The idea of hell, a judging God, and
1
Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).
S pi ri t u ali sm 239
the exclusive claims of Christianity to truth – or those of any religion – were

all banished.
The complete inclusivity of heaven marked a sea change in popular
thinking about difference and damnation. While most descriptions of heaven
did suggest that racial and ethnic others ended up on the lower rungs of
heaven, they were generally regarded as equal in spirit, but lacking in the
education that was the condition of heavenly progress. Some communica-
tions from the dead indicated that spirits continued to practice their various
religions in the afterlife, and that the landscape of heaven was dotted with
ethnic neighborhoods and temples erected to different faiths. The exclusive
truth claims of Christianity were roundly condemned by many mediums as
deeply misguided, ultimately leading people to fear the divine. Emma
Hardinge, one of the most respected mediums of her day, wryly commented
in a trance state that it was unfortunate that according to Christian dogma the
ancient Greeks, after having given us science, philosophy, and democracy,
were all consigned to hell. Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius, she believed, all
existed in heaven as especially wise men on a par with others who were
spiritually advanced.
Like all religious movements, Spiritualism developed at the confluence of
social, economic, and political events. America had recently experienced
what is often called the Second Great Awakening, a series of religious revivals
and innovations that changed the character of Protestantism and gave rise to
several new articulations of the sacred. The preachers during this epoch were
itinerant and often quite charismatic; they made significant changes to the
rhetorical style of American religions, introducing an emotional tone that
many thought was too informal for the pulpit. Rejecting their forebears’
belief in the predestined division of humanity into the saved and the damned,
these men sought to induce a dramatic conversion experience in all who
heard them. Salvation became universally possible, at least in theory, and the
individual became responsible for securing his or her own religious future.
This opening of heaven to all Christian believers undoubtedly set the stage
for Spiritualism and like-minded liberal denominations to declare an absolute
democracy of the dead. While more mainstream factions clung to ideas of
Christian exclusivity and the damnation of many, Spiritualists took the
egalitarian ethos of the time to its logical extreme: salvation was universally
necessary.
The first half of the century also saw the formation of an American middle
class and the concomitant changes to daily experience that it brought. The
shift from a farm or artisan economy, where the home was the locus of
economic activity, to work conducted outside of the household had a
profound impact on family structures. Many women in particular found

themselves in the unusual position of not being expected to toil for money.
Women began to fill their newfound leisure with religious pursuits that
quickly took on an overtly political cast. The age of volunteerism had
devotees to many causes, foremost temperance, abolition, and the Bible
Tract Society. Much energy was also expended on lesser-known causes,
many of which were attractive to spiritualists. These ranged from dress
reform for women to the treatment of prisoners and asylum inmates. The
Second Great Awakening laid the groundwork for women to participate in
the public sphere in the service usually of progressive causes.
The conception of heaven as inclusive both reflected and shaped moral
codes here on earth. While spiritualists were not unified on any front, in the
main they were defenders of progressive political causes such as abolition and
women’s rights. The equality of race and gender in the afterlife suggested that
we could work toward these conditions on earth, and the promise of a
heavenly future of equality provided some measure of hope for those who
did not get to experience it in life. Spiritualism imagined a democracy in the
afterlife where differences remained, but all spirits would advance through
education. Heaven reflected the greatest hopes of those on earth – the
continuation of individual lives after death and their ties to friends and family,
progress through scientific advancement and social reform, and the eventual
elimination of inequality.
2 Influences
In addition to the cultural atmosphere of the young republic, Spiritualism
was thoroughly indebted to a European intellectual legacy that linked it to
the Neoplatonic tradition and esoteric currents such as secret societies and
ritual magic. Foremost among these influences were the writings of the
Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). His visionary experi-
ences, reported in multiple volumes, described being repeatedly transported
to heaven and even other planets, where he was allowed to interact with
angels and the dead.
While Swedenborg remained a firm Christian (many of his books are
liberally stocked with biblical quotations, and he affirms the existence of
hell), the heaven that he described was a far cry from staid and traditional
descriptions of static perfection. What he found in his mystical journeys were
three heavens where the inhabitants were determined by the essential char-
acter they possessed while alive, and by whether their primary relationship to
the divine had been emotional, intellectual, or spiritual. The spirits of the
dead and the angels lived in vibrant societies, each with its own distinct
language and activities. The different ways of relating to the divine also
implicated different readings of Scripture, which Swedenborg believed had
multiple layers of possible meaning with the innermost interpretation bearing
no relationship to the actual words on the page.2
Spiritualists inherited from Swedenborg not only a many-tiered heaven
with constant activity but also two main elements that would affect their daily
lived experience. The first was Swedenborg’s ideas concerning memory: In
his writings, it is not a judging God who determines one’s destiny in heaven
or hell. Instead, the individual is drawn to one or the other based on memory.
On death, human beings discover that in addition to their “exterior” mem-
ory (the usual memory that is subject to mistakes and gaps), they also have an
“interior” memory that is a perfect recording of their life. This memory is
literally stripped off a person at death and watched like a film by the deceased
and by the angels. The unflinching evaluation of behavior that results from
this experience leads bad people to simply hurl themselves into hell; the
others ascend to the heaven to which they are drawn according to their
affinity with the sphere’s inhabitants. Later, when the Spiritualists had dis-
pensed with hell, Swedenborg’s theory of memory provided the answer to
the unsettling problem of how to deal with the presence of evil people in
heaven. Again, the dead are attracted to the correct sphere of heaven by
affinity, but to advance in heaven they must successfully deal with the
memory of having committed evil acts.
Swedenborg also believed that the spirits of the dead were married for
eternity and that adultery amounted to an alliance with falsehood and would
cause one to be condemned to hell. He declared that eternal union and even
sexual intercourse are the natural state for all beings in the afterlife including
angels. Allowances are made, however, for the unhappily paired on earth,
which Swedenborg recognizes as the majority of earthly marriages. At death,
everyone will get his or her true mate. Marriage on earth, while important, is
provisional. The spiritualists would largely affirm the eternity of romantic
love but would use it in pursuit of marriage reform and divorce law.
Heavenly couples served as a reminder that earthly arrangements were
frequently imperfect or worse, and that divine law demanded that one should
be free to search for true love.
The other indispensable influence on Spiritualism was the career of Franz
Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), the accidental and eponymous discoverer of
mesmerism. This is now generally thought of as a proto-hypnosis, but it came
2
For more information, see the essay “Swedenborg and Swedenborgianism” in this volume.
to serve as the paradigm for the trance state in spiritualist mediumship. One of
Mesmer’s students, the Marquis de Puységur, discovered that a boy he was
treating would fall on occasion into an altered state of consciousness.
Moreover, in this second state he was calmer, wiser, and more moral than
he was in his usual waking state. As in the case of sleepwalkers, this second self
knew all about the waking self, but this knowledge was unidirectional – that
is, the waking self was unaware of the second self. Puységur began cultivating
this state in all his patients and consulted them about their own medical needs
while they were in a trance. Puységur reported some paranormal activity, but
this was not his main interest. The artificially induced trance, however, was a
natural fit for the mystically inclined. The spiritualists embraced this trance
state as the conduit to the afterlife, a higher self that had access to the more
ethereal existence of the spirit plane.3
Both Swedenborg and Mesmer were men poised between a quasi-mystical,
Renaissance vision of the cosmos, in which the divine was infused throughout
the universe, and the Enlightenment’s love of empiricism. With their strong
Neoplatonic influences and their hopes for the technology of the future,
spiritualists, too, were enamored with both men and therefore with both
worlds.
3 Politics
Most but certainly not all spiritualists believed in and often worked toward
the progressive politics suggested by contact with heaven. Universal salvation
implied that all of humanity was equal in the eyes of the divine or could
become so with better education and opportunities. Spiritualists frequently
attributed unethical behavior to a climate of misfortune brought about by
poverty and ignorance. Curing the causes of social ills would cure the ills
themselves, and so the category of sin was replaced by a concept of social
injustice. Many spiritualists such as Amy and Isaac Post were ardent aboli-
tionists who worked for the Underground Railroad, and with their fellow
radical Quakers hosted speakers such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner
Truth (who became a spiritualist herself later in life). Some African
Americans found a consonance between Spiritualism and their own tradi-
tional religions and some became mediums. The most famous is the prolific
author Paschal Beverly Randolph, who had a successful career as a medium
and racial activist before he left the mainstream spiritualists for a more radical
branch of esotericism.
3
For more information, see the essay “Mesmer and Animal Magnetism” in this volume.
Issues that affected women were also popular among spiritualists, and
marriage reform was central to them. As the institution of marriage within
the middle class became less economically based, romantic love came to the
fore as the bond between men and women. Intimacy and emotion became
the foundation of marriage, and spiritualists further proposed that romantic
alliances might be eternal. Called “spiritual affinity,” this Swedenborg-
inspired theory posited that each individual has a predetermined soul mate,
and some writings about heaven even required the pair to be together in
order to advance. This emphasis on the importance of romantic love brought
many unhappy marriages into sharp focus, and it was apparent to many
spiritualists that the laws regarding divorce, child custody, and finances
often kept women and children in undesirable and even dangerous
circumstances.
In the mind of the public, marriage reform bled easily into the free love
movement and Spiritualism came to be associated with this unpopular fringe.
Victoria Woodhull, an extraordinary character who was the first woman to
run for president of the United States, was head of the Spiritualist Association
as well as the most outspoken and infamous advocate of free love. Easily
subject to being represented as promoting promiscuity, the free love move-
ment in reality embraced a wide variety of marriage reforms and even
endorsed celibacy as a legitimate choice. Woodhull’s message was that
women stayed in loveless marriages because of money and that this was
tantamount to socially sanctioned prostitution. The church and the state
were complicit in this sham, and love needed to be freed from the legal
system in order to thrive. While Spiritualism was clearly damaged by its
association with free love, and most adherents would not have endorsed
extreme views about romance, the free love advocates were clearly attracted
to Spiritualism’s ethos of progress and egalitarianism.
4 Science
Since Spiritualism retained a Renaissance worldview in which the divine
filled the cosmos rather than ruled over it, nature and the material world were
not devalued as base or corrupting. Spiritualists truly wanted science to work
with religion rather than to be at odds with it: Science would uncover natural
truths that would reaffirm the existence of heaven and significantly improve
the earth for the living. The Fox sisters’ poltergeist rappings began as an
amateur imitation of the telegraph, and the ability to instantly communicate
across vast space remained the template for communications with those in
heaven. Concepts such as magnetism (à la Mesmer) and electricity were
employed often in spiritualist writings, showing a fascination with science

even when the understanding of it was far from clear. The idea of the human
body as the conduit between worlds was predicated on vague notions of
electrical impulses – women, thought to be negatively charged, were attrac-
tive to the positively charged heavens.
Spiritualists created machines to aid communication with heaven and to
lend credence to their claims that this effort was empirically true and scien-
tifically verifiable. The planchette, still commonly used in Ouija boards, was
a simple device to promote communication with the spirits. Similar but
significantly more elaborate machines were built that used treadles and
wheels with alphabets so that the spirits could spin out words. Many of
these machines were designed to eliminate the margin of human error still
present with a medium. Robert Hare, a professor of chemistry at the
University of Pennsylvania and a famous early convert, was at the forefront
of spiritualists who built machines to talk to the dead.
But the dead also sent machines to the living to improve their condi-
tions on earth and to hasten progress. Spirits such as Benjamin Franklin
and Antoine Lavoisier reportedly sent instructions for new machines
designed to improve the lot of the living. Some of these involved
everyday items such as sewing machines and canning devices. Others
attempted to control the weather or were political in purpose, such as the
ultimate war machine that would promote peace because no one would
dare oppose it. Still others, such as the New Motor built in 1853 by the
Reverend John Murray Spear in High Rock, Massachusetts, were sent by
the spirit world for new but unspecified purposes: At 160 feet tall and
built at a cost of two thousand dollars, this machine was supposed to be
nothing short of a mechanical messiah – spiritual knowledge come to
earth in the form of technology.
As the century wore on, further forms of technology, such as photogra-
phy, contributed to the spiritualists’ hopes that progress would lead even-
tually to heaven. The apparent objectivity provided by the camera made the
advent of ghost photographs extremely convincing. The dead were thought
to exist just outside of the normal capacity for eyesight but were able to be
captured in photographs. Despite the highly publicized trial of William
Mumler for fraud in 1869 – when P. T. Barnum himself showed the judge
how ghost photographs could be faked – spiritualists remained convinced of
the veracity of this new medium. Mumler was acquitted, “spirit sittings”
were popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and such high-profile believers as
Mary Todd Lincoln contributed to the conviction that the camera provided a
new proof of spiritualist claims.
Influenced from the outset by Mesmer’s medical theories as well as others

(e.g., homeopathy), spiritualists embraced the science of medicine, serializing
new books in their weekly papers and finding adherents among practitioners.
Andrew Jackson Davis, a mesmeric trance healer who garnered the move-
ment untold popularity when he supported the Fox sisters, worked as a
country doctor. Along with other spiritual healers, he maintained that
physical moderation and spiritual development were the keystones to health.
The body could be cast into illness out of ignorance and fear – and it could be
healed by knowledge, rather than invasive procedures or dubious drugs.
Never far from the concept of universal magnetism that tied all of the cosmos
together, spiritualists refused to separate the soul from the body, arguing that
the health of the latter required knowledge of the former.
Experimenting with trance states, multiple voices from a single source, and
unorthodox roles for women, Spiritualism seemed destined to run afoul of
nascent psychology. Harper’s Weekly called for the institutionalization of
spiritualists because the movement “created lunatics weekly.” Asylums,
already swelled to bursting in America, England, and France, began commit-
ting people – women in particular – for the diagnosis of “monomania,” a
now-obsolete label used to describe someone who was sane in all respects
except one. These cases almost always involved religious disagreement or
experimentation, especially by women. Spiritualists, Shakers, and free thin-
kers of all sorts were institutionalized by their husbands or other family
members in an era when the legal system provided almost no rights for
those declared insane. Their writings from the asylum make it apparent
that the vast majority of monomaniacs were inconvenient wives caught in
a system that simply ignored them. Legal reforms for declared lunatics in
England and America significantly improved the conditions of asylums and
the rights of those within them, and monomania disappeared as a psychiatric
category. Schizophrenia, the nineteenth-century precursor to dissociative
disorder, was another common diagnosis for spiritualists.
Mediumship, in particular the capacity of mediums to seemingly manifest
multiple identities, raised questions about the nature of consciousness and
attracted the attention of psychological theorists. Several iterations of what is
now generally called the unconscious were proposed in France, Austria, and
England, with second or sometimes even multiple selves being accounted for
as psychological rather than spiritual phenomena. In 1843, British surgeon
James Braid had made hypnotism therapeutically respectable by divorcing
the trance state from any associations with Mesmer and his ideas about animal
magnetism. Sympathetic investigators to Spiritualism’s claims such as
William James and Frederic Myers generally associated themselves with the
more intellectually rigorous London-based Society for Psychical Research

rather than with run-of-the-mill believers in Spiritualism. While Spiritualism
clearly contributed to discussions about the nature of the self and the
distinction between religion and pathology, strict materialists such as
Sigmund Freud would win the debate for the twentieth century, only to
be eclipsed further in the twenty-first with the decline of classical therapy and
its replacement by psychoactive drugs. The spiritualists anticipated this
usurpation of their claims and fought to interpret altered states as inherently
religious and morally superior. But the medicalization of mediumship, com-
bined with economic and cultural trends, conspired to erode the progressive
optimism of Spiritualism’s heyday.
5 Conclusion
Arthur Versluis has characterized Spiritualism as the “exoteric church” of the
esoteric tradition. Spiritualism was more mainstream and accessible than
secret societies or initiatory groups that practiced ritual magic, but it never-
theless served as an efficient and faithful handmaiden of occult lore. Uniting
democratic ideals of egalitarianism with Neoplatonic visions of a ladder of
ascent, Spiritualism provided a welcoming and palatable version of esoteric
ideals that dismantled Christian damnation and made education the universal
goal. Replete with a Renaissance view of nature as infused with the divine
and embracing science as a companion to religion, Spiritualism offered an
esoteric cosmos stripped of its secrecy.
The overlap between Spiritualism and stricter versions of esotericism may
be seen in some of the movements that Spiritualism directly influenced.
Theosophy, as expounded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, spun off from
standard Spiritualism, with Blavatsky claiming that that Spiritualism’s “voices
of the dead” were actually elemental spirits or “shells” of the dead, a fading
form of consciousness no longer tied to the deceased. Blavatsky became a
defector from Spiritualism after many years as a successful medium – not
because she thought Spiritualism’s claims were mistaken but rather because
she thought them too modest.
The practice of talking to the dead took on an increasingly theatrical cast
over time, and the demands to produce materials and even spirits from the
realm of heaven invited charlatans into spiritualist circles. Harry Houdini
created contemporary stage magic specifically to debunk the claims of
sensational mediums, producing tricks that replicated the antics of séances
and blurring the boundaries of what was empirically verifiable. The produc-
tion of “ectoplasm,” a physical substance allegedly from the spirit world and
unknown on earth, made the fantastic character of some spiritualist sittings

even more pronounced. The movement eventually lost its cohesive theolo-
gical content and became more individualistic, frequently functioning more
as entertainment than as a means to construct a meaningful view of the world.
Current religious movements that are indebted to Spiritualism include the
New Age, which combines universalism with religious teachings from Asia,
particularly reincarnation and karma. Psychics continue to connect the living
to their deceased loved ones and often employ new technologies such as
digital photography and the Internet to aid them in this endeavor. Popular
culture is rife with fictional depictions of mediums who can talk to the dead
or other supernaturally gifted people who can communicate with angels or
demons. Implicit in these portrayals is a universal heaven marked by
increased knowledge and the ongoing concern of the dead with the affairs
of the living. The ethics of inclusion that characterizes so much of current
society and ecumenical discourse is the rightful heir of Spiritualism, in which
universal progress rather than salvation for the few was believed to govern the
universe.
21
H.P. BLAVATSKY AND THEOSOPHY
Michael Gomes
1 Introduction
With the advent of H. P. Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society in 1875, esoteric
groups, long limited by coded language and secrecy, moved to what sociol-
ogist Edward Tiryakian has termed “the margin of the visible.”1 Through the
work of the Theosophical Society, esotericist ideas found an easy conduit
into mainstream society. While membership always remained small, its net-
work of lodges served as the means to disseminate its philosophy. This has
been a constant throughout modern Theosophy’s existence: the primacy of
getting the message out not only through lectures and classes, but also by its
aggressive publishing program of books, magazines, pamphlets, and leaflets,
often distributed free in the tens of thousands. Although Theosophy’s initial
impetus was for the recovery of an ancient wisdom tradition, it quickly
redefined itself as a panacea for society’s social and moral ills. Through its
message of reincarnation and karma – or hope and responsibility, as Blavatsky
defined it – the movement offered the opportunity of taking control of one’s
destiny and making a change in the world.
2 Blavatsky
Modern Theosophy’s leading theorist was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, often
referred to as Madame Blavatsky, or by her initials, H. P. B.2 Born on August
12, 1831, in Ekaterinoslav in Southern Russia (now Dnipropetrovsk in the
Ukraine), she was named after her mother, a novelist, and her grandmother,
1
Edward Tiryakian, On the Margin of the Visible: Sociology, the Esoteric and the Occult (New York:
John Wiley, 1974), 274.
2
In spite of all the writing about her, no satisfactory biography exists. James A. Santucci’s entry
on her in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill,
2005), 1:177–185, presents a useful introduction to her career.
248
H. P . Bla va t sk y a n d Th e o so p h y 249
the Princess Helena Dolgorouky. Her childhood was a series of upheavals,

moving from one place to another when her father, Captain Peter von Hahn,
a cavalry officer, was transferred. After the death of her mother in 1842, she
was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in Saratov, where her
grandfather, Andrey Fadeyev, was governor of the province. At the age of
seventeen, she surprised everyone by marrying Nikifor Blavatsky, lieutenant
governor of the province of Erivan, a man twice her age. After a few months,
she abandoned him and left for what would become a life of travel. She
reappeared in Russia at the end of 1859, and after a few years she left again
until 1872.
According to some accounts, those “veiled years” were spent traveling
through Europe with the opera singer Agardi Metrovich, supporting herself
by her considerable skills as a pianist. There was also rumor of an illegitimate
child. Her own narrative has her meeting her teacher, an Indian who had
come with the Nepal delegation to the 1851 Great Exhibition at London’s
Crystal Palace, on her twentieth birthday, and leaving for North India to join
him there. She claims to have traveled as far as Tashi-lhunpo in Tibet, the
monastery town where the Panchen Lama resided. In the 1860s, she was
again in India, going through Kashmir to Leh in Ladakh and beyond. There
is scant evidence for either account, other than the statement of Major
General Charles Murray about finding Blavatsky on the Sikkim border in
“1854 or ’55” when he was stationed there.3
How are we to assess Blavatsky’s tale of pilgrimage to the wise men of the
East? Subsequent European travelers through the Himalayas have born
witness to the willingness of learned lamas to take on Western students, but
her teachers were not lamas or monks, although there is a strong regard for
the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism in their teaching. She credits
much of the inspiration for her writings to them, and the bond between
teacher and pupil, a form of psychic transmission, as the means of accessing
what she wrote about. Whatever the source, some change or transformation
took place in her life during these years.
In 1872, she started the Société Spirite in Cairo, Egypt, for the investiga-
tion of spiritualist phenomena that had become so popular, but she soon
disbanded the group when the medium they hired was found to be cheating.
On the eve of her forty-second birthday, she arrived in New York from Paris
in the summer of 1873. A year later, she applied for U.S. citizenship, which
3
H. S. Olcott, “Traces of H.P.B.” The Theosophist 14 (1893): 429–431. Olcott’s transcription
of Murray’s account, marked “correct” by Murray, at the back of his diary for 1893, is printed
in The Theosophist, December 1949, 190. Murray’s Cadet Papers at the India Office Library in
London show that he was stationed in the area at that time.
250 M i c h ael G o m e s
was granted in 1878. Blavatsky came to public attention through a series of

articles written by Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907), a New York lawyer who
had been an investigator for the U.S. War Department and was part of the
government’s investigation of President Lincoln’s assassination.4 Fascinated
by news of a family of Vermont farmers who were mediums, Olcott visited
them and his reports were published in the New York Sun and New York Daily
Graphic.
Olcott introduced Blavatsky to his readers in the November 27, 1874,
Daily Graphic, and their acquaintance became a lifelong friendship. She
joined him in Philadelphia at the end of 1874 to investigate another case of
mediumship; while there, she married an Armenian trader from Russian
Georgia. The marriage lasted only a few months, and she returned to New
York without him. Blavatsky’s emergence among the spiritualists and
Olcott’s enthusiastic remarks in the book version of his articles gained her
lasting identification as a medium. Blavatsky had displayed psychic abilities in
her youth. Given to fits of somnambulism, she tells of writing messages from
what was believed to be the spirit of an old lady and her son, who had
committed suicide, giving intricate details of their lives. On investigation it
was found that the woman was still alive, as was her son. This experience
contributed to her skepticism about the psychic nature of such communica-
tions, and to a lifelong interest in abnormal psychology.
After less than a year among American spiritualists, Blavatsky began to
develop a growing antipathy to the movement. Olcott’s failure to get the
American scientific community interested in studying Spiritualism led him to
suggest the formation of a society that would investigate these hidden
mysteries of nature and the powers latent in the individual. On September
7, 1875, at a gathering in Blavatsky’s rooms in New York to hear George
Henry Felt discourse on the lost canon of proportion of the ancients, Olcott
made the motion for such an organization. Those interested met the next
day, and by October the by-laws for its democratic structure of elected
officers and the name “Theosophical Society” were decided on. On
November 17, Olcott, who was elected president, delivered his inaugural
address at Madison Avenue’s Mott Memorial Hall, where the society had
rented rooms. Blavatsky, who was in the audience, had been elected corre-
sponding secretary, an office abolished after her death. The Minute Book of
the Theosophical Society shows a continued attempt to try and verify
4
Olcott’s contribution is assessed in Michael Gomes, “Olcott, Henry Steel,” Dictionary of
Gnosis and Western Esotericism, 2:894–895; Steven Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian
Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), and Gananath
Obeyesekere’s review of Prothero’s book in The Journal of Buddhist Ethics 4 (1997).
psychic phenomena under test procedures. The lack of success caused atten-
dance to dwindle until by the end of 1876 the society gave up holding
meetings.
Blavatsky’s first book, Isis Unveiled: A Master-key to the Mysteries of Ancient
and Modern Science and Theology (1877), stressed the work of latent powers in
the individual and in nature as the real source of spiritualist phenomena. The
work further accelerated her loss of support among spiritualists. At the end of
1878, Olcott and Blavatsky went to India to study its philosophy first hand
with the reformist Swami Dayananda Saraswati (1824–1883). After corre-
sponding with the head of the Bombay branch of his organization, the Arya
Samaj, the two groups briefly merged. However, when Olcott and Blavatsky
publicly converted to Buddhism on a tour of Ceylon in 1880, Dayananda
denounced their eclectic approach. This did not seem to hinder the growth
of the Theosophical Society, which, by 1885, had developed a network of
ninety-five branches throughout India and Ceylon and had purchased a
permanent headquarters on the banks of the Adyar River in Madras.
The society drew a wide array of Indian scholars, activists, and sympathetic
Anglo-Indians, such as A. P. Sinnett (1840–1921), editor of the Pioneer
newspaper, and A. O. Hume (1829–1912), former secretary to the
Government of India. Hume eventually left the Theosophical Society to
form the Indian National Congress, which would be instrumental in gaining
India’s independence. Sinnett remained a lifelong member, writing two of
the most widely read books of nineteenth-century Theosophy, The Occult
World (1881) and Esoteric Buddhism (1883), based on his correspondence with
Blavatsky’s Indian teachers. Olcott’s work in Ceylon was no less successful.
He traveled the island raising funds for Buddhist schools, and in 1884 he was
sent by the islanders to present their grievances to the Home Office in
London. During the Theosophists’ visit to Europe, news came that two
recently dismissed workers from the Adyar headquarters had sold some letters
purporting to be from Blavatsky giving them instructions for creating her
phenomena.5
The appearance of the correspondence in the Madras Christian College
Magazine drew the attention of the newly formed Society for Psychical
Research (SPR), which had set up a committee to gather evidence for
Theosophists’ accounts of astral travel, the miraculous appearance of letters
from Blavatsky’s Indian teachers (the Mahatmas, or Masters), and her mate-
rialization of various items. A member of the committee, Richard Hodgson,
5
An examination of the events set in motion by Emma and Alexis Coulomb is in Michael
Gomes, The Coulomb Case (Fullerton, CA: Theosophical History Occasional Papers, 2005).
was sent to India to investigate further. Hodgson’s report was damning:

Blavatsky’s phenomena, he claimed, were the work of accomplices; the
letters from the Mahatmas were written by her in an assumed handwriting.
In looking for a motive for her actions, he ruled out financial gain or “a
morbid yearning for notoriety,” settling instead on the theory that her
championing of ancient traditions was a diversion for her real work as a
Russian spy.6 The SPR committee endorsed most of Hodgson’s conclusions,
ending its report with the oft-cited statement: “We regard her neither as the
mouthpiece of hidden seers, nor as a mere vulgar adventuress; we think that
she has achieved a title to permanent remembrance as one of the most
accomplished, ingenious, and interesting imposters in history.”7
The publication of this report did little to dampen public interest in
Theosophy, and its years of growth in the West were still ahead. It did
bring an end to the prominence of the Masters and of psychic phenomena
in the Theosophical Society and moved it toward a greater focus on the
comparative study of the esoteric aspects of philosophy, religion, and science,
both Eastern and Western. Blavatsky had wanted to sue the SPR for libel, but
the Society’s leading members were against doing so.
Blavatsky subsequently resigned her position as corresponding secretary
due to illness and left for Europe, where she eventually settled in the small
German town of Würzburg. There she turned her attention to writing her
major work, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and
Philosophy. More than fifteen hundred pages in print when the two volumes
were published in 1888, it aimed at nothing less than chronicling the spiritual,
mental, and physical history of humanity and the universe. She resettled in
London in the spring of 1887 and drew around her a group of bright young
people, including some of the first women college graduates in England, the
pioneer of gnostic studies, G. R. S. Mead; the social reformer, Annie Besant;
and the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats.
In 1888, Blavatsky started her own school as an Esoteric Section of the
Theosophical Society, which she now called “a dead failure,” citing the
authority of the Mahatmas, who referred to it as a “soulless corpse.”8 This led
6
Richard Hodgson, “Account of Personal Investigations in India, and Discussion of the
Authorship of the ‘Koot Hoomi’ Letters,” SPR Proceedings 3 (1885), 317. Theosophists, of
course, disagreed.
7
“Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate Phenomena Connected with the
Theosophical Society,” SPR Proceedings 3 (1885), 207. Over the years the Society for Psychical
Research has increasingly distanced itself from this report, pointing out, as stated in their
Proceedings, that the opinions given represent the views of their authors and not the society.
8
H. P. Blavatsky, “Preliminary Memorandum of the Esoteric Section,” in Blavatsky Collected
Writings [BCW] (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1966–1985), 12:489; Letters
her into conflict with Olcott, who saw this as a sectarian move threatening
the neutrality of the Theosophical Society. The group became an indepen-
dent entity, the Eastern School of Theosophy, studying Blavatsky’s corre-
spondences of color, number, and sound in relation to her sevenfold system
in the microcosm and the macrocosm. But after a year she ceased issuing
instructions and turned her attention to the formation of an Inner Group –
six men and six women – chosen by her to receive oral instruction. This
group seems to have had its problems too. Three months before her death,
Blavatsky warned that meetings might cease because of a lack of harmony
among participants, a problem in the outer society that she had tried to
remedy by teaching select students.9
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky died on May 8, 1891, from the effects of the
influenza epidemic that was spreading through London. Her death was world
news, receiving extensive coverage in the New York and London papers,
and throughout India. Among those who attended her cremation was a
young Indian law student, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who had been encouraged
by two of her pupils to study the Bhagavad Gita, a text that would become the
basis of his later philosophy.
3 Central Concepts of Theosophy

Blavatsky’s enduring relevance in the field of esotericism lies in her massive
literary output. She started two journals, and her magazine and newspaper
pieces are estimated to be close to a thousand. Combined, Isis Unveiled and
The Secret Doctrine run more than twenty-eight hundred pages. She produced
two other books: The Key to Theosophy (1889) and The Voice of the Silence
(1889). The former was a manual in question-and-answer form outlining the
tenets of Theosophy, especially karma, reincarnation, postmortem states, and
Blavatsky’s distinctive sevenfold classification of the individual. The latter
was a small book based on precepts used by the esoteric school she had come
in contact with.10 It delineated the process of spiritual growth, mixing Hindu
and Buddhist concepts, and stressing the mastering of seven pāramitās, or
virtues, for spiritual success. Her interpretation of the pāramitās is reminiscent
of Shantideva’s treatment in his eighth-century text, the Bodhicharyāvatara, a
from the Masters of the Wisdom, First Series, compiled by C. Jinarajadasa (Adyar: Theosophical
Publishing House, 1973), 101.
9
The Inner Group Teachings of H.P. Blavatsky, compiled and annotated by Henk J.
Spierenburg, 2nd ed. (San Diego: Point Loma Press, 1995), 74–75.
10
Both the Ninth Panchen and the Fourteenth Dalai Lamas have written messages for editions
of The Voice of the Silence.
Buddhist work not then translated. At the time of her death, she was
compiling a massive dictionary of esotericism, which was published post-
humously as The Theosophical Glossary (1892).
Unlike previous works arguing for the existence of an ancient esoteric
tradition buried under myth and symbol, Isis Unveiled purports to provide the
proof for this claim: the survival of its adepts and schools in the present day.
Isis begins with the words: “The work now submitted to public judgment is
the fruit of a somewhat intimate acquaintance with Eastern adepts and study
of their science.”11 It is a practitioner’s guide effectively defining the tradi-
tion. Platonism, Neoplatonism, Paracelsism, mesmerism, Eliphas Lévi’s
Astral Light, the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, the
incarnations of Vishnu, and the laws of Manu are just some of the subjects
covered.
Central to Blavatsky’s position is the belief that
Esoteric philosophers held that everything in nature is but a materialization
of spirit. The Eternal First Cause is latent spirit, they said, and matter from
the beginning. . . . With the first idea, which emanated from the double-
sexed and hitherto inactive Deity, the first motion was communicated to
the whole universe, and the electric thrill was instantaneously felt through-
out the boundless space. Spirit begat force, and force matter; and thus the
latent deity manifested itself as a creative energy.12
The nature of the creative impulse is revealed through the idea of cycles, and
the first chapter of the book introduces the vast cycles of time, or yugas. Their
effects in human history are shown by the rise and decline of societies and
cultures. Since God is “the universal mind diffused through all things,”13 the
world is seen as a series of spiritual hierarchies, often no more than aspects of
impersonal divine force acting in accordance with divine will.
In The Secret Doctrine, the creative process is examined in more detail than
in Isis. “The Eternal Parent,” akin to the Parabrahman of Indian philosophy
and Ein-Sof in the Kabbalah, reveals itself through periods of activity and
rest. The manifested world is a radiation of this Unknown Cause and is
withdrawn back into itself at the end of the cycle. The forms of manifestation
are worked out through a series of hierarchies from divine to elemental.
Humanity is seen as the crown of creation in this scheme. The Monad, the
divine spark, after passing through mineral, vegetable, and animal stages,
comes to full self-consciousness in the human, the fourth stage in a sevenfold
11
H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled (New York, 1877), 1:v.
12
Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1:428.
13
Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1:289.
round of development. Present humanity is the fifth human race to inhabit

this planet; the previous ones ranged from ethereal unconscious forms to the
giants of Lemuria, a continent that existed from India to the South Pacific,
and Atlantis, whose Atlantean portion sank thousands of years ago. Blavatsky
claimed that a new sixth race, which will develop a sixth sense, will slowly
begin to emerge in America.
Many of the concepts in The Secret Doctrine had been put forth in the
correspondence later published as The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett. The
letters, written over a six-year period, from 1880 to 1885, were from
Blavatsky’s Indian teachers, Morya and Koot Hoomi. The majority of the
letters are by Koot Hoomi, a Kashmiri Brahmin who is said to have been
educated in Europe, and his writing shows a familiarity with nineteenth-
century English science and literature. Blavatsky’s Mahatmas possess attri-
butes different from those attributed to them by twentieth-century devotees.
As she describes them, they are human beings whose lifespan rarely exceeds a
hundred years. The bureaucratic structure of an Inner Government of the
World prevalent in the writings of Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, and
Alice Bailey, is not found in Blavatsky’s work. The most she reveals is that
“there is beyond the Himalayas a nucleus of Adepts of various nationalities,”
and that some of them “remain unknown in their true character even to the
average lamas.”14 The adepts are adepts by virtue of the sanctity of their lives
and devotion to the welfare of humanity.
The authorship of the letters is usually attributed to Blavatsky. In fact,
Richard Hodgson devoted the greater part of his report to an attempt to
prove precisely this. William and Harold Hare’s 1936 Who Wrote the Mahatma
Letters, a book-length treatment of the matter, simply recycled Hodgson’s
conclusions. More recently, the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
published the most extensive examination of the entire correspondence to
date – a larger selection than had been available to Hodgson – prepared by the
noted British handwriting expert Vernon Harrison. His conclusion:
Blavatsky was not the writer.15 K. Paul Johnson in The Masters Revealed
(1994) has suggested that the Mahatmas were in fact Ranbir Singh,
Maharajah of Kashmir, and Thakar Singh Sandhanwalia, cousin of the
deposed Maharajah Dalip Singh, both Sikh insurrectionists plotting against
British rule. However, correspondence from the Mahatmas continued after
the deaths of these two men. Whatever their origin, the Mahatma letters
14
Blavatsky to Franz Hartmann, 2 April 1886, The Theosophical Quarterly 23 (April 1926), 324.
15
Harrison’s report in the April 1986 SPR Journal is reprinted with a detailed analysis of the
script and color plates of the letters in his H. P. Blavatsky and the S.P.R. (Pasadena, CA:
Theosophical University Press, 1997).
remain a major source for understanding the fundamentals of modern

Theosophy, and the complex figure that is H. P. Blavatsky.
One of the main ideas to emerge in the Mahatma letters is the sevenfold
classification of the individual: physical body, astral double, vitality, desire,
mind, spiritual intuition, and Ātma, the divine spark.16 At death, only the
higher principles survive, constituting the enduring individuality, while the
discarded personality dissipates. Between death and rebirth is the intermedi-
ate state of Devachan, a blissful period absorbing the best of the past life. The
regulator of human experience is karma, which is constantly being created by
the personality. The spiritual life is put forth as the means of escape from the
round of birth and death.
Blavatsky’s claims regarding Buddhist esotericism were dismissed by one
of the leading Orientalists of her time, F. Max Müller, editor of The Sacred
Books of the East. His opinion represented the prevailing notions of the day,
which viewed the Theravada Buddhism of Ceylon and the Pali texts as the
original form of Buddhism, and everything else a corruption. Now that
Tibetan Buddhism has been better studied, however, the idea of esoteric
Buddhism is accepted and the tradition of wonder-working adepts, the
Mahāsiddhas, is acknowledged.
Far more serious is the charge of plagiarism raised by Blavatsky’s long-time
critic, William Emmette Coleman. A fervent spiritualist, Coleman made a
career of attacking Blavatsky and is remembered only for his railings against
her. Coleman claimed that the twenty-one hundred quotations in Isis
Unveiled were derived without acknowledgment from one hundred books.17
The books he cites were some of the main sources available on the study of
myth and symbol at the time. Some – such as S. F. Dunlap’s books, which
Coleman says supplied Blavatsky with the majority of her material – were
extensive collections culled from the works of other writers. Ironically, the
same charge had been brought against Coleman himself by another writer,
H. W. Burr, who complained that he had passed off translations used by Burr
as his own.18
The charge of plagiarism against Blavatsky remains undecided because of
the difficulty in proving Coleman’s claims, especially since the titles he lists
are the ones she credits most often in her books. Nor is his accusation of the
16
Blavatsky refined the concept in a later enumeration given to her esoteric students: aura,
pattern body, desire, lower mind, higher mind, intuition, and prana.
17
William Coleman, “The Sources of Madame Blavatsky’s Writings,” in Vsevolod Solovyov’s
A Modern Priestess of Isis, trans. Walter Leaf (London, 1895; facsimile reprint New York:
Arno Press, 1976).
18
H. W. Burr, Plagiarism (Washington, DC, 1881).
wholesale copying of passages as clear-cut as he would like the reader to

believe, since anything Blavatsky mined from the sources given was often
improved or added to. Blavatsky’s last written piece, penned less than two
weeks before her death, was in response to Coleman’s charges published in a
San Francisco spiritualist journal. Acknowledging many defects in her books
due to her inexperience as a writer, she cited the quote from Montaigne she
had used in The Secret Doctrine: “I have here made only a nosegay of culled
flowers, and have brought nothing of my own but the string that ties them,”
adding, “is anyone of my helpers prepared to say that I have not paid full price
for the string?”19
In spite of her critics, Blavatsky’s literary influence during the formative
years of the modern Theosophical movement vastly exceeded that of any
other author. In the decade between Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, A.
P. Sinnett’s The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism were the main source of
Theosophical ideas. Issued in America by the respected Boston firm of
Houghton and Mifflin – publishers of Emerson and Thoreau – Sinnett’s
books received wide circulation. Franz Hartmann contributed a number of
books on Rosicrucians, Hermeticism, and Paracelsus. Mabel Collins’s little
book, Light on the Path (1884), a guide for spiritual practice, was reprinted
countless times. A minor fiction writer, Collins (1851–1927) produced what
must be one of the earliest depictions of the trials awaiting a woman on the
path, The Blossom and the Fruit (1888). Its tone so scandalized Blavatsky that
she stepped in and rewrote the ending. The book became required reading
for members of Aleister Crowley’s occult group, the A∴A∴.
4 The Influence of Blavatsky and Theosophy

Often derided and dismissed, Blavatsky nevertheless had an impact that was
far-reaching. The first woman with such a presence in a male-dominated
field, she opened the way for women as no one else before. Denied the right
to vote by society at large, in the Theosophical Society women were allowed
to vote and be elected to office. And women would run it after Blavatsky’s
death: Annie Besant (1847–1933) as president after the death of Olcott, and
Katherine Tingley (1847–1929) as head of W. Q. Judge’s Theosophical
Society in America.
After Blavatsky’s death, members including Annie Besant, C. W.
Leadbeater, and Alice Bailey took a less aggressive stance against
Spiritualism and the churches, and they began integrating both. This caused
19
H. P. Blavatsky, “My Books,” Lucifer, May 1891, BCW 13:202.
alarm among some, and a “Back to Blavatsky” movement developed in the

twentieth century stressing a return to the study of her writings. Others such
as Rudolf Steiner, Anna Kingsford, and Dion Fortune would leave
Theosophical terminology behind and form their own groups.20 Through
the writings of Alexandra David-Neel and W. Y. Evans-Wentz, members
inspired by Blavatsky’s narrative, Tibetan Buddhism would further attract the
attention of the West, while Christmas Humphreys and Ernest Wood, with
their popular Penguin paperbacks of the 1950s, helped make Buddhism and
yoga part of Western culture.
While Blavatsky is often credited with bringing Eastern ideas into the
stream of Western esotericism, it was not an undigested assimilation of Hindu
and Buddhist concepts. The philosophical positions of those schools were
often adapted to the already existing concerns of the Western tradition. This
in turn affected the acceptance of these beliefs when the first Hindu and
Buddhist practitioners came West. Equally important is the dramatic shift
Blavatsky brought about in Western esotericism, previously a textual study
abetted by ritual work. Blavatsky’s development of a psychology of the mind
and reference to Eastern techniques allowed for an interiorization of practice.
Meditation, visualization, and the exaltation of consciousness as means to
access hidden wisdom have become features of modern esotericism. Nor can
one ignore Blavatsky’s pioneering work in bringing Western esotericism to
India. Through her writings, Indians became aware of the Kabbalah and
Hermeticism – quite an achievement considering that, as Wilhelm Halbfass
notes, “in traditional Hindu thought and literature, there has been virtually
no interest in foreign countries, societies, cultures or religions.”21 Theosophy
flourished in India, now its largest membership, and counted among its ranks
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minster of independent India.
Drawing on the best of both West and East, the founding of Blavatsky’s
Theosophical Society in New York helped usher in a new age of American
esotericism. Long before anyone else, she saw the fit of Eastern religion and
the American temperament. This synthesis would provide a defining marker
in the history of esotericism, which until then had been exclusively a
European concern. In blurring cultural barriers, Blavatsky created a form
that was neither Eastern nor Western but found a global acceptance. With
20
The Theosophical Society would fragment a number of times. Its later history is given in
L. H. Leslie-Smith’s 100 Years of Modern Occultism (London: Theosophical History Centre,
1987), and Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical
Movement (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980).
21
Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Philosophical Understanding (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1988), 193.
her ideal of the individual empowered by gnosis, she reached back to the
Renaissance beliefs of Pico della Mirandola. She presaged the growing
movement for a spirituality that could function outside the bounds of
organized religion. An expert in myth and symbol, she helped create some
of the most enduring images of our time: the mystic East, ancient wisdom,
hidden texts, and a secret brotherhood of beneficent guardians.
22
RUDOLF STEINER AND

ANTHROPOSOPHY
Robert McDermott
1 Introduction
Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) is the founder and teacher of anthroposophy,
which derives its name from the Greek anthropos (understood by Steiner to
mean “ideal human”) and sophia, which refers to divine feminine wisdom.
Anthroposophy overlaps with religion and mysticism in that it is focused on
the human experience of the divine, but its emphasis is on a spiritual knowl-
edge that is in principle difficult to attain. Steiner insisted that in theory others
could attain the same kind of knowledge that he had. In fact, however, very
few have been able to attain the profound secrets of evolution, higher beings,
as well as afterlife and rebirth, all of which Steiner claimed to have researched
successfully.
Steiner reported his esoteric research in three thousand lectures recorded
by stenographers. As he continued to write, lecture, administer, and counsel,
he did not have time to revise these lectures for publication. However,
Steinerbooks has now undertaken the project of publishing his collected
works in 354 volumes. Steiner’s writings contain important contributions to
philosophy, the natural and social sciences, the arts, education, and the study
of Asian and Western spiritual traditions. Steiner is perhaps best known for
the Waldorf School movement, consisting of more than one thousand
schools in more than one hundred countries. These schools continue to
draw guidance from his hundreds of lectures on child development, curri-
culum, and pedagogy.
Steiner wrote approximately thirty books, beginning in 1891 with Truth
and Knowledge, his doctoral dissertation in philosophy, and ending in 1924,
the year before he died, with his autobiography (which unfortunately
covers only up to 1907, therefore before the beginning of the
Anthroposophical Society, and before most of his important research).
260
R u d o l f St e i n e r a n d An t h r o p o s o p h y 261
Steiner was convinced that his Philosophy of Freedom, which he wrote in

1894, at age 33, would be the book that would be his most lasting and
influential.1 It seems more likely, however, that his Theosophy (1904) and
How to Know Higher Worlds (1904) might prove more enduring, perhaps
because for most readers both are more immediately accessible than
Philosophy of Freedom.
Rudolf Steiner believed his esoteric mission and research to be a con-
tinuation of the tradition associated with the mysterious fifteenth-century
esoteric teacher Christian Rosenkreutz. However, he also intended his
teaching to be entirely relevant and contemporary, especially given that
he set it in direct opposition to the reductionist science of his day. Steiner
taught a comprehensive and detailed theory of the evolution of conscious-
ness as a way of demonstrating the need for the transformation of the
faculties of thinking, feeling, and willing. He considered the goal of the
evolution of human consciousness to be the attainment of universal love
and true freedom, and he regarded the incarnation of the Christ as the
central event in this process. Steiner’s written works and lectures seek to
establish that in the past four centuries in the West, humanity gradually lost
its previous access to the inner reality of the self and to the inner dimension
of the outer world.
In a series of letters to members written in the last year of his life, Steiner
offered the following characterization of anthroposophy:
Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge to guide the spiritual in the human
being to the spiritual in the universe. It arises in the human being as a need
of the heart, of the life of feeling. It can be justified only inasmuch as it can
satisfy this inner need. Only those can acknowledge anthroposophy who
find in it what they themselves in their inner lives feel impelled to seek.
Only they can be anthroposophists who feel certain questions on the nature
of the human being and the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one
feels hunger and thirst.
Anthroposophy communicates knowledge that is gained in a spiritual
way. Yet it only does so because everyday life, and the science founded on
sensation and intellectual activity, lead to a barrier along life’s way – a limit
where the life of the soul in the human being would die if it could go no
further. Everyday life and science do not lead to this limit in such a way as to
compel the human being to stop short at it. For at the very frontier where
1
Most recently published as Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom, trans.
Michael Lipson, introduction by Gertrude Reif Hughes (Great Barrington, MA:
Steinerbooks, 1995).
262 R o b e r t M c D e rm o t t
the knowledge derived from sense-perception ceases, there is opened

through the human soul itself the further outlook into the spiritual world.2
Steiner sought to help human beings develop their spiritual (higher, intui-
tive) faculties or capacities as a means to gain true and reliable knowledge of
the spiritual dimension of the cosmos. According to Steiner, this achieve-
ment is possible by a kind of thinking that he describes synonymously as
active, loving, spiritual, and free. He tries to show that this new mode of
spiritual thinking is at the core of the great advances in science, art, and
religion.
According to Steiner, to be a thinking person one must relate lovingly to
the universe, earth, the animate world, and to the human person, especially
oneself. Steiner intends his ideal of spiritually active thinking as a call to the
heart, to the affective and artistic capacities of each person. He develops a
concept and method of spiritual, “living” thinking as a contrast to both
ordinary intellectualism and to religious faith, neither of which, in his
view, develops the capacities essential in this life, in the afterlife, and in
future incarnations. In his view, ordinary religious belief is too passive, while
scientific knowing is usually limited to the surface, or material level.
2 Rudolf Steiner’s Life and Work

Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27, 1861, in Croatia, within the
Austrian Empire. He spent his early childhood near, and often in, a train
station on the Southern Austrian Railway where his father was a station
master. It was in this station house when Steiner was eight years old that the
ghost of an aunt appeared to him and sought his help. As the young Steiner
learned the following day, his aunt had committed suicide. This experience
indicated to Steiner that the dead can be in close contact with the living and
can need help. When his elementary schoolteacher gave him a geometry
book, Steiner found that the pure geometric forms were rather like the world
of spiritual forms with which he was already familiar. This discovery con-
vinced him that the experience of the world of spiritual realities, in this case
ideal forms, was one that could be shared and communicated.
Steiner attended a scientific high school until age eighteen, later graduat-
ing from a polytechnic college in Vienna. During his college years, he was
employed as a tutor to a family of boys, the youngest of whom, Otto Specht,
had virtually been abandoned by his family because he had hydrocephalus.
2
Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts: Anthroposophy as a Path of Knowledge – the
Michael Mystery, trans. George and Mary Adams (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1973), 13.
After two years of patient work, Steiner had the boy learning on a par with
those of his age. In later life, Specht became a medical doctor. Steiner’s work
with Otto Specht would later serve as a model and inspiration for his work as
the founder of the Waldorf approach to education – and equally for the
Camphill movement, which provides education and community life for
individuals in need of special care.
In a brief autobiographical sketch called “The Barr Document,” written in
1906, Steiner acknowledges but does not identify by name the spiritual
master to whom he was sent by an intermediary, the herb gatherer Feliz
Kugetski: “I did not at once meet the M. [master], but first someone sent by
him who was completely initiated into the mysteries of the effects of all plants
and their connection with the universe and with man’s nature.”3
This herb gatherer gave Steiner his first opportunity to share with another
human being the reality of the spiritual world manifest in nature. After this
meeting, Steiner’s spiritual master, or initiator, gave him the immeasurably
difficult task of reversing the fall of Western thought and culture into
materialism. He also gave Steiner the specific task of restoring to the West
the double concept of karma and rebirth. During the remaining decades of
his life, Steiner faithfully carried out these missions, making them his life’s
work. The first task he set for himself was to establish the philosophical basis
for his later esoteric research.
Through his professor of German literature, Steiner began to edit, at age
twenty-two, the volume that became Goethe’s Natural Scientific Writings. At
age twenty-five, he wrote A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World
Conception. In 1891, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the
University of Rostock; a year later, he published his dissertation under the
title Truth and Knowledge. In 1894, he published his primary work in philo-
sophy, The Philosophy of Freedom. Because he already believed that he pos-
sessed an unusual, and in fact extraordinary, ability to see spiritual realities and
to communicate profound spiritual insights, he was eager to establish the
philosophical justification for such research. In so doing, he drew on two
great streams in German thought: Goethe’s “gentle empiricism” and the
philosophies of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
Steiner saw the natural philosophy of Goethe, as well as his own esoteric
naturalism, as necessary complements to philosophical idealism. This typifies
Steiner’s habit of synthesis: He often sympathized with diverse and compet-
ing positions in such a way as to save and reconcile the positive contributions
3
“Barr Document,” in The New Essential Steiner, ed. Robert McDermott (Great Barrington,
MA: Steinerbooks, 2009), 81.
of each. Both his life and his thought can be seen as attempts to reconcile, and
lift to a higher synthesis, such polarities as science and art, matter and spirit,
individualism and community.
As Steiner argued in The Philosophy of Freedom, to be free is to be capable of
thinking one’s own intuitive thoughts – not the “thoughts” occasioned by
the sensations of the body, and certainly not those promulgated by society,
but thoughts generated by one’s own spiritual self. He emphasized repeatedly
that our faulty (nonspiritual, unfree) thinking is due to alienation from other
human beings and from cosmic rhythms. This alienation, both innate and
acquired, is characteristic of the present age. It includes an image of the
human being that isolates the self from its necessary relations. Steiner sought
to show how the thinking characteristic of the past several centuries in the
West had led to a disregard for the life of feeling. He sought to critique and
replace scientific-rationalistic thinking, which excludes the entire affective
dimension of life, and thus denigrates the religious and the artistic.
In 1899, as he later reported in his autobiography, Steiner entered a deep
spiritual struggle that led to an experience of the role of Christ in the
evolution of consciousness. As a result of this life-transforming experience,
his esoteric research was thereafter bathed in the light of the Logos, the Sun
Being, or Cosmic Christ. In his autobiography, he described a profoundly
transformative event that occurred at this time:
During the period when my statements about Christianity seemed to
contradict my later comments, a conscious knowledge of real Christianity
began to dawn within me. Around the turn of the century this seed of
knowledge continued to develop. The soul test described here occurred
shortly before the beginning of the twentieth century. It was decisive for
my soul’s development that I stood spiritually before the Mystery of
Golgotha4 in a deep and solemn celebration of knowledge.5
Following this experience, and his discovery of “real Christianity,” Steiner
began to lecture to large audiences of Theosophists. He served as general
secretary of the German branch of the Theosophical Society from 1902 until
1909, when he formally separated from the society. This break was
virtually forced on him when C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant, leaders
of the Theosophical Society, announced that the then sixteen-year-old
4
By the Mystery of Golgotha, Steiner intends the events of the last week of the life of Jesus
Christ: arrest, execution, “descent into hell,” and resurrection from the dead.
5
Rudolf Steiner, Autobiography: Chapters in the Course of My Life: 1861–1907, trans. Rita
Stebbing. Chronology, notes, bibliography, Paul Allen. Collected Works, vol. 28 (Great
Barrington, MA: Steinerbooks, 2005), 188.
J. Krishnamurti was the vehicle of the reincarnated Master Jesus. Steiner and
Besant were unable to collaborate, but one wonders whether he might have
been able to collaborate with Madame Blavatsky, had she not died in 1891.6
In 1912, Steiner’s followers, almost all members of the Theosophical
Society, formed the Anthroposophical Society with Steiner as its teacher.
In 1913, Steiner laid the foundation stone for the Goetheanum, an enormous
wood structure that he designed for an imposing hill in Dornach, near Basel,
Switzerland. This architecturally double-cupola structure was named in
honor of Goethe and was made of woods from all over Europe and North
America. It was under construction for a full decade. Steiner hoped that the
Goetheanum would give future generations of open-minded visitors some
clues as to the health-giving capacity of spiritually informed arts. This hope
was dashed when the Goetheanum building was totally destroyed by an
arsonist on New Year’s Eve, 1922. In the midst of the ashes, Steiner imme-
diately began to design the second Goetheanum, which was completed after
his death.
Marie von Sievers, whom Steiner married in 1914, shared every aspect of
his work, particularly in relation to the esoteric renewal of the arts. It seems,
however, that Steiner’s deepest personal relationship – one that he believed
had extended through previous lifetimes – was with Ita Wegman, a Dutch
physician with whom he collaborated on medical research for more than two
decades.
In response to a request from a young dancer for a new approach to dance,
Steiner developed eurythmy, an art of movement intended to strengthen the
“subtle body,” the etheric aspect of the human being that surrounds and
pervades the physical body. Steiner also contributed new methods and
innovations in sculpture, architecture, painting, and music. He taught that
the etheric, or life-body, is nourished by sculpture and eurythmy, that the
soul or astral body is strengthened by painting, and that the “I” or individual
spirit is deepened by poetry.
From 1910 to 1913, Steiner wrote four mystery dramas as a way of helping
modern Western audiences experience in dramatic form the karma of
entwined lives over several incarnations. The economic and social ills of
the decade surrounding the First World War led Steiner to develop an
elaborate social, political, and economic theory called “the threefold social
order,” according to which rights and responsibilities fall into three distinct
but related groups: the economic, the political, and the cultural. Among the
6
See Rudolf Steiner, Spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky, and Theosophy: An Eyewitness View of
Occult History, ed. Christopher Bamford (Great Barrington, MA: Steinerbooks, 2001).
many significant implications of this division is the freedom of the cultural

sphere from legal and economic control. The cultural sphere, for Steiner,
includes religion, education, and the arts, and all other expressions of indi-
vidual freedom and creativity.
In 1919, in response to a plea from the owner of the Waldorf Astoria
Cigarette Factory in Stuttgart for help in educating the children of his
employees, Steiner developed a novel educational experiment based on his
insights concerning the inner life and development of the child. The Waldorf
approach to education is especially significant for its ability to reconcile
science and art on the basis of a single source and methodology: active,
heartfelt thinking. The Waldorf schools, which constitute the largest non-
sectarian private school movement in the world, are characterized by the
attempt to integrate the works of head, heart, and hand (or the disciplined
cultivation of thinking, feeling, and willing), and by the aim of educating the
total child in freedom and responsibility for nature, for the individual, and for
the global human community.
In response to requests from doctors for a course of lectures on homeo-
pathic and anthroposophic healing, Steiner classified numerous herbs and
other natural substances according to their various healing powers. There are
now more than two thousand physicians worldwide who have been trained
both in standard medical diagnostic and prescriptive treatment and in anthro-
posophic healing. Answering the plea of farmers, Steiner lectured extensively
on a method of agriculture based on his supersensible knowledge of the
spiritual forces operative in the mineral, vegetable, and animal worlds. This
method of farming, called biodynamic, is an increasingly influential agricul-
tural alternative to chemically dominated farming.
3 Evolution of Consciousness
The spiritual knowledge scattered throughout Steiner’s hundreds of
volumes includes disclosures – some of them quite startling – concerning
such topics as the evolution of the sun, moon, and planets. He describes
the role of great spiritual beings such as Krishna, Buddha, and Christ; the
two tempters, Lucifer and Ahriman; and the archangel Michael, whom
Steiner regards as the regent of the current age. Steiner also includes
descriptions of the salient characteristics of Western civilization, which
he places in a detailed evolutionary sequence. Steiner discusses histori-
cally significant and paradigmatic individuals such as the pharaohs of
ancient Egypt, the patriarchs and prophets of Israel, Zoroaster, Plato,
and Aristotle, as well as a series of influential Christian personalities and

modern Western philosophers and scientists.
Steiner particularly emphasizes the descent of Christ, the “spiritual Sun-
Being,” into history through the agency of Jesus and several predecessors.
When discussing his experience of the Mystery of Golgotha, Steiner
explained that his understanding of these events was based entirely on direct
vision. He did not claim certitude for his clairvoyant powers; he considered
his esoteric research to be work in progress. He refined and deepened his
findings throughout his life, and he sought collaborators who could penetrate
as deeply as he could into the secrets of humanity and the universe. Steiner
apparently believed that he was able to “read” (or to supersensibly “see”) the
essential events recorded in what is known in the esoteric tradition as the
“astral akashic record.” He characterizes the evolution of consciousness by a
double direction: a steady decrease in human spiritual-intuitive thinking and
a corresponding increase in the capacity of, and reliance on, the human
intellect.
According to this theory of evolution and devolution, modern Western
consciousness lost the clairvoyance it possessed thousands of years ago, but it
has gained independence in thinking and in the development of individual
consciousness. Steiner details the loss of ancient clairvoyance without
regret: It is precisely this loss that made possible the development of
intelligence and individual creativity. The real cause for regret, he explains,
lies in the failure of modern Western consciousness to develop a thinking
capability at once warm and rational, individual and sacred. Steiner sought
to help people (particularly Westerners) living in his own time to under-
stand how and why they think, feel, and will as they do. He considered
Greek thought to represent a remarkable transition from the old clairvoy-
ance represented by the gods of ancient Greek religion to the possibility of
rational, intellectual thinking represented by Socratic inquiry, Platonic
dialectic, and Aristotelian logic.
Steiner states that soon after this transition, the Logos, or Christ-Being,
incarnated and helped reverse the increasing control of the material world,
particularly the grip of materialist thinking on Western consciousness. By
entering the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Logos brought into the earth a
spiritual impulse that can help lead humanity to greater freedom and love.
Steiner’s worldview and spiritual practices are permeated by the Christ
impulse but are not constrained by Christian dogma or the ideal of faith.
Rather, he teaches that in the present age, the “Christ impulse” serves the
ideal of human freedom in thinking and action.
Steiner believed that the separation of mind from nature, as formulated by

Descartes in the seventeenth century, is the fundamental life problem of the
modern, Western individual. The solution to this problem lies in a new kind
of clairvoyance based on an intensely active spiritual thinking. The nature
and function of this kind of thinking constitute the spiritual methodology
called anthroposophy.
4 The Discipline of Spiritual Science

Perhaps Steiner’s most significant contribution to contemporary esotericism
is the method he provided for acquiring higher or deeper spiritual knowl-
edge. Steiner is distinctive, and perhaps unique, in the degree to which he
theorized about his clairvoyant powers and tried to instruct people with
ordinary consciousness to develop spiritual intuition.
Steiner intended his research into the spiritual world to exemplify his
method and to show the need for solutions that stem from a higher level of
spiritual insight. Again, anthroposophy represents a method of spiritual
growth and transformation that aims to create an ideal harmony between
thinking, feeling, and willing. Steiner recommends rather simple exercises
that cultivate these three components of human life and also serve as a basis
for the more advanced work of spiritual science. He offers six preconditions
for spiritual-esoteric progress:
1. Practice concentrating: gain control of one’s thoughts for a few minutes
faithfully every day. For example, concentrating for five minutes on a
simple object, one that is presumably uninteresting in its own right, for
example, a paper clip. Steiner held that it should be possible to experience
each new thought as issuing from one’s own will and creativity.
2. Practice controlling the will. Steiner recommended performing one
positive but relatively insignificant task the same time each day, for
example, turning one’s ring at 3:00 every afternoon.
3. Practice equanimity: learn to stabilize fluctuations of pleasure and pain,
joy and sorrow. Steiner conceived this not as an exercise to weaken one’s
involvement or concern. Rather, it simply places each event and thought
(particularly ones that would ordinarily arouse fear or delight, sympathy
or antipathy) under one’s conscious control.
4. Practice seeing the positive in all things and events; resist negative
criticism.
5. Practice openness to new experiences and ideas; try to overcome one’s
opposition to a new or strange event or idea simply because it is new.
6. Practice repeating and harmonizing the first five exercises. The first two
can be performed at specific points in the day; the third, fourth, and fifth
can be practiced throughout one’s daily life.7
In his Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner sought to establish the theoretical and
experiential possibility of attaining spiritual or esoteric knowledge. He tried
to show the causes of alienated (i.e., unfree, materialistic, superficial) think-
ing, and the possibility of thinking in a new, creative, original way. He hoped
that the result of working conscientiously through his Philosophy of Freedom
would be none other than what the book’s title suggests: to think freely, to
intuit ideas and ideals that exist in the spiritual world, of which every free
thinker is a part.
How to Know Higher Worlds is intended as a kind of handbook for the
development of clairvoyant or supersensible perception, the possibility of
which Steiner insists on in the opening paragraph:
There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which indivi-
duals can acquire for themselves knowledge of higher worlds. Mystics,
Gnostics, Theosophists, all speak of a world of soul and spirit that for
them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch
with our physical hands. At every moment the listener may say: That, of
which they speak, I too can learn, if I develop within myself certain powers
which today still slumber within me.8
Steiner insists that esoteric knowledge is available to anyone who seeks it
according to a method established by a genuine spiritual school and by an
esoteric teacher disciplined in the methods of that school. Unfortunately,
modern Western individuals typically lack the imagination to recognize that
their ordinary thinking cannot access spiritual depth. Steiner believed that
the widespread inability to experience the thinking, feeling, and willing of
others is at the root of national, racial, gender, and generational misunder-
standings and violence, and he offered a discipline by which to overcome
such alienation and violence. He believed that the development of esoteric
capacities usually follows a systematic progression, from intellectual knowing
up through imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Each of these three levels
of higher knowledge corresponds to a part of the human being: Imagination
is a capacity developed by, and in the realm of, the subtle body or life
principle (also called the etheric, or formative, principle); inspiration
7
Start Now! – A Book of Soul and Spiritual Exercises, ed. Christopher Bamford (Great
Barrington, MA: Steinerbooks, 2004), 109–119.
8
Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds (Great Barrington, MA: Steinerbooks, 1994), 13.
corresponds to the astral (or soul) principle; and intuition corresponds to the
“I,” or the spiritual self.
For Steiner, science and art are equally effective means by which to
develop spiritual-thinking capacity. Like other great spiritual figures (e.g.,
Swedenborg, Goethe, Blake, Emerson, and Sri Aurobindo), Steiner was able
to express himself in a wide range of endeavors, including natural science, art,
philosophy, and history. He was convinced that meditative or imaginative
thinking, according to the method of anthroposophy, can enable one to
acquire higher ways of knowing as well as a more fruitful relationship to one’s
self, to the rest of humanity, and to the universe.
5 Karma and Rebirth

At the core of Steiner’s teaching concerning karma and rebirth is his claim that
human beings have two closely related life histories: waking and sleeping. The
beginning of sleep represents a kind of death to the waking biography, just as
the beginning of waking consciousness is a kind of death to the sleeping
biography. The activity of the soul after its earthly life parallels the activity of
the soul during sleep, when the soul and spirit leave the remainder of the
sleeping individual – the physical and etheric bodies – and return to the
spiritual world for the period of sleep. After death, the sleep biography is
relived in an ingenious reversal of the individual’s earthly life.
Steiner believed that at death, only the physical body immediately dies.
The etheric body, which has recorded the essential qualities of a person’s
lifetime, presents a detailed summary of this life to the astral body. After it
absorbs the panoramic report of the etheric body, the astral body remains in
existence for approximately one-third the duration of a person’s lifetime.
During this time, the astral body, in which is embedded the individual’s
desires and emotions, continues to seek the kinds of satisfaction it enjoyed on
earth. To the extent that it clings to physical and selfish satisfaction, it can
only be frustrated. In the second phase of this process, the spirit of the
individual relives its entire past life from death to birth, all the while receiving
the consequences of its earthly actions as they were experienced by everyone
and everything that was the object of their actions. The experiences of these
recipients rain down the appropriate sympathies and antipathies on the one
who is absorbing the qualities of his or her recent life and preparing for the
next life.
The law of karma refers to the complex process by which the enduring
qualities of each action and of a full lifetime fashion the possibilities and the
tasks of the next moment and the next lifetime. On the basis of the previous life
experience, as summarized and reexperienced between death and rebirth, the

individual self, or “I,” chooses the personal and environmental conditions of its
next life. It is the karmic condition of the individual that largely determines
the components of the next life, including the “choice” of parents, body,
disposition, and capacities, as well as important influences and tasks.
6 The Anthroposophical Society

At the 1923 Christmas Foundation Meeting held in Dornach, Switzerland, in
the shadow of the ruins of the Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner founded a public
society devoted to esoteric research. To be a member of this society, one
need only affirm the kind of research influenced by Rudolf Steiner and
conducted at or by the Goetheanum. He also founded an esoteric School
of Spiritual Science, members of which are expected to be in the process of
transforming the content of such research into a living state of the soul, one
that expresses warm and loving truths concerning the full range of human
concerns. This school includes the following sections: general anthroposo-
phy, medicine, pedagogy, arts of speech and music, visual arts, letters,
mathematics and astronomy, natural science, social sciences, nutrition and
agriculture, and the spiritual striving of youth.9
9
Some of the ideas in this essay first appeared in my “Steiner and Anthroposophy,” in Modern
Esoteric Spirituality, ed. Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (New York: Crossroad, 1992),
288–310, and in my introduction to The New Essential Steiner (Great Barrington, MA:
Steinerbooks, 2009), 1–72.
23
THE GOLDEN DAWN AND THE O.T.O.
Egil Asprem
1 Introduction: Magic in an Institutional Setting

The Golden Dawn and the O.T.O. share a place in the history of Western
esotericism because of their importance in reshaping conceptions of magic
and relocating it to the context of institutionalized esoteric societies. While
the practice of other occult arts (notably alchemy) has a long institutional
history, the practice of ritual magic had typically remained a solitary pursuit.
A link between masonry and theurgy had existed in Martinès de Pasqually’s
(1727–1774) eighteenth-century Order of Élus Coëns, but nineteenth-cen-
tury occultists tended to view the teaching and practice of magic as an
entirely private affair.
Both orders discussed in this essay illustrate a move toward creating new
social and institutional sites for magic by reconceptualizing the esoteric order
as a vehicle for magical teachings. As sources for the production and dis-
semination of new syntheses of magic, both the Golden Dawn and the O.T.
O. have exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century esoteric trends.
2 The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

a Birth of a Magical Order
During its short lifespan from 1888 to 1903, the “classical” Hermetic Order of
the Golden Dawn was the pivotal esoteric order in fin-de-siècle Britain.
Despite its quick lapse into disorder and schism, it managed to create a social
platform for the study and practice of ritual magic, operating four temples in
England and one in Paris. Among the better known members were the poet
William Butler Yeats; the actresses Florence Farr and Maud Gonne; and
Mina Bergson Mathers, the sister of philosopher and Nobel laureate Henri
Bergson.
272
Th e Go ld en D aw n an d t he O. T.O. 273
The order was established by a small coterie of London-based Freemasons

and occultists. The key founders were the coroner William Wynn Westcott
(1848–1925) and Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers (1854–1918), both
members of the Rosicrucian Masonic group Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia
(S.R.I.A.). William Robert Woodman (1828–1891), Supreme Magus of the
S.R.I.A., was invited in as the third chief, but he died shortly thereafter. The
Golden Dawn culled many of its early members from Rosicrucian- and
Hermetic-oriented parts of the occult milieu. Like Anna Kingsford’s
Hermetic Society (then only recently defunct), it presented itself as a decid-
edly Western alternative to the increasingly Oriental and anti-Christian
Theosophical Society, claiming an authentic Rosicrucian heritage and rein-
stating Egypt as the true origin of perennial wisdom.
The circumstances surrounding the creation of the Golden Dawn’s con-
structed tradition are among the most thoroughly discussed episodes in
modern occultism. Briefly, Westcott had come across a manuscript among
the papers of the Swedenborgian Rite in 1887, coded in a cipher taken from
Johannes Trithemius’s Polygraphiae. When deciphered, the manuscript
revealed a set of notes sketching the outline of five initiation rituals. It also
hinted at the existence of an occult order by the name of “Golden Dawn,”
but it offered nothing to suppose a Rosicrucian connection. Westcott,
recognizing the great potential of these notes, provided such a connection
by forging a series of letters from one “Fräulein Sprengel.” In this spurious
correspondence, the mystery lady revealed herself as a Rosicrucian adept
(“Sapiens Dominabitur Astris,” S.D.A.) in charge of a secretive Rosicrucian
Order in Germany, “die Goldene Dämmerung.” S.D.A. attested that the
lower grades of her order were the ones revealed in the cipher manuscript.
The adept was kind enough to provide Westcott with the authority to open a
local temple in London, as soon as he could gather two companions to serve
as co-chiefs. These would be Mathers and Woodman.
The Rosicrucian connection was likely Westcott’s invention, designed to
create an air of legitimacy in a milieu obsessed with “tradition.” The cipher
manuscript, on the other hand, was genuine enough. It was claimed to be of
ancient provenance, related to the Rosicrucians in Germany and possibly to
ancient Egyptian hermetists. In reality, it was probably written only a few
years before, by the recently deceased occultist Kenneth Mackenzie.
In October 1887, Westcott wrote his friend Samuel Liddell Mathers, who
spent most of his time studying obscure magical manuscripts in the British
Museum, asking for cooperation. If Mathers fleshed out the rituals, they
could found and run the order together. He accepted, and things proceeded
smoothly from there. In March of the following year, the first initiations into
274 Egil Asprem
the “Isis-Urania Temple” took place at Mark Mason’s Hall, London. Within
a year, sixty persons had been introduced to the first degree of Neophyte.
At this point, the order operated initiations into five degrees. In 1892,
these were joined by a new “Inner” or Second Order, open on invitation to
those possessing the highest Outer grade. The Second Order went under the
name Rosae Rubeae et Aurea Crucis (“Ruby Rose and the Golden Cross”) and
had a distinctly Rosicrucian, but also magical, emphasis. Mathers had
designed two new initiation rituals, which demanded the construction of a
vault that the initiate would recognize as the tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz.
For this reason, the Second Order rituals took place in a different location
from those of the Outer; additionally, it was desirable that nobody in the
Outer Order should have a clue about its existence.
b Initiations, Magical Doctrines, and Techniques

Westcott once boasted that the Golden Dawn was a school for “classical
medieval occult science.”1 But what were the magical teachings of the
Golden Dawn actually about? Members of the order only found out gradu-
ally, since the theories were taught in steps modeled on the order’s initiation
structure. In the Outer Order, disciples were handed so-called Knowledge
Lectures expounding on the theme and symbolism of each grade. The
initiate was gradually taken through a grand synthesis of symbol systems,
from alchemy, the Kabbalah, and astrology to the Tarot and the mysterious
“Enochian” letter squares.
The Golden Dawn initiation system was composed of ten degrees plus
one preliminary Neophyte degree. The structure was borrowed from the
S.R.I.A., but it ultimately stemmed from the eighteenth-century German
Gold- und Rosenkreutzer Order. The grades were divided into three segments:
the First or Outer Order, the Second Order, and an obscure Third Order. In
the beginning, only the four lower degrees of the Outer Order were worked
with initiations. The fifth to seventh degrees (Adeptus Minor, Major, and
Exemptus) were originally honorary titles reserved for the chiefs, but they
became operative with the creation of Mathers’s Second Order. The final
three degrees of the Third Order belonged to the mysterious (or mythical)
“secret chiefs” and were not attainable in practice.
Except for the preliminary Neophyte grade, the Golden Dawn grades
were correlated with the ten sefirot of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, running
from the bottom up. The four proper degrees of the Outer Order were
1
Cited in Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical
Order 1887–1923 (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1978), 34.
additionally correlated with the four elements. Progressive initiation in the

order thereby took the form of an ascent through the sefirot, along with a
gradual training of the magician toward mastery of the four elements. This
reflects the basic aim of the Golden Dawn: approaching deification through
magical ascent.
Doctrinally, a reinterpreted Christian Kabbalah plus the four elements
together made up a matrix in which all other occult systems were framed.
John Dee’s Enochian magical squares, for example, were attributed to the
four elements and presented consecutively in the elemental initiations of the
Outer Order. On entering the Second Order, the adepts would learn how to
apply all this occult knowledge in magical practice. Instructions were circu-
lated in documents called “Flying Rolls,” some of which may have been
lectures delivered at gatherings, while others are descriptions of procedures
and results attained by senior adepts.
Among the first things a magician needed to know were how to conse-
crate magical weapons and how to ritually “banish” and invoke elemental,
planetary and zodiacal forces. There were instructions in divination by means
of the Tarot, geomancy, and the casting of horoscopes; others discussed the
making and consecration of magical talismans, and instructions in the evoca-
tion of spirits, whether angels, demons, planetary intelligences, or elementals.
Much of this was borrowed from Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (1533),
Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1801), the Greek magical papyri, and revisions of
medieval and Renaissance grimoires.
The most fundamental magical technique was based on the concept of
“the astral,” developed much later. Following the occult theories of Eliphas
Lévi, the Golden Dawn taught the existence of “astral realms” paralleling the
ordinary, visible world. Familiarity with the astral was fundamental for
Golden Dawn magicians: Any successful practice of magic was dependent
on the control of astral forces, or action on the astral plane. Access to these
dimensions was primarily gained through two techniques known as “scry-
ing” and “traveling in the astral.” For scrying, the magician would typically
employ certain symbols (e.g., the “Tattwas” or the Enochian letters) as foci
for ritual meditations, inducing visions of the astral region to which the
particular symbol corresponded. But these visions were passive and only
imparted a mirror image of the astral world. When a more active approach
was desired, the adept would instead project his or her astral body into the
parallel dimensions, traveling around freely, touching objects, performing
rituals, and encountering astral entities.
The most common magical experiments were aimed at gaining esoteric
knowledge in the astral plane. Other, more operative types of magic, such as
276 Egil Asprem
the evocation of spirits or the use of talismans, were intended to achieve

material ends. For many, the obligatory consecration of magical weapons
became the first and the last elaborate ritual they ever performed. The costly
and time-consuming nature of larger magical workings may have been one
reason. Time and place needed to be calculated and planned according to
astrological principles, and magical implements prepared from often exotic
and expensive materials. Sometimes it would simply be easier to keep to the
next best thing of purely astral work.
c Downfall and Aftermath

The Golden Dawn disintegrated abruptly around the turn of the century,
mainly due to three factors: (1) leadership problems between the distant but
authoritarian Mathers and the London Isis-Urania Temple; (2) a controversy
among the London adepts over the place of private magical groups within the
order; and (3) the scandalous “Horos affair,” which damaged the order’s
reputation beyond repair.
Following a conflict with the respected adept Annie Horniman, Mathers
made several choices that were strategically unwise. Westcott had to resign
from his office because of suspicions from his employer, leaving Mathers in
charge from Paris. In January 1900, the members of the London Isis-Urania
Temple had grown so impatient with their erratic and absent leader that they
threatened to shut down the temple. Mathers was convinced they planned to
restart with Westcott as chief and launched a campaign to discredit his
authority. This he did by revealing the truth behind the Fräulein Sprengel
letters. Mathers wanted to foster the idea that the only link to the “secret
chiefs” of the order ran through him, claiming to be in contact with the real
Soror S.D.A. in Paris.
The strategy was short sighted, since it created the suspicion that the order
was founded on nothing but lies. Mathers’s own extravagant claims about
secret chiefs seemed less trustworthy in this light, and instead of support he
got demands for proof. Mathers refused to deliver and instead threatened that
the secret chiefs would unleash “a deadly and hostile Current of Will” to
smite down the rebels, as was promised in the oath of the Neophyte ritual.
Mathers sent one of his last allies, a young Aleister Crowley, to London in a
final attempt to win the rebels back to the fold. Crowley’s eccentric man-
euvres failed, however, and instead the rebels expelled Mathers from the
order and resumed business independently.
In Paris, Mathers had been in contact with a certain couple named Horos.
It was with reference to Mrs. Horos, a “powerful medium,” that he claimed
to have renewed contact with the secret chiefs. However, the Horos couple
turned out to be sly con artists. By appearing as high-degree initiates to
Golden Dawn members, they managed to get hold of the order’s rituals and
used them to set up a scam in London. In September 1901, the couple was
arrested on allegations of fraud and rape of a young girl during a bogus
Neophyte initiation. The scandal attracted massive press coverage, seriously
damaging the integrity of the Golden Dawn, even though the actual order
had had nothing to do with it. The Neophyte ritual was made public,
ridiculed by the press, and deemed blasphemous by the judges. Many
respectable members found it hard to remain associated with the Golden
Dawn after this episode.
To make matters worse, an internal conflict emerged over the function of
the Second Order and the role of certain small private magical groups that
had become popular among its members. A concern that such groups might
form “elites within elites” was voiced by Yeats and Horniman, while
Florence Farr, who ran the secret “Sphere Group” together with twelve
other adepts, defended such practices. The conflict proved impossible to
resolve, and the order finally dissolved in 1903.
Several factions nevertheless attempted to carry on the Golden Dawn’s
“true lineage.” Most notable were the Alpha et Omega Lodge in Paris,
based on Mathers’s temple, and the Stella Matutina, which set up lodges
in London, Bristol, and even New Zealand. Several other groups and
orders carried on its influence as well, including A. E. Waite’s
Independent and Rectified Rite, Paul Foster Case’s California-based
Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.), and Crowley and G. C. Jones’s
Astron Argon (A∴A∴). The latter two are still active today. After several
rounds of exposures and publications of Golden Dawn material through-
out the twentieth century, new groups claiming lineage have appeared,
together with a wide range of books and instructions.
3 Ordo Templi Orientis

The Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) rivals the Golden Dawn’s influence on
occultism and conceptions of magic in the twentieth century. Its organiza-
tional roots are grounded in the fascination with fringe-masonry,
Rosicrucianism, and Templarism in Germany and Austria at the turn of
the century. However, its chief impact is related to the new religious move-
ment Thelema, and its English creator and prophet Aleister Crowley (1875–
1947). The O.T.O. has been the institutional site for disseminating a novel
mix of ideas, doctrines, and practices drawing on Rosicrucianism,
278 Egil Asprem
Hermeticism, Golden Dawn ritual magic, neo-Gnosticism, Theosophical

teachings, and perhaps most importantly sexual magic.
a Roots, Foundation, and Early History

The early history of the order is complicated and contested. We first find
references to an Order of Oriental Templars in 1906, in the fringe-Masonic
periodical of the German occultist, political activist, and journalist Theodor
Reuss (1855–1923), the Oriflamme. Yet it was not until 1912 that the exis-
tence of an order by the name O.T.O. was officially announced. This
announcement further claimed that the order dated as far back as 1895,
connecting it with the Austrian paper chemist and occultist Carl Kellner
(1851–1905) and yet another secret society, the Hermetic Brotherhood of
Light.2 Although we should view 1912 as the order’s formal date of birth, it is
nevertheless important to have a look at some prior events.
During the first decade of the 1900s, Reuss had collected a number of
charters for mostly “irregular” Masonic rites, including Memphis and
Misraim, the Ancient and Accepted Rite, and the Swedenborgian Rite.
These systems were tied together by the Oriflamme journal. Kellner, often
regarded as the “spiritual father” of the O.T.O., had been connected with
Reuss’s Masonic activities in Berlin before his death in 1905. Together with
the Theosophist Franz Hartmann, Reuss and Kellner viewed themselves as
the elite “Inner Circle” of this Masonic milieu, boasting that they possessed
the secret key to all Masonic mysteries and religious systems. Certainly by
1906, but perhaps earlier, Reuss held that this secret key was of a sexual
nature. He may have been influenced by theories on the solar-phallic origin
of religion, popular in the late nineteenth century. The influence of
Hargrave Jennings’s Phallicism (1884) is particularly clear; Reuss published
it in German as Lingam-Yoni in 1906, adding his own introduction.
Additionally, the sexual interpretation of religion was widespread in the
neo-gnostic movement, particularly in France and Belgium, where the idea
had suggested itself from Christian heresiological allegations of gnostic
perversities. Reuss did have connections with the neo-gnostics, obtaining
charters to run a gnostic Catholic Church in 1908. The combination of
Gnosticism and a sexual theory of religion would find its way to the core of
the O.T.O. project.
The mysterious Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, which Kellner is said to
have come in contact with, appears to have been a Rosicrucian society
2
“Unser Orden,” Jubilæums-Ausgabe der Oriflamme, September 1912, 15.
established in Boston in 1895, possibly an offshoot of the somewhat better

known Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.3 Suggestively, this latter group was
known for its sexual teachings, originating with the American spiritualist and
occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825–1875). The relation with the
Hermetic Brotherhood of Light remains unclear, but it is worth noting
that the O.T.O. tends to view itself as a continuation of that nebulous
order, allegedly treasuring its secrets in the high degrees. Indeed, parts of
the O.T.O. high-degree instructions do contain paraphrases of Randolph’s
“Mysteries of Eros,” suggesting that at least some of the sexual teachings
came from this source.4
Despite these precursors, the actual formation of the functioning O.T.O.
resulted from Reuss’s meeting with Aleister Crowley in London in 1912. We
have already seen that Crowley was an aspiring magician in the Golden
Dawn at the turn of the century. During the interim years, he had traveled
the world, spending his inherited money and living the life of an adventurous
mountaineer, magician, mystic, and poet. He had founded Thelema, a new
magical religion based on The Book of the Law, a text he claimed to have
“received” from the entity Aiwass on behest of the gods Nuit, Hadit, and
Ra-Hoor-Khuit, in Cairo in 1904. Around 1907, he had set up his magical
order, the A∴A∴ and established its periodical, The Equinox, in 1909. The
A∴A∴ and The Equinox became the organs through which Crowley pro-
moted Thelema and communicated his ideas on magic, religion, and science,
under the banner of “Scientific Illuminism.”
When Crowley and Reuss met between 1910 and 1912, Reuss found a
man with radical visions similar to his own. The anti-Christian, antibour-
geois ideology of Thelema apparently appealed to the political activist.
Crowley for his part was looking for new institutional vehicles to promote
his ideas. When Reuss offered him the leadership of a British section of the
O.T.O., the Mysteria Mystica Maxima (M∴M∴M∴), and the job of rewrit-
ing the order’s rituals, Crowley eagerly accepted. The process of transform-
ing the O.T.O. into a Thelemic Order followed soon after.
The existence of the O.T.O. was officially announced in the 1912 autumn
issues of Oriflamme and The Equinox. Until 1918, Crowley spent much time
writing new rituals and instructions, replacing the traditional Masonic
themes with explicitly Thelemic and magical ones. During a stay in
Moscow in 1913, he also produced the liturgy of a gnostic Mass for use in
3
Anon., “The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor,” The Rosicrucian Brotherhood, II:4 (1908), 161.
4
Martin P. Starr, The Unknown God: W. T. Smith and the Thelemites (Bollingbrook, IL: Teitan
Press, 2003), 25, n. 25.
280 Egil Asprem
the Gnostic Catholic Church (Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, or EGC) that

Reuss had obtained charters for back in 1908. In effect, Crowley revived
and re-created the gnostic church as well, designed as an ecclesiastical and
exoteric counterpart to the esoteric O.T.O., openly worshiping its
secrets in religious rituals. The EGC became a veritable “church of
magic.”
Reuss and Crowley soon mobilized their respective networks to spread
charters and set up local lodges. This was, however, an unhappy time for
international organizational expansion. When war broke out in 1914, inter-
national Masonic networks were dispersed, and publication of the Oriflamme
was discontinued. Reuss settled near Ascona, Switzerland, where he
attempted to launch O.T.O. activities among the utopian spiritual milieu
flowering at Monte Verità during the war. Meanwhile, Crowley ran out of
money. After emigrating to the United States, he sustained himself as a
journalist and editor, while relying on donations from followers. He also
engaged in war propaganda for the Germans, although he would later claim it
all had been part of a British disinformation strategy. The activities never-
theless damaged the reputation of Crowley’s order, even causing a police raid
at its London premises in 1917.
During this period, a gulf grew between the two leaders of the order, as
Crowley became more dedicated to his role as prophet of a new religion.
He may even have attempted to stage a revolt to overthrow Reuss as
Outer Head of the Order (OHO) around 1921. Although this failed,
Reuss died in 1923 and Crowley finally succeeded him as international
chief. Under Crowley’s rule, the O.T.O. gradually let go of the Masonic
pretensions that had been so important to Reuss, increasingly focusing on
the Thelemic mission. Crowley’s Thelemic vision for the order was
published in 1919, in the so-called Blue Equinox. Crowley nevertheless
had a hard time establishing the O.T.O. as a potent movement for
implementing the radical social, political, and religious reforms he
hoped for. His apparent pro-German activities during the war had made
it difficult to operate in Britain, and he was losing control over the
Continental lodges due to schisms over succession following Reuss’s
death. With the ascent to power of fascism and National Socialism in
Europe, the operation of esoteric orders became increasingly difficult,
sometimes attracting direct persecution. As a consequence, the O.T.O.
moved most of its activity to the United States. By the mid-1940s, the
Agape Lodge in California was the last functioning body of the order
worldwide.
b Doctrines and Ritual of the O.T.O.

The esoteric doctrines of the O.T.O. can be summed up in three key terms:
Thelema, solar-phallicism, and sex magic. Although only the first of these
aspects is explicit in the lower parts of the O.T.O.’s eleven degrees, the latter
two remain tacitly present. It is only in the high degrees, from VII˚ to XI˚,
that they become explicit, with elaborate theories and ritual instructions.
Although drastically reformed by Crowley, solar-phallicism and sex magic
form the oldest parts of the O.T.O. synthesis. They constituted the “secret
key” guarded by Reuss, Kellner, and Hartmann in the early days of the
Oriflamme. In the journal’s 1912 “Jubilaeums-Ausgabe,” Reuss openly
divulged that the secret of all Masonic ritual was sex magic, and further
coupled it with practices of yoga.5 He explained sex magic as the concentra-
tion and transmutation of the “energy of reproduction” (using the yogic term
vayus napa), the essence of the divine creation process. The point is to employ
yogic practices to concentrate the “vital energy” that rests in the subtle
counterpart to the reproductive organs, raising them up to the solar plexus,
where they are transmuted. This should effect the consummation of “the
Great Union” between the male and female aspects of the practitioner.
Although it has become commonplace to view sex magic as an antinomian
transgression of conventional mores based largely on a flawed Orientalist
understanding of Indian Tantra, it is worth noting that there is little emphasis
on these themes in the O.T.O. primary literature.6 While Reuss insisted on
using yogic terms in his brief 1912 exposition, this is less present in high-
degree O.T.O. instructions, such as De natura deorum, De nuptiis secretis, Liber
Agape, and De arte magica. While tantric references still occur occasionally,
allusions and analogies with Greek, Egyptian, and biblical mythology, and
even Christian demonology, are much more common. In place of a focus on
transgression, we find attempts at formulating a positive religious stance based
on solar-phallicism: God is one; in the macrocosm he is the Sun, simulta-
neously creator, sustainer, and eventually destroyer of life on our planet; in
the microcosm, he is the phallus. In this sense, man is also divine, endowed
with godly creative powers, and sex magic thus becomes a sacred art. De
nuptiis secretis, which deals with sexual magic and devotional practices largely
based on masturbation, tells of the Egyptian theogony in which the sun-god
Toum creates the other gods by masturbating and ejaculating semen. This
account forms a parallel to a ritual in which the magician consecrates himself
5
Theodor Reuss, “Mysteria Mystica Maxima,” Oriflamme (September 1912), 21–23.
6
See Hugh Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
282 Egil Asprem
as the sun and proceeds to create two talismans, one male and one female,
vivified by the magician’s sperm. These talismans become new gods, who
conjoin and create an entirely new world, replete with elementals and other
beings.
The most important high-degree doctrines concern full sexual inter-
course. The union of male and female is paramount, celebrated in the gnostic
mass and situated as an essential component of magical ceremonies. The
mixing of male and female sexual fluids is utilized to produce the alchemical
“Elixir of Life,” and vaginal intercourse may even be arranged magically to
produce a homunculus through procreation. By extension, anal intercourse,
whether homosexual or heterosexual, can also be utilized for giving birth to
astral entities. Rites based on anal intercourse were Crowley’s invention,
absent from Reuss’s earlier conceptions.
In fact, however, the most novel element that Crowley introduced into
the O.T.O. was the framework of Thelema. As presented in The Book of the
Law and Crowley’s numerous commentaries, Thelema (Greek for “will”)
prophesies the end of “the Aeon of Osiris,” a millennia-long period char-
acterized by patriarchal, collectivist religions, and the coming of a new
“Aeon of Horus” to replace it. A radical, liberal individualism is the credo
of the new aeon, and Thelema is its only proper religion. Its dictum is “Do
What Thou Wilt,” – however, this is not meant to license indiscriminate
indulgence. Crowley explained that Thelemites were bound to discover
their single “True Will” and follow it unconditionally. For Crowley,
magic is always interwoven with this pursuit; indeed, Thelemic magic
becomes a complete “form of life.”
We can distinguish at least two roles for Thelema in the O.T.O. First,
candidates are taught how to implement Thelemic and magical principles in
their lives, as part of initiation and self-realization. Second, the elected high-
degree members of the order are committed to promulgating the law and
work toward the establishment of a truly Thelemic society. In addition to
proselytizing and recruiting new members, this duty would be observed by
working the rituals of sex magic, employing the order’s esoteric practices to
advance its worldly mission.
c The O.T.O. after Crowley: Aftermath and Influence

When Crowley died in 1947, he had entrusted the leadership of the order to
Karl Germer (1885–1962), the O.T.O.’s Grand Treasurer. Germer had lived
in New Jersey since fleeing from war and persecution in Germany.
However, his unpleasant encounter with the Nazi regime had left a lasting
stain on his psychology. Germer’s paranoid leadership style would soon

destroy what little was left of O.T.O. activities in the United States.
Recruitment came to a halt, the Agape Lodge dissolved during the 1950s,
and Germer himself died in 1962 without assigning a successor. This left an
unclear situation, which several groups have taken advantage of. Among
claimants to the O.T.O. leadership, we find a Swiss O.T.O. group, based on
Reuss’s lodges from the Ascona period; the Brazilian Societas O.T.O.,
claiming links with Germer; the British Typhonian O.T.O., run by British
occultist Kenneth Grant (1924–2011); and the California-based Caliphate O.
T.O. Counted in numbers, presence, and publications, the latter of these
groups is by far the most significant.
The Caliphate originated with Grady Louis McMurtry (1918–1985), who
met Crowley when he was stationed in England during the Second World
War. McMurtry began a process of reassembling the American order after
Germer’s death. Availing himself of two letters from Crowley appointing
McMurtry his representative in the United States, he claimed to be the
legitimate chief of the order. McMurtry laid claim to the title of “Caliph,”
a title for Crowley’s successor appearing only in these letters. Much of the
Caliphate’s later success has been built on victories in the legal system. It was
incorporated as a religious, nonprofit organization in 1979 and has since won
several trials over rights to the O.T.O. name and copyrights.
The Typhonian O.T.O. is still influential in Great Britain but has received
little recognition abroad. In contrast to the Caliphate, which is considered a
fairly orthodox Crowleyan movement, the Typhonian branch has notably
extended the O.T.O. synthesis by incorporating UFO lore, the Lovecraftian
“Cthulhu mythos,” and a larger emphasis on Indian Tantrism.
In addition to these continuities, the synthesis of Golden Dawn and O.T.
O. magic, resulting from the encounter between Crowley and Reuss, has
helped shape the many loosely knit occultist currents associated with Wicca,
Satanism, chaos magic, and paganism in its many forms.
24
G.I. GURDJIEFF AND THE FOURTH WAY
1 Life, Writings, and Influence

As is the case with many figures in Western esotericism, the life of George
Ivanovich Gurdjieff is shrouded in both mystery and controversy. Seen by
some as a sage and others as a charlatan, he is arguably the most influential
esoteric teacher of the twentieth century. As we shall see, whether we are
approaching Gurdjieff’s life, writings, teachings, or legacy, there are no easy
answers to be found.
We are not even certain when Gurdjieff was born, but it was likely January
13, ca. 1866. The place of birth was definitely Alexandropol, which at the
time was part of the Russian Empire. Gurdjieff’s father was Greek, his
mother Armenian. The family name was originally Georgiades and was
later Slavicized as Gurdjieff. When he was quite young, Gurdjieff’s family
resettled in Kars near the Turkish border, which had once been part of the
Ottoman Empire but was then under Russian control. Because of its location
and rich history, Kars exposed the young Gurdjieff to a great variety of
cultures and faiths. Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff’s most accessible
work, is our chief source of information on his early life, and it contains a
number of fascinating stories about his experiences in this mysterious region.
Gurdjieff’s father was an ashiq, or balladeer, and was a strong influence on
him. His parents raised him in the Eastern Orthodox faith, whose theology is
almost entirely “mystical,” and it is clear that this was a strong influence as
well. However, Gurdjieff was no admirer of organized religion, and in later
life expressed strong antipathy to the clergy. From a young age, he reacted
against both the tendency to rationalism and reductionism in the modern
outlook, and the unquestioning faith demanded by religion.
In early adulthood, Gurdjieff set off on what would become roughly two
decades of travels, journeying throughout Central Asia and the Middle East
284
G . I . G u r d j i e f f an d t h e Fo u r t h W a y 285
in search of wisdom. Our chief source for this period in his life is, again,
Meetings. Though it must be acknowledged that this is a flawed source, for it
contains some anecdotes that strain credulity. Precisely because of this, and
because Meetings does not fill in all the gaps, there has been a great deal of
speculation about Gurdjieff’s activities during this time. For example, it has
been claimed that he was a spy for the Russians and a tutor to the Dalai Lama.
Gurdjieff’s own account features him meeting various spiritual teachers,
including Sufis, and finding a number of companions along the way, men
and women who shared his hunger for truth. He also claimed to have been
initiated into a mysterious organization known as the Sarmoung
Brotherhood, located in a monastery in the heart of Asia. Scholars differ in
their views as to the identity (and existence) of this brotherhood.
In 1912, Gurdjieff appeared in St. Petersburg, Russia, offering himself as a
spiritual teacher. By 1914, he had moved to Moscow, and a year later
encountered P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947). A highly intelligent man,
Ouspensky was already a successful journalist on esoteric matters and the
author of several books. In the work for which he is known best, In Search of
the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (hereafter referred to as
Fragments), Ouspensky offers a vivid account of his first meeting with
Gurdjieff in a crowded Moscow café. Like so many influential spiritual
teachers, Gurdjieff possessed enormous charisma and made a strong first
impression (Ouspensky refers to his “piercing eyes”1). Soon, with
Ouspensky’s help, a group had formed around Gurdjieff. It included the
composer Thomas de Hartmann (1885–1956) with whom Gurdjieff would
later collaborate on the so-called Gurdjieff – de Hartmann music.
In 1916, with the approach of the Revolution, Gurdjieff and his students
headed for Essentuki, located near the base of the Caucasus Mountains. In
1919, they relocated to Tiflis and then were eventually forced to head west,
finally ending their travels in Paris. The students accompanying Gurdjieff on
these journeys included de Hartmann and his wife Olga, as well as Alexandre
and Jeanne de Salzmann. The latter not only became Gurdjieff’s principal
student but an important spiritual teacher in her own right. Ouspensky,
however, did not make the entire journey. He broke with Gurdjieff in
1918, although they remained in contact for several years. He was not the
first nor was he the last pupil to feel compelled to leave Gurdjieff. Sometimes
it seems clear that Gurdjieff himself instigated these breaks when he felt it was
necessary for the individual’s further development.
1
P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1949), 7.
In 1922, Gurdjieff founded the Institute for the Harmonious

Development of Man at the Chateau du Prieuré at Fountainbleau, outside
Paris. New students from several countries came to Fountainbleau after news
of Gurdjieff’s teachings circulated abroad. It was at the Prieuré that Gurdjieff
established many of the practices now associated with his school, including
the “movements,” a complex and difficult form of sacred dance. Gurdjieff
reported that he had learned these movements through his experiences with
different initiatic schools in his years of spiritual wandering.2
Activities at Fountainbleau were more or less brought to a halt by
Gurdjieff’s disastrous automobile accident in July 1924, which almost
claimed his life. His recovery was long and difficult. Physically weakened
and also penniless, Gurdjieff decided to begin writing books. He started in
December 1924, dictating the first parts of what would become Beelzebub’s
Tales to His Grandson to Olga de Hartmann. This was the projected first part
of a series collectively referred to as All and Everything. Beelzebub was even-
tually published for the first time in 1950. The second part of the series,
Meetings with Remarkable Men, was not published until 1963. The third part,
Life Is Only Real Then, When “I Am,” which Gurdjieff did not (apparently)
finish, was published in 1975.
Gurdjieff left the Prieuré in the early 1930s and moved to Paris. He took a
number of trips to the United States to raise funds, where he inevitably made
a variety of impressions on those who encountered him. But Gurdjieff spent
the majority of his time at his flat on the Rue des Colonels-Renard, where he
lived out his remaining years. He was apparently able to continue his work
unmolested throughout the German occupation. In 1948, he was involved in
a second serious car accident, from which he also recovered. But he died on
October 29, 1949.
A discussion of Gurdjieff’s teachings must inevitably begin with the ques-
tion of influences, and of the interpretation of his writings. In both cases, we
face great challenges. There has been a good deal of speculation concerning
the sources of Gurdjieff’s ideas. Here I will only mention that there seems to
be a clear influence of Eastern Orthodox mysticism, Sufism, and even,
surprisingly, Pythagoreanism. It would be wrong, however, to characterize
his teachings as a mélange culled from different sources. Gurdjieff himself
claimed that he was recovering an ancient esoteric tradition, a Western
tradition – and there is some reason to take him at his word on this. He
2
See Jacob Needleman, “G. I. Gurdjieff and His School,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed.
Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (New York: Crossroad, 1995), 369.
sometimes referred to his philosophy as “esoteric Christianity,” but in fact its

roots are much older than Christianity.
As to Gurdjieff’s writings, they are extraordinarily difficult. In particular,
Beelzebub is a strange and baffling book. Set on a spaceship, it is ostensibly (as
the title implies) an account of Beelzebub’s conversations with his grandson,
in which he teaches him quite literally “all and everything” (a recent edition
is 1,135 pages long). The book is written in a deliberately off-putting style,
with extremely complex and confusing sentence structures, and is also filled
with peculiar neologisms. These all have specific meanings, but seem calcu-
lated to test the reader’s patience and commitment.
The truth is that Beelzebub is one of the strangest examples of esoteric
writing in world literature – “esoteric” both in the sense employed through-
out this volume, and in the sense of “hidden.” Gurdjieff deliberately obscures
his meaning. Indeed, in a conversation about the meaning of Beelzebub,
Gurdjieff is supposed to have said, “I bury dog.” One of his interlocutors
took him to mean that he had “buried the bone,” but Gurdjieff corrected
him: “No. I bury whole dog.”3
By contrast, Meetings and Life Is Only Real Then, When “I Am” at least
appear to be easier to understand, especially the former (which was made into
a film in 1979). It is generally believed that all of Gurdjieff’s writings are
calculated to affect the reader in more than one manner. And this is another
way in which they may be said to be esoteric. While they reach the reader on
an intellectual level, imparting ideas, they also have a much deeper effect.
Gurdjieff states at the beginning of Beelzebub that its purpose is to “destroy,
mercilessly and without any compromise whatever, in the mentation and
feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about
everything existing in the world.”4 Over the years, transcripts or summaries
of Gurdjieff’s lectures and group meetings have also been published. As is the
case with many authors, the remarks Gurdjieff delivered orally are often
much more accessible than those he prepared for publication.
Still, most readers begin by reading about Gurdjieff, rather than reading
Gurdjieff himself. The “standard introduction” for many years has been
Ouspensky’s Fragments. However, The Reality of Being by Jeanne de
Salzmann (posthumously edited and published in 2010) is arguably a better
place to begin, although more challenging than Ouspensky.
3
Edwin Wolfe, “Further Episodes with Gurdjieff,” The Gurdjieff International Review 6:1
(Spring 2003), http://www.gurdjieff.org/grossman2.htm
4
G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (New York: Viking Arkana, 1992), v. It
should be noted that this edition is controversial: It is a revision of the original translation
published in 1950. Nevertheless, the revision was supervised by Jeanne de Salzmann herself.
Gurdjieff did not just learn from remarkable men, he also influenced them.
Mention has already been made of Thomas de Hartmann and Jeanne de
Salzmann. Others influenced by Gurdjieff, his students, or Fourth Way
teachings include: founder of The Little Review Margaret Anderson, mathe-
matician and scientist John G. Bennett, poet T. S. Eliot, filmmaker Alejandro
Jodorowsky, writer Katherine Mansfield, psychiatrist Maurice Nicoll, pain-
ter Georgia O’Keefe, editor of The New Age A. R. Orage, novelist J. B.
Priestley, Henry John Sinclair (Lord Pentland), “Mary Poppins” creator P. L.
Travers, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The degree of influence, of
course, is different in each case. Some of these individuals (e.g., Bennett,
Nicholl, and Lord Pentland) became teachers of the Gurdjieff Work. Others
can only be said to have been on the periphery of the movement (e.g., Eliot,
Jodorowsky, and Priestley).
Before his death, Gurdjieff charged Jeanne de Salzmann with the task of
carrying on his work, and of creating centers for its study. Accordingly, over
time the Gurdjieff Foundations were established in Paris, New York,
London, and Caracas. In addition, however, there is a bewildering number
of other groups today claiming to teach Gurdjieff’s philosophy. Needless to
say, these differ greatly in quality, and some are decidedly “cultish.” It is the
Gurdjieff Foundations established by de Salzmann, and their affiliated groups,
that have the strongest claim to be the authentic representatives of Gurdjieff’s
teachings. Jeanne de Salzmann died in 1990, at the age of 101.
2 Ideas
As a spiritual teacher, Gurdjieff did not simply impart doctrines. Instead, he
acted on his students in various ways calculated to place them in situations he
believed were necessary for their development. Like Socrates, he changed his
approach depending on the person or the group he was dealing with, and the
circumstances of the moment. The result of this is that we have been left with
wildly conflicting accounts both of Gurdjieff’s character and of his manner of
teaching (hence, the title of Margaret Anderson’s 1962 memoir The
Unknowable Gurdjieff).
Gurdjieff did have a “philosophy,” but it was always taught – and still is
taught – within the context of a “school”: a group of individuals devoted to
what is referred to as “the Work,” led by one or more teachers. Gurdjieff and
his followers are unwavering in their insistence that solitary individuals can
accomplish little in the Work. The Gurdjieffian school is not an ashram,
however; it is not intended as a refuge from life. Here we come to the
meaning of what Gurdjieff called the “Fourth Way,” which is the term
widely used to refer to the movement he founded. The “first way” is that of
the fakir, who develops control over his physical body. The way of the
monk, the “second way,” concentrates chiefly on emotional control. The
“third way” is that of the yogi, whose attainments are mainly intellectual. All
have two things in common: first, their development is one sided; second,
they typically follow their path in separation from worldly affairs, as much as
possible.
By contrast, the Fourth Way is that of what Gurdjieff called “the sly man.”
He does not separate himself from the world; rather, he uses the world as a
vehicle for Work on himself. And that Work develops all his aspects:
physical, emotional, and intellectual.5 Gurdjieff’s vision of the Fourth Way
is not that far removed from the “left-hand path” as conceived by
Traditionalist author Julius Evola: the path of “riding the tiger”; of utilizing
the world, including even the destructive, disintegrating forces of the present
age (the Iron Age, or Kali Yuga), as a means to self-transformation.6 Thus,
Gurdjieff schools do not insulate their members from the world.
While the importance of a group and a teacher is heavily emphasized,
there is a strong individualist element to the Work as well. Gurdjieff stead-
fastly resisted the tendency of pupils to treat him as a guru. (This is one of
things that make the Fourth Way a path “for the West,” as it is often called.)
Also, he insisted that pupils not take what he said on faith, and verify all claims
for themselves. The reason for this is simple: to blindly follow the word of a
guru is a form of sleep, which is precisely what the Gurdjieff Work combats.
Indeed, that “man is asleep” is arguably the central tenet of Gurdjieff’s
philosophy, or at least the logical point to begin an account of it. Gurdjieff
emphasizes that human beings as they are (especially in the modern world)
are thoroughly mechanical. While they imagine themselves to be conscious
and free, in fact they are at the mercy of a variety of forces, and usually
completely unaware of this. This is true not just of “ordinary people” but
even of the vast majority of intellectuals. “Man is a machine,” Gurdjieff tells
Ouspensky in Fragments. And “he can do nothing.”7 Things simply happen
to him.
If you confront people with such claims, they become indignant. No one
likes to be told that he is a robot, and everyone thinks he is not only conscious
but has a stable sense of personal identity. In fact, Gurdjieff argues that the
vast majority of people have no authentic “I” at all and live in a constant state
5
On the “four ways,” see Ouspensky, Fragments, 44–51.
6
See Julius Evola, Ride the Tiger, trans. Joscelyn Godwin and Constance Fontana (Rochester,
VT: Inner Traditions, 2003).
7
Ouspensky, Fragments, 21.
of self-deception about this. Rather, they have many “I’s,” each of which has
been constructed in certain ways, essentially as a result of the same sort of
experiences psychoanalysts have described in vivid detail: unmet needs,
repressed desires, the internalization of voices of authority, and so forth.
The sense of what Gurdjieff means can easily be seen if we reflect on the
fact that frequently we respond to our own deeds as if they had been
committed by another person: The “I” that got out of bed in the middle of
the night and ate the rest of the pie is not the “I” that loathes the pie-eating
“I” the following morning at 9:00. We are ruled by these “I’s,” each of which
we fully identify with in the moment. Each “I” really is like a separate self,
and none of them wants to be exposed because that would mean the
diminishment of its hold on us. Thus, there is enormous resistance to seeing
how we are “taken” by these “I’s,” how we are really mechanical and unfree.
The “I’s” have so great an aversion to being exposed to the light that they will
throw up all sorts of barriers to “awakening” – including dismissing
Gurdjieff’s claims as either absurd or as applying only “to other people, but
not to me.”
As Gurdjieff has described it, the condition of most human beings is clearly
one of great suffering – although, again, most are unaware that they suffer.
We are deluded in thinking that we will be truly fulfilled when all our needs
and desires are satisfied. Since each “I” has its own set of needs and desires,
often conflicting, this is obviously a trap. Once we realize this, and truly
confront the degree to which we are mechanical, the result is potentially (and
quite literally) ego shattering. Some will flee from this, back to the safety of
identifying with this “I” or that. Others, however, will be seized by a desire
to overcome this condition, as far as possible – to “wake up” and achieve an
authentic “I.” This desire is a necessary precondition for “Work on oneself,”
as it is called in the Fourth Way.
In a moment, I will turn to the question of what, specifically, Work
consists in. But before doing so, I must note that Gurdjieff ties this “psycho-
logical” teaching to an elaborate cosmology involving a diagram called the
“Ray of Creation,” which shows reality emerging from the Absolute. The
Ray of Creation must be understood in terms of what is known as the “law of
three” and the “law of the octave.” The latter seems strikingly Pythagorean.
Gurdjieff argues that the octave of the musical scale (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti,
do) corresponds to a cosmic octave governing the emergence of the world
from the Absolute, as well as to the stages in the spiritual development of the
individual. The law of three holds that every phenomenon exhibits three
“forces”: active, passive, and neutralizing; or affirming, denying, and recon-
ciling. In Fourth Way teachings, the connection between the law of three
and the law of the octave is explicated through the mysterious symbol known
as the enneagram.
To really do justice to Gurdjieff’s philosophy, the intricacies of these laws
and diagrams would have to be explained in detail. But this is simply not
possible in a short introduction. For our purposes, we may focus instead on
just one crucial point: Gurdjieff’s views on the place of man in creation. First
of all, he makes it clear that whether we choose to do the Work and attempt
to “wake up” is not a purely personal matter. The Work is not self-improve-
ment, nor is happiness its goal. Instead, Gurdjieff claims that our ability to
become conscious plays a crucial role in the life of the cosmos itself.
Unfortunately, he also teaches (again, not unlike the Traditionalists) that in
the modern period, it is more difficult than ever for us to perform this role.8
Gurdjieff and Ouspensky both utilize the language of evolution to
describe the process by which individuals can become conscious and play
their part in the cosmic scheme. For Gurdjieff, the evolutionary process
described by biologists only takes mankind up to a certain point of develop-
ment. Going further involves, in fact, resisting the very physical forces that
made our biological evolution possible. In Fragments, Ouspensky reports that
Gurdjieff told him “The law for man is existence in the circle of mechanical
influences, the state of ‘man-machine.’ The way of the development of
hidden possibilities is a way against nature, against God.”9 However, this is
only possible for certain individuals. Gurdjieff teaches no doctrine of uni-
versal salvation. Only individuals of a very special sort can freely and con-
sciously choose to wage war against sleep.
But in what way do these individuals participate in a cosmic process, rather
than a purely personal one? To answer this question, we must look more
close at what “Work on oneself” consists in, and to the crucial concepts of
“remembering the self” and “self-observation.” The reader should proceed
with the warning that these are difficult ideas to explain, and that there are
significant differences of opinion within the Gurdjieff movement about what
they mean, and how to discuss them. The following is only one possible
interpretation.
Self-remembering, at its most basic level, consists in what we may call
“being present.”10 This is the vivid but ineffable sense, which we have all
experienced at one time or another, of being here now. It is not what is often
called today “being in the moment,” which seems to simply mean enjoying
8
See Ouspensky, Fragments, 309.
9
Ouspensky, Fragments, 47. Italics in original.
10
See Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being (Boston: Shambhala, 2011), 19.
the present rather than being preoccupied by our cares. Instead, being present
means being aware that I am in this body, at this time, having this experience;
it involves the sense of being “grounded” in the body, and in the present.
Normally, consciousness is absorbed in some object or situation, and the
sense that I am conscious and that it is happening in this body and now simply
drops out. In other words, the self is “forgotten.” What Gurdjieff means by
self-remembering is something like being aware that we are aware, or what is
called in philosophy apperception. This term actually comes up in Fragments.
Shortly after encountering Gurdjieff, Ouspensky describes the concept of
self-remembering to a friend who states dismissively that this is nothing new,
it’s just apperception.11 The pretentious friend attributes the concept to
Wilhelm Wundt, but of course Wundt derives it from Kant. To be sure,
self-remembering and Kantian apperception are not exactly the same thing,
but if one defines apperception simply as “awareness that we are aware,” this
is helpful in getting to Gurdjieff’s meaning.
Clearly, then, self-remembering involves a kind of bifurcation in con-
sciousness: I am aware simultaneously of my surroundings, and of myself
being aware.12 This does not mean the same thing as having “internal
thoughts” while being aware of external events. Gurdjieff and his followers
continually emphasize that true self-remembering is grounded in the body,
rather than something that takes place entirely “above the neck.” If our
awareness of ourselves being aware becomes exclusively a matter of con-
sciousness of our thoughts, then we will involve ourselves in all sorts of
distractions and self-deceptions. Indeed, Gurdjieff and those trained by him
give explicit instructions on how to ground attention in the body.
Once one is grounded in this way, one practices self-observation. And
what is observed are the “centers.” Some accounts list four: intellectual
(thought), emotional or feeling, moving (all learned actions of the organism
such as walking, eating, speaking, etc.), and instinctive (all innate – as
opposed to learned – activities of the organism, such as the work of the
internal organs, reflexes, and sensations).13 More often, however, the last two
are grouped together as “moving-instinctive center,” since they both deal
with actions (learned or innate, voluntary or involuntary) of the physical
organism.
Each of these centers has its own way of sensing and being, and ideally they
should be in harmony. In most people, some kind of disharmony is often
11
12
See Ouspensky, Fragments, 119. See also p. 188.
13
See P. D. Ouspensky, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution (New York: Random
House, 1950), 25–28.
present, and this usually consists in the overdevelopment of one center. For
example, some individuals “live in their heads”: They are focused almost
entirely on the intellectual center and are numb to the others. This is a
common malady of modern people. The practice of self-observation is
supposed to reveal these imbalances. It involves noting such things as unne-
cessary thinking, emotional reactions and our tendency to be “taken” by
them, tension in the body, and habitual actions.
Gurdjieff maintains that self-observation requires an unsparing honesty.
One will discover all sorts of things to dislike in oneself, and the process can
be painful (it is referred to in the Fourth Way as “voluntary suffering”14).
One habitual action that will frequently take us in the practice of self-
observation is the tendency to judge what one observes. But Gurdjieff teaches
that this is a trap: In judging, one “I” is simply passing sentence on another;
and, quite obviously, when we judge we have stopped observing! (Similarly,
observation is not “analysis.”15) Just as one should refrain from judging, so
one should also make no attempt to change what is observed. There will be
enormous temptation to do this, since much of what one observes about
oneself is negative. But Gurdjieff teaches that it is vital to the Work to come
to terms with just how mechanical we are, and that most attempts to change
are futile.
As a result of such claims, some see Gurdjieff’s philosophy as extraordina-
rily pessimistic. In fact, he does offer hope. The very act of observing our
negative qualities creates “space” between our observing selves and those
qualities. This means that over time their hold on us may be gradually
diminished. Those who are “in the Work” do practice self-observation in
meditation (referred to as “sittings”). But since the Fourth Way involves
engagement with the world, students practice self-observation in a variety of
life contexts. A particular emphasis is placed on observation while engaged in
physical work. And the importance of bodily orientation is frequently men-
tioned: Erect posture is emphasized as conducive to the cultivation of the
right sort of attention, as well as the absence of unnecessary physical
tension.16
Observation, again, involves awareness of all the centers. However,
“awareness” is not really the right term. Rather, what Gurdjieff seems to
mean is that we should be fully present both to and through the centers. The
ideal is to be aware of the world “out there,” but through all of the centers –
14
See de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, 238–243.
15
See Ouspensky, Fragments, 105.
16
See de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, 49–50, 143.
and, again, to be aware of ourselves in all these centers simultaneously (to

remember the self).17 In other words, the Work involves achieving a state in
which we are present to the Being of the world, and to our own Being.
Taken together, the world “out there” and the one “in here,” in ourselves
(between which we make an artificial division), are everything. We may
therefore say, in sum, that the objective of the Work is simply to be present to
what is. In Heideggerean terms, we could say that the Gurdjieff work is a
praxis for the full development of Dasein – Heidegger’s term for the funda-
mental nature of humanity as the being who is open to Being-as-such.
However, it must be noted that in the Fourth Way the term “being” has a
special, technical meaning. This is reflected, for example, in the title chosen
for Jeanne de Salzmann’s posthumously published notes, The Reality of Being.
If one does not understand the connotations of these words in Gurdjieff’s
teaching, this title may seem vacuous or redundant, but it is neither. In the
Fourth Way, the term “being” is usually used to refer to an attribute of man.
Gurdjieff and his followers use the word a great deal, and it is often juxta-
posed with “knowledge.”18 Gurdjieff states that it is possible for a man to
have a great deal of knowledge while having a low level of being. And he says
that this is not only common in modern Western culture, it is not even
perceived as a problem.19 What Gurdjieff is referring to is the familiar
phenomenon of, say, the professor who possesses a great deal of book
learning but who is also petty, absent minded, and neurotic. Or, to take an
example of more recent vintage, the techno-wizard who is socially dysfunc-
tional to the point of autism.
It is clear from both examples that “being” is not reducible to “character”
(absent mindedness and social ineptitude are not moral failings). Rather, for
Gurdjieff being seems to involve a kind of self-possession or self-mastery that
cannot be acquired via knowledge, in the sense of the accumulation of facts.
However, Gurdjieff also states that “knowledge depends on being.”20 What is
meant by “knowledge” in this context is authentic knowledge, or “knowl-
edge of the whole,” as Gurdjieff is quoted as saying in Fragments.21 This is, of
course, the conception of wisdom that philosophers have held from Plato to
Hegel. The difference is that Western philosophers conceive “knowledge of
the whole” as knowledge of a “system” of ideas or concepts that serves to
17
See de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, 41.
18
See, for example, Ouspensky, Fragments, 64–68.
19
20
Quoted in Ouspensky, Fragments, 65. Italics in original.
21
explain everything. For Gurdjieff, by contrast, knowledge of the whole

involves what is sometimes called in the Fourth Way “direct knowing.”
Like the concept of mystical gnosis (to which it may be equivalent), direct
knowing is extraordinarily hard to put into words. Here I will merely suggest
that direct knowing may be just what I described earlier as the state of being
“present to Being” – present to the Being of the world, and to our own
Being. In other worlds, “knowledge of all things” is a direct knowing of the
Being of the All.22 (Is this the same thing as knowing what Gurdjieff terms
the Absolute? Perhaps.) Gurdjieff believes that an individual can cultivate his
or her “level of being” through the development of this capacity, which
involves the harmonization of all the centers. Thus, it is precisely through
becoming present to Being that I actualize my own “being” (in Gurdjieff’s
sense of the word).
But now an important question arises: Just what is it that is present to
Being? I have said that this state is one in which we are present to both what is
“out there” and “in here” simultaneously; present to the All. But what is it in
us that does this? It cannot belong to any of the centers – intellectual,
emotional, or moving-instinctive – precisely because the attention
Gurdjieff wishes us to cultivate observes all of the centers. And so we must
ask: What is the “self” that observes? What is the “self” that remembers itself?
It is with the asking of these questions that Gurdjieff’s philosophy converges
with the most profound perennial teachings of mysticism, East and West.
Jacob Needleman writes that “the proper relationship of the three
centers . . . in the human being is a necessary precondition for the reception
and realization of what in the religions of the world has been variously
termed the Holy Spirit, Atman, and the Buddha nature.”23 Note that
Needleman says “reception and realization.” “Reception” implies that
something “outside” and distinct from us enters in, whereas “realization”
implies that something is born within us, or through us. One frequently finds
this ambiguity in the mystics, and the reason is simple. The “self” that
remembers itself, that is capable of being present to Being, is not myself –
where “myself” refers to my individual ego with all its idiosyncratic vices,
virtues, and quirks. But beneath that there is another “self” that is capable of
seeing all of my individual qualities and hence isn’t any of them. This self is by
definition impersonal. Thus, it is “mine” – and not mine. And so it is
perfectly reasonable to speak of identification with this self as if it were the
reception of something distinct from me, since it really is distinct from me. But
22
See de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, 36.
23
Needleman, “G. I. Gurdjieff and His School,” 370.
it is equally reasonable to speak of it as the realization of something already in

me, since it is the real me.
The Gurdjieff Work appears to be about giving birth to a higher “I”
within oneself, and the strong suggestion is that it is through us that the
Absolute comes to consciousness of itself. To be present to Being is to be able
to say, with Parmenides, “It is.” But what says this is not an individual, finite
being but rather an infinite (not individual, not limited) self to which all finite
beings presence themselves. It is the soul of the All – Needleman’s Holy
Spirit, Atman, or Buddha nature – awakened within an individual human
being. It is not “I” that wakes up, in the sense of my individual selfhood or
ego. It is something far greater. And yet, again, it is “I”: the authentic “I” that
is occluded by the many finite “I’s” spoken of earlier. Thus, the message of
the goddess to Parmenides, “It is,” ultimately is equivalent to the message
God gives to Moses: “I am” (Exodus 3:14). When the authentic “I” in me is
able to say “I am,” then “my” being (in Gurdjieff’s sense) is realized, and
Being confronts itself.24 Hence the title of Gurdjieff’s Life Is Only Real Then,
When “I Am,” as well as the title given to Jeanne de Salzmann’s posthumous
book The Reality of Being.25
The Fourth Way claims to teach a clear path to the realization of being.
Still, although the path may be clear, it is far from easy. As noted earlier,
Gurdjieff holds that the “I’s” will fight attempts to observe them and will
erect all sorts of barriers and distractions to Work. However, the Fourth Way
teaches that resistance is actually useful material for self-observation, and that
there can be no progress without it. Observation of resistance continually
confronts us with our mechanicalness. This can produce a kind of shock, and
a flash of awakening, which can have a profound effect.
Gurdjieff does not, however, promise us enlightenment: There will never
come a point when we “wake up” permanently, and Work is no longer
necessary. As it is in ordinary life, so it is in the Gurdjieff Work: Awakening is
not a constant state, but a continually repeated process of emerging from
sleep. Hence the title of Colin Wilson’s 1980 book on Gurdjieff, The War
Against Sleep.26 For Gurdjieff and his followers, it is a war without end.
24
See de Salzmann, The Reality of Being, 60, and especially p. 173.
25
Gurdjieff also taught that through Work, one could create an “essence” that could survive
the death of the body. This is a complicated matter, beyond the scope of the present essay.
26
See Colin Wilson, The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of G.I. Gurdjieff (Wellingborough,
Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1980).
25
C.G. JUNG AND JUNGIANISM
Gerhard Wehr
1 Life and Work

Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, left behind a life’s
work that has significant implications for spiritual and religious matters.
Jung’s writings are often studied by readers who are less interested in profes-
sional psychology than in self-understanding. A large number of his writings
fall under the rubric of esoteric literature.
Jung was born on July 26, 1875, the son of an Evangelical Reformed
minister in the small town of Kesswil, within the Swiss Canton of Thurgau,
on Lake Constance. After attending the gymnasium in Basel, he completed
his studies in the natural sciences and medicine from 1895 to 1900 at the
University of Basel. Jung’s decision to devote himself to psychiatry afforded
him the opportunity to link his interests in the natural and social sciences. As
he reports in his 1962 autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, already
during his youth he was drawn to the world of the supersensible and
transpersonal. Jung participated in spiritualist sittings with a medium
(Helene Preiswerk, a member of his mother’s family), which led to his
1902 doctoral dissertation, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called
Occult Phenomena (Zur Psychologie und Pathologie sogenannter occulter
Phenomena). Jung’s time from 1900 to 1909 as an assistant and later chief
physician at the psychiatric clinic at Burghölzli (under the direction of Eugen
Bleuler) was of great importance to his later medical and psychotherapeutic
practice. He studied briefly with Pierre Janet at the famous Salpetrière Clinic
in Paris, but it was Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis that were to make the
most important impact on him. In his speaking and writing, Jung advocated
Translation by Timothy Dail, revised by the editor. All translations are those of the translator
unless specifically noted otherwise. English titles of German-language works have been
adopted.
297
298 Gerhard W ehr
for psychoanalysis, which, at the beginning of the century, was still con-
troversial. However, within a few years he had set his own course and
distanced himself from the Freudian school. His analytical psychology placed
itself in opposition to psychoanalysis, beginning with a new model of
psychological types.
In 1903, Jung married Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a Swiss
industrialist, and started a family. Around the same time, he opened a highly
successful private psychotherapy practice in Küsnacht, near Zurich. He also
began publishing numerous works setting forth his theories. It was during
this same time that Jung turned to mythology and to the mystical and gnostic
traditions. He was also quite interested in the natural philosophy of German
Romanticism, in which one already found discussions of the unconscious
and the “dark side of the soul” in the early nineteenth century.
The year 1909 would be significant for Jung. He and Freud were invited to
lecture at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This invitation
contributed to the growth of Jung’s reputation in the Western world. At
the same time, it strengthened his high standing in the psychoanalytical
movement. Nevertheless, Jung was then also developing his own libido
theory, which differed from Freud’s in that it did not treat libido as exclu-
sively sexual. This view is found in his major work from 1912, Wandlungen
und Symbole der Libido (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido) translated
into English as Psychology of the Unconscious. This led to Jung’s break with
Freud in 1913, and to his removal from the International Psychoanalytical
Association, in which he had acted as president for several years.
By the beginning of the First World War, Jung had reached middle age.
For him, it was the period of a penetrating and transformative spiritual
experience, which can be characterized as his conflict with the unconscious.
A flood of inner images threatened to conquer Jung and to throw him
dissociatively into mental instability. These were experiences that drove
him, he believed, to the outer reaches of consciousness. At the same time,
Jung saw in them the primary material for his future life’s work. To bear up
under this nightmarish imaginativeness, he was careful to maintain contact
with reality. He told himself, “One does not become bright by imagining
brightness, but rather by becoming aware of darkness.”1 Departing from
conventional psychoanalysis, he no longer saw the unconscious merely as the
repository of the forgotten and repressed, which eludes deliberate access.
Aside from the personal unconscious, his new conception of the “collective
1
C. G. Jung, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 13, ed. M. Niehus-Jung and L. Hurwitz Ellsner (Olten
und Freiburg: Walter, 1978), 215.
C.G. Jung and Jungianism 299
unconscious” (i.e., the transpersonal unconscious) became much more

important to him, especially in that he saw it as underlying spiritual-religious
experience. The collective unconscious manifests itself, for example, in
dreams, in which one finds imagery and themes of an archetypal nature.
Jung argued that these “archetypes” were not ascribable to personal experi-
ence and that analogues were to be found in the fairy tales and myths of
peoples throughout the world.
Central to analytical psychology and its understanding of the collective
unconscious is the model of archetypes (from the Greek arche, beginning, and
typos, the molded, the originally produced). Jung derived the term linguis-
tically from texts in the Corpus Hermeticum and even used it to infer that the
designation is present in Greek philosophy as well as in the literature of the
Christian Church Fathers (e.g., Augustine). The concept of the archetype
underwent a process of clarification within the framework of Jung’s psychol-
ogy. Such a process of evolution was characteristic of him, as Jung did not
remain content with mere heuristic suppositions but aimed to get as close to
the real nature of the psyche as possible.
Nevertheless, he conceived the archetype as less a “primordial image” than
a dynamic and process-like force. Jung himself spoke of archetypes as “men-
tal life forces” (seelischen Lebensmächte), which in a peculiar way demand to be
recognized and validated. Because the archetype stands as the centerpiece of
analytical psychology, individuation takes on a central role as well. In Jung’s
conception of human nature, “becoming human” cannot merely be the
result of biological maturation. It is apparent that the empirical ego is subject
to a lifelong spiritual-psychical process of growth whose goal is the archetype
of “the self.” The center and circumference of this self are determined
through its embodiment of a whole or unity of the conscious and uncon-
scious. To this unity – which has the sense of completeness, rather than
perfection – belongs the integration of the individual “shadow,” that is, one’s
own unconscious dark side. Just as the shadow is invested in the individual
unconscious, there is within the unconscious of the man a psychical femi-
nine, the anima. Analogically, in the woman there is the masculine animus.
Because these are unconscious as well, they are typically projected onto other
human beings, which leads to all kinds of problems and misunderstandings.
The process of individuation does not merely involve becoming aware of
these elements of the psyche. Rather, one must strive for integration in the
full sense of the word – and to affirm and bear one’s own destiny.
Seen in this way, Jung’s conception of the process of individuation exhibits
initiatic traits. However, as a psychologist it could not be his concern to offer
meditative or contemplative exercises. In conjunction with his personal
300 Gerhard W ehr
psychological process at the time of the First World War, in 1916 he none-
theless developed “active imagination” (Aktive Imagination). This is a method
employed during the phase of advanced therapy through which patients
unfold the depth of their own psyche, thereby activating the creative poten-
tials of the unconscious. The individual ego enters into a state of
detachment.2 The therapist must refrain from all interference so that the
self can take over the direction during the process, in which images that affect
the dream and fantasy life display themselves. Jung, who also occasionally
occupied himself with the spiritual exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, followed
in this way a directive of the Jesuits, who recommended that instructors of
meditation refrain from all interference.
It is no coincidence that in his 1939 English-language commentary on the
Tibetan Book of the Dead, Jung speaks of the extent to which, as a path to
individuation, psychoanalysis constitutes a Western initiatic process. In this
context, he addresses the individual forms of the Western and Eastern paths.
He describes the Tibetan Book of the Dead as “an esoteric book” – esoteric in so
far as its understanding requires a special spiritual capacity that one does not
readily possess from the first. It is more valid to find one’s own path in the
form of a spiritually oriented conduct of life, and the experience that results
from it. And it is not possible merely through attaining secondhand knowl-
edge of another horizon of consciousness already developed by some spiritual
teacher. Jung was also skeptical of an imprudent adoption by Westerners of
practices developed by persons living under completely different psychoso-
cial conditions, whether those practices be yoga or so-called theosophical
teachings.
According to Jung, both the individual and humanity as a whole find
themselves in a process of transformation and maturation of an archetypal
nature. According to this way of looking at things, the existential meaning of
religiosity, with mysticism and esotericism at its spiritual core, allows itself to
be truly authentic. Whereas, by contrast, a theology that is mainly preached
or lectured remains lodged in formalism rather than in conscious participa-
tion in “divine wisdom.” The inefficacy of such theologies and their dimin-
ishing appeal are evident everywhere today.
Jung deepened his investigation of the archetypal dimension of the psyche
through his study of the gnostic texts of antiquity. His preoccupation with
Gnosticism was an important element in his struggles with his own uncon-
scious. Jung’s 1916 work Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the
Dead), a text initially withheld from the public, documents this critical,
2
(The word employed here by Professor Wehr is Gelassenheit – trans.)
internal psychic process. He felt inwardly compelled to express, in poetic

language, the powerful images that arose within him in terms of forms found
in the gnostic tradition, in particular those of the Alexandrian gnostic
Basilides (117–138 CE). Further images came forth from the depths of the
transpersonal unconscious. Jung discovered what a clarifying effect an artistic
rendition (painting, for example) can have within the psychotherapeutic
process. The images Jung produced included a mandala, which he drew
from a strong inner impulse. For Jung, the meaning of images always points
beyond their explicit definition, or expression in language.
Jung’s encounter and first intellectual exchange with the German
Sinologist Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) became particularly important to
him. Wilhelm had made a name for himself as an expert on the East Asian
spiritual world and as translator of the I Ching. In 1929, Jung contributed a
commentary to Wilhelm’s translation of the eighth-century Chinese medi-
tation classic The Secret of the Golden Flower. Within his more intimate circle of
colleagues and students, he invited Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881–
1962) of Tübingen to give a course on Kundalini yoga. Jung himself con-
tributed depth-psychological correspondences that illuminated the meaning
of this spiritual discipline. His encounter with Indologist Heinrich Zimmer
(1890–1943) also contributed to the expansion of Jung’s spiritual horizons
with a view toward other areas of the Indian spiritual world.
Jung visited India in 1937–1938, and for the first time, as he himself
confessed, he found himself under the immediate influence of a truly foreign
culture. It was typical of him, however, that he took with him as travel
reading the seventeenth-century alchemical text Theatrum Chemicum. Jung
paid heed to his dreams and was therefore not surprised that alongside his
impressive daily experience of the Indian world of temples, he dreamed of
the Grail and of occidental Christian symbolism. For him, this was an
expression of spiritual-archetypal rootedness, which cannot be extinguished
even when the daily life of the traveler abroad is filled with completely alien
and exotic images.
Jung’s collaboration with Richard Wilhelm and Heinrich Zimmer
remained important beyond their early deaths. His association with The
Secret of the Golden Flower, for which Jung had written a psychological
commentary, inspired Jung’s work in later life to a great degree. From then
on, the world of alchemical symbolism in its illustration of the transpersonal
processes of the unconscious opened itself to him. For Jung, alchemy is a
centuries-old form of knowledge that can be applied hermeneutically to the
unconscious productions of men living today. While gnostic texts contrib-
uted helpful insights to Jung’s understanding of psychic processes in the first
302 Gerhard W ehr
years of his research, only alchemy turned out to be appropriate for a better
understanding of spiritual-psychical transformations in the phases of matura-
tion and how they can represent themselves in dreams.
In comparison to the gnosis of antiquity, alchemy had an advantage in that
the medieval texts and iconographic portrayals were closer to the con-
sciousness of modern human beings than records from the early Christian
and pre-Christian eras. This becomes apparent when one takes note of
Jung’s pertinent works in which he amplifies or enriches images produced
by modern people with equivalents from the alchemical tradition. As a
psychologist, Jung had to be careful to see that immediate experiences were
documented as carefully as possible. That was complicated in the case of
early Christian Gnosticism, since in the first half of the twentieth century –
before the discoveries of Nag-Hammadi had become known – there were
still relatively few original texts available. One had to rely on multiple
scattered reports and interpretations from the quill of Christian heresiology,
that is, from ecclesiastical enmity.
Moreover, it must be emphasized that in dealing with alchemical material,
Jung was not concerned simply to “psychologize” it and to disregard actual
alchemical laboratory operations. It was important to Jung to cross the
boundaries of a personalist-constructed psychology to derive possibilities
for comparison, with whose help psychic processes in their depth dimension
might be better understood. As a psychologist, Jung made important con-
tributions to research in intellectual history in general, and to esotericism in
particular. This already becomes clear when one sees with what care he
compiled and interpreted rare alchemical literature. Jung’s research into
alchemy stretches from the 1930s up to his late work. Aside from a series of
smaller preliminary works, the volume Psychology and Alchemy represents an
important milestone in his research.
If the descent into his own unconscious gave Jung unexpected insights
into psychic reality, it was only his penetration of the multifaceted alchemical
tradition that made it possible for him to decipher these highly personal
experiences. For Jung, it was a decades-long process of coming to awareness.
Jung’s contributions to research into alchemy conclude alongside a series of
further studies in the posthumously published, two-part work Mysterium
Coniunctionis, in which he was assisted by his colleague Marie-Louise von
Franz.
In light of the significance of archetypes in religious and spiritual contexts,
one must in addition discuss Jung’s psychological works in their relationship
to religion. This topic moved him his entire life – not simply because he grew
up in a parsonage, but rather because for Jung the religious signified a reason
for being. In this context must be understood the words he had placed over
the gate to his house: Vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit (Summoned or not
summoned, God will be present).
Jung opened his 1937 Terry Lectures (later published as Psychology and
Religion), delivered at Yale University, with the following statement:
Since religion is incontestably one of the earliest and most universal expres-
sions of the human mind, it is obvious that any psychology which touches
upon the psychological structure of human personality cannot avoid taking
note of the fact that religion is not only a sociological and historical
phenomenon, but also something of considerable personal concern to a
great number of individuals.3
It is remarkable when one sees Jung, a Protestant, speaking of the extra-
ordinary importance of dogma and ritual, which he validates as “methods of
spiritual hygiene.” The life of Christ is not a one-time historical occurrence
for him. To Jung, who was familiar with the mysticism of Meister Eckhart
and Jacob Boehme, the life of Christ in fact happens always and everywhere,
because the Christian archetype is interwoven with what it means to be
human. Naturally, this is not meant in a narrowly sectarian way. Jung wished
to deconstruct traditions of thought that have become historically fixed and
rigid, in order to reveal their experiential value.
This becomes clear, for example, in two studies: “A Psychological
Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity” (1948) and “Transformation
Symbolism in the Mass” (1954). When he was criticized for “psychologizing”
religious facts, he responded that by “God” he meant a psychic image, a
phenomenon that appears in the human psyche. Jung expressly abstained
from making theological pronouncements. On the other hand, if someone
accused him of abstraction and of not being faithful to the spiritual experience,
then he did not shy away as a layman from responding with a statement of
avowal, such as when he confessed to the Catholic theologian Gebhard Frei (in
a letter dated January 13, 1948): “Christ is indeed in us and we in him! . . . I am
thankful to God every day that I am permitted to experience the reality of the
Imago Dei [man as God’s image]. . . . Thanks to this actus gratiae [act of grace] my
life has meaning, and my inner eye has been opened to the beauty and
grandeur of the dogma.”4
3
C. G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 2nd ed., Collected Works, Vol. 11, trans.
R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 5.
4
C. G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1, ed. Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffé, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 487.
304 Gerhard W ehr
Testimonies such as these show that Jung did not retreat exclusively to the
position of a nonpartisan observer and researcher when he dealt with the
central themes of religion. He speaks as someone deeply moved, one who
was not untouched by the great contents of religious tradition. The darkness
of the Old Testament image of God (Yahweh) aroused him at his innermost
core. In none of his later works did this become more obvious than in Answer
to Job (1952). Therein he raised fundamental questions about the image of
God, which coincide with essential questions about human existence in
relation to the elemental force of the transcendent. Without a doubt, Jung
was successful at moving minds again and again.
As to more recent esoteric or mystical figures and movements, Jung
principally kept a certain distance from them. In this way, he consciously
refrained from seeking out gurus of the status of Ramana Maharshi (1879–
1950) during his trip to India, or questioning them in the manner of countless
contemporaries, or meditating in their presence. With all due respect for
them as holy and honored initiates of the East, Jung came to the following
conviction: “I would have felt it as a theft had I attempted to learn from the
holy men and to accept their truth for myself. Neither in Europe can I make
borrowings from the East, but must shape my life out of myself – out of what
my inner being tells me, or what nature brings to me.”5 He reiterated this
reliance on that which springs up from one’s own psychic ground when
speaking of H. P. Blavatsky or Rudolf Steiner; for this reason, he was
skeptical of both of them. From personal friends close to the
Anthroposophical Society, he received all kinds of inside information
about Steiner’s followers.
Jung became especially suspicious when observing how otherwise
unknowing believers misinterpreted messages of this or that master figure
as their own “awareness of higher worlds,” instead of working toward an
awareness stemming from the depths of their own soul. The spiritual trans-
formation for which one should strive cannot be reached through a method.
On the other hand, it is legitimate to place Steiner’s work in dialogue with
Jung’s, so to speak. One would only have to be careful not to blur the fine
line between comparison and synthesis, whereby everything is lumped and
mixed together, undifferentiated. As always with Jung, the dialogue with
representatives of other disciplines was important, especially with theology
and the natural sciences.
5
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard
and Clara Winston (New York: Random House, 1965), 275.
In this context, one must consider the Eranos Symposia, organized by

Olga Froebe-Kapteyn (1881–1962) beginning in 1933 at Lake Maggiore in
Switzerland. Here, scholars and scientists from all over the world met to
discuss their research and present it to an international audience. In the early
years, the symposia dealt mainly with religious studies and esoteric issues,
which took center stage, but in later years disciplines of the natural sciences
were also discussed. Eranos had its origins in Froebe-Kapteyn’s Theosophical
“School of Spiritual Research.” Following a break with Alice Bailey,
Froebe-Kapteyn closed the school and replaced it with the Eranos
Symposia. It would chiefly be Jung who set the priorities for Eranos. In
terms of his principles, Jung continually placed great emphasis on the liveli-
ness and spontaneity of the psyche, in light of which dogmatic theological
systems become superfluous. In this way, a characteristic of the esoteric
reveals itself – not in the sense of the “secretive,” but rather attentiveness
to the inner dimension of experience and reality. For his entire life, Jung
advocated for such attentiveness.
It is ultimately worth noting that even the stone erected above Jung’s grave
at the Küsnacht cemetery unambiguously expresses the spirit and hope for
which he lived. The inscription states: Primus homo de terra terrenus, secundus
homo de caelo caelestis (“The first man is of the earth, earthly; the second man is
of heaven, heavenly,” 1 Corinthians, 15:47).
2 Aspects of the Jungian School

Through his writing and lecturing, C. G. Jung established a school of thought
and a therapeutic approach that have been very influential. The development
of the Jungian movement had already begun in 1916 with the founding of the
Psychological Club (Psychologischer Club) in Zürich. Numerous training
schools, the first of which was the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht at Lake
Zurich, have charged themselves with the further development of analytical
psychology. This process took on various forms. It was contingent on the fact
that numerous Freudian and Jungian analysts were forced to emigrate from
Europe around the mid-twentieth century, as a result of the rise of fascism. A
theory and therapeutic method based on superpersonal and supernational
foundations were not permitted in nations under totalitarian regimes. Jung’s
attitude during the era of National Socialism in Germany is still debatable.
Certain ambiguous and unfortunate statements made by Jung damaged his
image considerably. He was not even spared the slanderous accusation that he
was an anti-Semite. It is easy to overlook the fact that Jung made it possible
for Jewish colleagues to remain legally in his psychotherapists’ organization in
306 Gerhard W ehr
spite of the political consolidation of institutional powers and the alignment

of psychoanalytic organizations with National Socialist ideology.
Further, reliable witnesses – such as the leading Jewish Jungian Thomas
Kirsch – explicitly confirm Jung’s dedication to the disadvantaged and the
persecuted. On emigration, a great number of dispossessed analysts found
affiliation with the Jung Centers that already existed in the United States.
Some, such as Jung’s students James and Hilde Kirsch, settled in Los Angeles,
affiliating themselves with other refugee Jungians in an organization that
eventually became the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. Erich Neumann
(1905–1960), whose works explored the origins of consciousness and the
archetype of the Great Mother, became a major figure in analytical psychol-
ogy in Israel and internationally. He was one of the acclaimed lecturers at the
Eranos Symposia.
Concerning the ideas of the Jungian movement, two main streams suc-
ceeding Jung are worth mentioning. One is a “classical” formulation, a
stream geared more strongly toward developmental psychology. Another
stream can be described as oriented more toward archetypal psychology. It
deals with the theme of maturation, to which integration of the shadow and
spiritual image belong within the framework of the process of individuation.
It is a process that starts to appear in midlife and in which one can recognize
initiatic traits, somewhat analogous to Nietzsche’s aphorism: “You should
become who you are.”6
A further direction of the so-called Jung School gives special attention to
the images and symbols produced by the psyche. Here the focus of attention
is placed on the archetypal observation of mental facts. Among its represen-
tatives is James Hillman, the late editor of the magazine Spring, who also
became known through his early involvement with the Eranos Symposia. He
employed the description “archetypal psychology” in his work. One must
also note the important role Jung’s ideas have played within the framework of
transpersonal psychology, whose representatives pay special attention to
spiritual traditions, including the spiritual-religious schools of both East and
West. Whether one can also speak, as Richard Noll does, of a pseudo-
religious “Jung Cult,” which places the psychologist in the gray area of
neo-paganism, magic, and so on, remains open for debate.7 But Jung himself
does not deserve to be reduced to the shadow side of the movement he
6
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge
7
See Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994).
founded, or the shadow of its followers. (Additionally, there are the shadow
projections of some critics.)
The movement that began in the original circle of colleagues of the
Psychological Club in Zürich, then as the Zürich C. G. Jung Institute, was
advanced over decades with some transformations. Mention must be made of
the work of Marie-Louise von Franz and her Research and Training Center
for Depth Psychology. Von Franz stressed the importance of not only
perpetuating but deepening Jung’s approach. Some saw in such a position
an attempt to shield the work of the founding father from change, or even
falsification through new developments. In any case, such a controversy
demonstrates again that Jungianism is a vital, multi-faceted movement.
If, in light of these many accents and innovations, one asks to what extent
there are essential commonalities in the post-Jung era, then one must surely
point to the importance of Jung’s use of alchemical symbolism, with the help
of which he described the psychological process of maturation. Aside from
the texts mentioned, Psychology and Alchemy and Mysterium Coniunctionis, the
work Psychology of the Transference is notable. Other commonalities can be
mentioned. These include, in particular, a view of psychic reality based on
completeness and individuation that does not only take the individual into
account but at the same time looks to a transformation of society. The
problems of human beings are not solvable solely by technical or organiza-
tional skill – not if damage to the psyche is to be prevented. In light of the
globalization and homogenization encompassing virtually all regions today,
Jung’s work has never been more useful and important.
26
RENÉ GUÉNON AND TRADITIONALISM
Mark Sedgwick
1 Introduction
What is sometimes called “Guénonian Traditionalism” is a school or move-
ment most easily identified by its origin in the writings of the French
philosopher René Guénon (1886–1951). Guénonian Traditionalism – dis-
tinguished in this essay from other forms of traditionalism by the use of a
capital “T” – was originally developed in Paris in the 1920s and has since
become widespread and influential. Some Traditionalists today stay close to
Guénon’s original conceptions and practice, and they may be said to form the
Traditionalist school, sometimes now called Integral Traditionalism; others
have modified and developed his ideas to the extent that purist Guénonians
do not recognize them as fellow Traditionalists. These may be said to be part
of the broader Traditionalist movement.
Guénonian Traditionalists of both sorts understand “tradition” in a special
sense that distinguishes them from the many other individuals and groups that
use the term. For Traditionalists, “tradition” indicates the spiritual wisdom that
is conceived as having formed the ancient core of all the great religions and
spiritual paths – in effect, the perennial philosophy. The term “perennialist” is
also used, both by some Traditionalists to describe themselves and by some
outsiders. Traditionalists, however, differ from other perennialists such as
Aldous Huxley (who published his The Perennial Philosophy in 1944) in their
anti-modernism and their insistence on esoteric initiation. Huxley, for exam-
ple, was interested in neither of these. This insistence is one basis on which
Traditionalism may be classed as esoteric; another is the degree to which
Traditionalism draws on other esoteric currents discussed in this volume,
even though Traditionalists are fiercely critical of most other such currents,
which they see as “pseudo-initiatic” or even “counter-initiatic.”1
1
This summary and the following paragraphs draw on my Against the Modern World:
Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford
308
R e n é G u énon and T raditionalism 309
Traditionalism has a complex doctrine,2 and a cyclical conception of time

borrowed from Hinduism. In the distant first age of the current cycle,
spiritual wisdom was widespread and generally accessible; in the current
and final age, identified as the kali yuga or dark age, spiritual wisdom has
almost vanished. The result is what is called modernity, with all its problems.
Inevitably, things will degenerate further. During the first age, spiritual
wisdom was unified, and there was no distinction between the esoteric and
exoteric. In later ages, a distinction developed between these, and the
exoteric split into the various religions that we know today. Some of these,
including the Catholic Church, then lost their esoteric content. Under these
circumstances, the immediate task of Traditionalism is to reveal and recover
what remains of the ancient tradition. A related task is to do what can be done
under the circumstances.
However, Guénon did not think that much could be done under the
circumstances of modernity. At best, a small “elite” might save what could be
saved, for themselves and for the new age that would come in the new cycle.
Guénonian purists agree, and their activities have thus generally been in the
scholarly and spiritual fields. Some Traditionalists – generally rejected by the
purists – have, however, seen possibilities for a more general transformation
and have thus been active in the political field. At the present time, it is these
political Traditionalists who are most widespread and active.
The scholarly activities of certain Traditionalists are impressive in their
scope but are mostly ignored by mainstream academia, which generally
rejects Traditionalism when it notices it (as it does from time to time), on
the grounds that it is methodologically unsound, not to mention tainted with
esotericism. Traditionalists, in turn, generally reject academic scholarship,3
seeing it as incapable of grasping what really matters, and as contributing
more to confusion than to clarification. Despite this, some important
Traditionalists have been academics, and most Traditionalists are in some
sense intellectuals, if only because the complexity of Guénon’s work means
that it is not easily accessible. Political Traditionalism, however, has been to
University Press, 2004), 21–28. In general, my approach has been to cite this book when
sources and argument are given there, and to cite other works especially when they are more
recent and/or were not included in Against the Modern World.
2
For more detail, see Graham Rooth, Prophet for a Dark Age: A Companion to the Works of René
Guénon (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2008) or William W. Quinn, The Only
Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
3
This includes the historical scholarship in my Against the Modern World, as might have been
expected. There are, however, exceptions: Traditionalists who believe that an accurate
understanding of Traditionalism’s past may contribute usefully to its future.
310 Ma rk Sedg wic k
some extent popularized and so in some form reaches a more general

audience.
The scholarly activities of Traditionalists have resulted over the years in an
impressive number of books and journals and, more recently, publishing
houses and Internet sites.4 Some of the books and articles are dense and
technical, intended for other Traditionalists, and may be termed “hard
Traditionalism.” Others are aimed at a more general audience and are either
not explicitly Traditionalist or are merely inspired by Traditionalism, some-
times as no more than one influence among many. These may be termed
“soft Traditionalism.” Still others are editions and translations of classic non-
Western religious texts that meet the highest standards of mainstream aca-
demic scholarship.
The spiritual activities of Traditionalists may likewise be termed “hard” or
“soft.” There have been Traditionalist groups that have established
Traditionalist Sufis and Traditionalist Masonic lodges, and there have also
been Traditionalists who participate in, and sometimes influence, preexisting
groups – again, generally Sufi or Masonic.
The activities of political Traditionalists have been of a non-electoral
variety, and at the far right of the standard political spectrum. In the sense
in which the terms were used earlier, they have more often been “soft” than
“hard,” although there are also published works of hard political
Traditionalism.
2 The Origins of Traditionalism

Guénon’s writings rarely disclosed their sources, but his biography and an
analysis of his work allow these sources to be reconstructed. Most
Traditionalists would dispute such a reconstruction, stressing that the only
real source of Traditionalism is tradition itself.
After a provincial childhood, Guénon encountered esotericism when he
moved to Paris at the age of eighteen, in 1904. While a student, he became
closely involved in the Martinist Order of “Papus” (Gérard Encausse, 1865–
1916), itself a development of Theosophy with elements of irregular
Masonry.5 His thought was subsequently influenced principally by his own
4
An analysis of the books and Internet sites, now somewhat outdated, is given on my website
www.traditionalists.org
5
The classic source for Guénon’s life is Paul Chacornac, La vie simple de René Guénon (Paris:
Editions traditionnelles, 1958). There are several later editions and translations. For Papus, see
Marie-Sophie André and Christophe Beaufils, Papus, biographie: la Belle Epoque de l’occultisme
(Paris: Berg International, 1995).
readings of the Vedanta; by a Swedish painter resident in Paris, Ivan Aguéli

(1869–1917), who combined Theosophy with Egyptian Sufism; and by a
French writer, Count Albert-Eugène de Pouvourville (1861–1940), who
combined concern about what would now be called the “clash of civiliza-
tions” with what was then called Taoism.6 It is unclear how Guénon was first
introduced to Hindu works, but these were relatively well known in fin-de-
siècle Paris.
This early period of Guénon’s life ended with the disruption of the fin-de-
siècle esoteric milieu by the First World War, and with Guénon’s marriage
to a respectable Catholic. Guénon published his first books in 1921, con-
demning Theosophy and other such currents, under the patronage of the
neo-Thomist Catholic theologian and philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–
1973).7 He also published a book on Hinduism that he had written as a
doctoral thesis, but which had been rejected by the Sorbonne – one reason
for his and Traditionalism’s lasting hostility toward academia. During this
period, Guénon worked as a high school philosophy teacher while devel-
oping what would become the essential tenets of Traditionalism in numer-
ous articles as well as books.8
Between 1927 and 1929, Guénon suffered a number of disasters: He lost
his job, his wife died, and his adopted daughter was removed from his care by
her family. In 1930, he traveled to Egypt, a country in which he had never
previously been much interested, in the company of a wealthy American
widow who had proposed to finance a book series he was to edit. However,
Guénon broke with the widow and spent the rest of his life in Cairo, never
returning to France. He attempted to support himself by his writing but
achieved a reasonable standard of living only as a result of gifts from various
admirers of his work, the number of which continued to grow.9
During this final period of his life, from 1930 until his death in 1951,
Guénon lived as a Muslim and followed an Egyptian Sufi Order.10 His later
Muslim admirers date his conversion to Islam to his encounter with the
Swedish Sufi Aguéli in 1911, while his later non-Muslim admirers dispute
this, stressing his continuing commitment to Masonry even during his
Egyptian years. Masonry need not be incompatible with Islam, however,
6
Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 39–50, 56–62.
7
Nöele Maurice-Denis Boulet, “L’ésotériste René Guénon: Souvenirs et jugements,” La
pensée catholique: Cahiers de synthèse 77 (1962).
8
A limited selection of these is given in the Suggestions for Further Reading at the end of this
volume.
9
Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 73–80.
10
Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 76.
and it is clear that Guénon did follow the Shariah scrupulously during this
period. There are no traces of any Islamic practice before 1930. Guénon
himself denied that he had “converted” to Islam, since it was impossible for
anyone who truly understood the perennial philosophy to convert to any-
thing – he had merely “moved in” to Islam.11
Guénon’s writing in Cairo further developed his earlier themes, but with a
new emphasis on initiation, stressing that esoteric initiation (in his own case,
Sufism, as well as Masonry) must be within an orthodox exoteric framework
(in his own case, Islam). These were the final elements to be added to what
might be called the pure doctrine of Guénonian Traditionalism.
Traditionalism is in many ways a typical product of nineteenth-century
Western approaches to the spiritual. Like so much else, it is clearly indebted
to Theosophy, and through Theosophy to the common fund of Western
esotericism. Its emphasis on initiation derives at least in part from Masonry. It
also reflects the widespread interest in Oriental spirituality that followed the
first translations of Hindu and Sufi works into modern European languages in
the 1820s, an interest that may itself be understood in terms of the Romantic
Movement and, before that, of Deism.12
Traditionalism’s understanding of modernity as the result of decline rather
than of progress is unusual in a nineteenth-century context, although it is in
some ways implicit in the Romantic Movement, even though the idea of
decline and degeneration as the basic dynamic of history has always been
popular, in Hinduism as well as in many versions of the Golden Age myth.
Anti-modernism is, however, fairly typical of the period following the end of
the First World War. Spengler’s Decline of the West, published in 1918, is the
best known representative of this trend. Sufism, another important element,
was also popular in Europe and America in the interwar years.13
However, Traditionalism also owes something to non-Western sources.
At the level of detailed doctrine, the Advaita Vedanta is both Guénon’s
inspiration and source. At the level of practice, Sufism is clearly even more
important than Masonry, as the source of the idea that the esoteric path must
be followed within the context of orthodox exoteric practice. The relation-
ship between the esoteric path and exoteric practice has been disputed for
11
Thierry Zarcone, “Relectures et transformations de Soufisme en Occident,” Diogène 187
(2000), 145–160.
12
Mark Sedgwick, “Quelques sources du dix-huitième siècle du pluralisme religieux inclusif,”
in Etudes d’histoire de l’ésotérisme: mélanges offerts à Jean-Pierre Laurent, ed. Jean-Pierre Brach
and Jérôme Rousse-Lacordaire (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 2007), 49–65.
13
Mark Sedgwick, “European Neo-Sufi Movements in the Interwar Period,” in Islam in Inter-
war Europe, ed. Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain (New York: Columbia University Press,
2008), 183–215.
centuries in Islam, with Sufis frequently being criticized – sometimes with

justification and sometimes without – for ignoring exoteric rules and
practice.14 One response to these criticisms was for Sufis to emphasize the
importance of the exoteric Shariah as the vessel that holds the esoteric
Haqiqah or truth. This approach was taken by Guénon’s Sufi shaykh in
Cairo, Salama al-Radi.15
From an academic perspective, it is far from clear that Sufism as found in
the Muslim world involves initiation as understood in the West, but this
question has troubled few Traditionalists, most of whom have had no direct
contact with the Muslim world or with non-Traditionalist Muslims. Scholars
might also question the very concept of “orthodoxy,” but again this has
rarely troubled the Traditionalists themselves.
3 The Initial Reception of Traditionalism

Some of the earliest enthusiasts of Guénon’s work came, like him, from the
French esoteric and Masonic milieus. Others came from the artistic milieu,
some seeking to ground their artistic production in a deeper understanding of
reality. Marxism provided an analysis of reality that was attractive to many,
and Traditionalism provided its own analysis, attractive to a few.16
By the late 1920s, Guénon’s work was beginning to be known outside
France. His enthusiastic readers from this period who are now well known
are mostly those who later played some part in the further development of
Traditionalism. One of the first and most important of these was Ananda
Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), an Englishman partially of Sri Lankan origin
who emigrated to America during the First World War. Coomaraswamy was
a distinguished art historian, and the first academic to be a Traditionalist.
Guénon’s writings turned Coomaraswamy’s focus from what was then called
Oriental art to the spirituality underlying that art, understood within a
Traditionalist framework. Coomaraswamy’s main interest was Buddhism,
and he worked with Guénon – who he never actually met, but corresponded
with at length – to integrate Buddhism into Traditionalism, which had until
that point drawn mostly on Hinduism.17
14
For the phenomenon, Richard McGregor, “The Problem of Sufism,” Mamluk Studies
Review, 13:2 (2009).
15
Michael Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2000), 233.
16
Kathleen Ferrick Rosenblatt, René Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic Guide (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1999), 97–111.
17
Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 34–36, 51–53.
Another academic enthusiast of Traditionalism was Mircea Eliade (1907–

1986), then at the University of Bucharest, who was later in correspondence
with Coomaraswamy, and also with a painter and would-be academic in
Italy, Baron Julius Evola (1898–1974), a further early enthusiast of
Traditionalism. Unlike Coomaraswamy, Eliade did not influence the devel-
opment of Traditionalism, but Traditionalism may have influenced the
development of Eliade. Eliade’s mature work is massive and complex and
differs from mainstream Traditionalism in important respects, but much of
Eliade’s basic analysis is arguably derived from Traditionalism.18
In the long run, Evola would prove the most important contributor to the
development of Traditionalism after Guénon and Coomaraswamy. As
Guénon is the origin of Traditionalism as a whole, Evola is the origin of
political Traditionalism. Guénon was not Evola’s only source – Nietzsche
was also a major influence – and Evola never agreed with Guénon’s require-
ment for esoteric initiation within an exoteric framework. His esotericism
was more eclectic than Guénon’s and included magia sexualis, closely linked
to his reading of Tantra.19
Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998), another Guénon enthusiast, was the Swiss-
born son of a German musician and his French wife. Schuon was interested
in non-Christian religion as a teenager and dreamed of being a painter, but
financial hardship forced him to leave school and take a job in a factory.20 In
later life, he created paintings and poetry that were much admired by his
followers.
All these early Traditionalists have similar backgrounds. All had long-
standing interests in esotericism, the occult, and non-Western religion,
save that neither Eliade nor Schuon were ever much interested in the occult.
Aguéli, Coomaraswamy, Evola, and Schuon were interested in art or were
artists, often of real talent. Aguéli is well known as a painter today in his native
Sweden, if not much outside it, and Evola still features in standard histories of
the Dada movement, whose authors often seem unaware of his later career.
Coomaraswamy and Eliade were distinguished academics; Guénon and
Evola attempted academic careers.21
18
Natale Spineto, “Mircea Eliade and ‘Traditional Thought,’” in The International Eliade, ed.
Bryan S. Rennie (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 131–147.
19
Hugh Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 140–161.
20
Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 84–85. The classic source for Schuon’s life is his
autobiography, Frithjof Schuon, Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen (Switzerland, privately
printed, 1974), but this is almost impossible to obtain.
21
What seems to have attracted all these early Traditionalists to Guénon’s

work and to Traditionalism itself is its uncompromising condemnation of a
modernity that they had already, for various reasons, rejected. Traditionalism
provided an explanation of what was wrong. It also indicated a way forward,
or at least a general direction.
4 The Development of Traditionalism

The development of Traditionalism by Schuon is closest to Guénon’s origi-
nal vision in that it was spiritual, and initially Sufi. The development of
Traditionalism by various Masons was probably also close to Guénon’s
original vision, but less is known about this. Traditionalist Masonry remains
under-researched, partly because of the difficulties that research into
Masonry presents for the non-Mason.22 Evola’s development was the furth-
est from Guénon’s vision and – unlike the other developments – took place
independently of Guénon.
Schuon was one of a number of Traditionalists who were inspired by
Guénon’s work to search for a traditional esoteric initiation. He found this at
the hands of a well-known Algerian Sufi shaykh, Ahmad al-Alawi (1869–
1934), and he used this “initiation” to establish a Swiss branch of al-Alawi’s Sufi
Order, the Alawiyya, in about 1933. A number of Swiss Traditionalists joined
Schuon’s branch of the Alawiyya, converting to Islam to do so, but keeping
their conversion secret, and modifying the standard practices of Islam some-
what to this end and to facilitate life as a practicing Muslim in Europe. Guénon
referred some of those who wrote asking for a recommended initiation to
Schuon, and Schuon’s Alawiyya grew, establishing branches in France and
elsewhere, and losing contact with its Algerian origins.23 The final size of
Schuon’s Alawiyya is not known but was probably in the region of one
thousand to two thousand people at its height.24 Its impact was greater than
those numbers suggest, however, because many of Schuon’s Alawis were
writers or academics: Their works of soft Traditionalism reached a wide
audience, presenting religious and artistic topics to the reading public within
a framework that derived from Traditionalism.25
22
One starting point is Denys Roman, René Guénon et les destins de la franc-maçonnerie (Paris:
Editions de l’Œuvre, 1982).
23
Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 88–90. See this source for other information on
Schuon, following.
24
This estimate is impressionistic and may be badly wrong. The absolute lower limit is
probably five hundred; the total might be much higher.
25
The best-selling Maryami author in North America was Huston Smith, whose The World's
Religions sold millions of copies there, although it sold fewer copies in Europe. The World’s
Schuon is important for establishing the largest and most widespread Sufi
Traditionalist organization. He is also important for his development of
Guénon’s original Traditionalism, identifying Guénon’s esoteric perennial
philosophy as primordial truth or perennial religion, and developing the
concept of the “transcendent unity of religions,” including Christianity,
which Guénon had rejected more firmly. One result of this development
was that even before Guénon’s death, Schuon’s following began to include
non-Muslims, most of whom were Christian; this was the cause of a breach
with Guénon.
Schuon’s Alawiyya initially combined Traditionalist metaphysics with Sufi
initiation within the context of orthodox Islam, just as Guénon himself had.
As the years passed, however, the relative importance of Islam declined, a
development connected with a series of visions in which Schuon saw the
Virgin Mary. These led to an increasing emphasis on the Virgin, and to the
renaming of Schuon’s Sufi Order, which became the Maryamiyya in Mary’s
honor. Schuon moved with some of his closest followers to Bloomington,
Indiana, in 1981, and elements of Native American religious practice such as
the Sun Dance were then added to the original Sufism and to the reverence
for the Virgin. The focus on the person of Schuon himself increased. Reports
also indicate the practice of sacred nakedness.26 The Maryamiyya at this point
might perhaps have developed into a new religion had not scandal connected
with the practice of sacred nakedness and then Schuon’s own death
intervened.
One member of the Maryamiyya was an Iranian academic, Seyyed Hossein
Nasr (b. 1933), the first and most important Traditionalist to be of Muslim
origin. Although Nasr followed Schuon and accepted the premise of the
transcendent unity of religions, his focus was always on Islam, and he probably
knew nothing about the stranger goings-on in Bloomington until scandal
broke there. Nasr encountered Traditionalism while studying in the United
States, and he established it in prerevolutionary Iran on his return, both in the
Philosophy Department at Tehran University and through the well-funded
Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, which he headed. In the context of
Nasr’s Academy, “philosophy” was understood as the perennial philosophy.
Religions, initially published in 1958 as The Religions of Man, predated Smith’s encounter with
Schuon and owed its perennialist approach to other sources. Later revisions of the book
reflect Traditionalism, however, and Smith’s later works are more explicitly Traditionalist.
26
Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 161–177; and Hugh Urban, “A Dance of Masks: The
Esoteric Ethics of Frithjof Schuon,” in Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of
Mysticism, ed. G. William Barnard and Jeffrey J. Kripal (New York: Seven Bridges Press,
2002), 406–440.
Like the early Schuon, Nasr developed Traditionalism in an Islamic

context; unlike Schuon, he focused less on the organization of practice and
on other religions, and more on scholarship. As well as completing a doctoral
degree at Harvard, Nasr studied under some of the leading teachers of
mystical philosophy in Iran, and his work combined the Traditionalist frame-
work with greater learning in, and understanding of, a non-Western religious
and esoteric tradition than had been possessed by any previous Traditionalist.
As a result, his works have been well received in many parts of the Muslim
world, as well as in the West.27 Nasr’s close connections with the shah meant
that he was obliged to leave Iran when the revolution came. He continued
his academic and Traditionalist careers in the United States, gathering a
following there, and working with other Muslim Traditionalists, of whom
the most important was Martin Lings (1909–2005), an English Sufi who had
once been close to Guénon in Cairo.28
Just as Schuon established a Traditionalist Sufi Order to provide esoteric
initiation within the framework of exoteric Islam, others established
Traditionalist Sufi lodges to provide esoteric initiation within an exoteric
framework that was, generally, Christian. The number of lodges that fol-
lowed this approach is not known, but there were perhaps two or three in
each major Western country. None grew as large as Schuon’s Sufi Order,
probably because the organizational structures of Masonry do not accom-
modate this sort of growth.
Two early Traditionalists were involved in politics, Evola and Eliade. Both
were part of milieus of the 1930s that looked for national and spiritual
renewal, saw interwar democracy as part of the problem rather than part of
the solution, and were firmly opposed to Bolshevism. Eliade was initially a
strong supporter of the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania, and
Evola initially hoped for great things from the Fascist Party in Italy and from
the Conservative Revolutionary movement in Germany. The initial differ-
ence between the two men was that while Eliade formally supported the
legion and wrote on its behalf, he did not develop a Traditionalist political
ideology. By contrast, Evola never formally supported fascism but did
develop a Traditionalist political ideology. The later difference between
the two was that when the implications of such movements began to be
apparent to Eliade, he dissociated himself from what degenerated into
Romanian Nazism and from political action in general, whereas Evola
remained committed for the rest of his life to a political vision that changed
27
28
only in some details. Even though the Conservative Revolutionary move-

ment was destroyed by Hitler, Evola still looked to Germany, where he was
involved in official discussions in Berlin on racial questions in 1942.29 Evola
was never, however, a Nazi, regarding Nazi understandings of race as
simplistic. Race was incidental to his ideology and was never understood
by him in purely biological terms.30
The key to Evola’s development of Traditionalism was his replacement of
Guénon’s vision of a tradition in which the Brahmin priest-class had once
ruled with a vision of a tradition in which the Kshatriya warrior-class had
once ruled. Rather than look for the return of the individual to the former
priestly state through initiation as Guénon had, Evola looked for the return of
the group to the warrior state through action. To this end, he attempted
during the mid-1930s to establish an Italo-German chivalric order, but
without success.31 By the end of the Second World War, his impact on
Italian and German policies had been negligible, partly because the fascists
considered his views too extreme, and because the Nazis had their own
ideology, with which Evola’s was not really compatible.
Evola was more influential, however, in the postwar period, partly because
he was an ideologist of the Right who was not implicated in what many had
come to see as the debacle of fascism. His later works, in which he developed
a theory of individual self-realization through political action irrespective of
actual effect, proved extremely popular with the rightist terrorists who
fought the Italian state, as well as the leftists terrorists during Italy’s “years
of lead” in the 1960s and 1970s. Evola himself never explicitly endorsed
terrorism, but the closest he came to condemning it was to stress that political
action without adequate spiritual preparation was pointless.32
Evola’s analysis of modernity is compatible with mainstream
Traditionalism, from which it derives, but his prescriptions are very different.
Although interested in esotericism, he did not incorporate esotericism into
his work to the same extent that Guénon did. Serious readers of Guénon
usually ignore Evola, whereas serious readers of Evola do not ignore
Guénon.
29
30
31
32
This, at least, is my interpretation of the material quoted in the introduction to Julius Evola,
Cavalcare la Tigre: Den Tiger reiten (Radeberg: Zeitenwende Verlag, 2006). The introduction,
however, comes to the opposite conclusion, and it must be admitted that the case is not
clear.
5 Traditionalism Today
Traditionalism continues to exist in all its main varieties, but it is political
Traditionalism that has enjoyed most growth in recent years. The largest
spiritual Traditionalist organization, the Maryamiyya, changed after
Schuon’s death, splitting into two parts: a perennialist core in Bloomington
and a larger network elsewhere in the world, led by Nasr, and focusing
almost exclusively on more standard Sufism.33 Other smaller groups, gen-
erally Sufi or Masonic but sometimes Orthodox Christian, are to be found in
most Western countries, as are occasional Traditionalists engaged in the
academic study of religion.34 There are also Traditionalist influences within
one of Morocco’s most important Sufi Orders, the Boutchichiyya,35 and
interest in Traditionalist works, especially Nasr’s, grew during the 1990s in
Iran and Turkey. Lings became the most influential Sufi Traditionalist in
Europe, passing his interest in Traditionalism to Britain’s Prince Charles,
who combines Traditionalism with other approaches to spirituality and
modernity.36
The end of Europe’s Communist regimes opened new spaces for
Traditionalism, notably in Hungary and Romania, where interest in
Traditionalism, dating from Eliade’s activity in the interwar period, had
survived the Ceauşescu years. Traditionalism had even played a small part
in Ceauşescu’s downfall, since one of the members of the extempore court
that condemned him to death, Gelu Voican Voiculescu (b. 1941), had
previously been arrested for – among other things – possession of
Traditionalist works.
Political Traditionalism has enjoyed a renaissance since the 1990s. One of
the most important reasons for this is events in Russia. The origins of
Traditionalism there lie in a small group of low-profile Soviet dissidents in
the 1960s whose original interest in Gurdjieff shifted to an interest in Evola,
Guénon, and other “alternative” writers, some of whose works were avail-
able in the Lenin Library in Moscow. Alexander Dugin (b. 1962), a junior
member of this group, emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union as
33
This view is based on reports from various correspondents in 2005–2006 and has not been
confirmed by further research.
34
A brief Internet search will identify many such groups and individuals.
35
Mark Sedgwick, “In Search of the Counter-Reformation: Anti-Sufi Stereotypes and the
Budshishiyya’s response,” in An Islamic Reformation? ed. Charles Kurzman and Michaelle
Browers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 125–146.
36
See various entries on Prince Charles and Traditionalism on Traditionalists: A Blog for the
Study of Traditionalism and the Traditionalists, moderated by Mark Sedgwick, http://traditionalist
blog.blogspot.com/search/label/United%20Kingdom
Russia’s leading political Traditionalist, both generating interest in

Traditionalist classics and developing his own eclectic mixture of Evola and
other sources, both Western European and Russian. He developed a
Traditionalist understanding of Russia as engaged in an inevitable and ulti-
mately apocalyptic contest with modernity, represented by the United
States.37 During the chaotic but somewhat liberal Yeltsin period, Dugin
and his followers occupied the margins of Russian politics and cultural life,
but as Russian foreign and domestic policies became more “assertive” under
Putin, Dugin and the political and intellectual mainstream moved toward
each other. Dugin acquired a growing following and influential allies, as well
as access to prime-time television. Dugin’s views on Russian relations with
the West were probably the main cause of his popularity, but he used this
popularity to promote the intellectual basis of these views, including
Traditionalism.38 He later established the Center for Conservative Studies
at Moscow State University, one of Russia’s leading academic institutions,
with Evola and Guénon in the curriculum. Guénon had already appeared in
the online library of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of
Sciences.
Dugin’s influence in Russia resulted in rightist political circles in other
European countries becoming interested both in Dugin himself and in
political Traditionalism. Evola became an increasingly popular point of
reference in such circles, and also in the Neo-Folk music scene. The extent
to which interest in Evola in this arena is related to the growth of political
Traditionalism elsewhere is uncertain, as indeed is the extent to which the
interest itself should be taken at face value.39
6 Conclusion: Traditionalism in Perspective

Traditionalism is significant as a development of Western and non-Western
esotericism that ultimately produced a new definition of the esoteric as
primordial religion, and as the common core of contemporary exoteric
religion. Its relationship with mainstream Western esotericism is equivocal:
drawing on it for perennialism and initiation, but rejecting it in favor of
37
Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 221–237. See also Marlene Laruelle, “Aleksandr Dugin:
A Russian Version of the European Radical Right?” Woodrow Wilson Center, occasional
paper #294, 2006.
38
Mark Sedgwick, Russian translation of Against the Modern World (Moscow: New Literary
Review, 2014). The Russian translation contains the results of fieldwork performed in
Russia after the publication of the original English edition.
39
Stéphane François, “The Euro-Pagan Scene: Between Paganism and Radical Right,”
Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1:2 (2007), 35–54.
orthodox religion, generally of non-Western origin. Political Traditionalists

have been less interested in non-Western religion, preferring European
paganism mixed with esotericism in Evola’s case, and Russian Orthodoxy
mixed with esotericism in Dugin’s case. Traditionalism’s relationship with
mainstream academia is also equivocal, as Traditionalism condemns academia
but sometimes prospers there.
Traditionalism has always been a minority interest except when popular-
ized in combination with other philosophies and ideologies, as is the case in
Russia today. Traditionalism’s greatest source of appeal is probably its con-
demnation and rejection of modernity, which is common to all
Traditionalists from Guénon to Dugin. Given that disenchantment with
modernity seems to be an important characteristic of modernity,
Traditionalism may be expected to continue to prosper.
27
VIA NEGATIVA IN THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY
Arthur Versluis
1 Introduction
The via negativa – or mysticism proceeding by way of negation – has a very
long history in Christianity. We find it very early, in the work of Basilides,
then again, pivotally, in the works of Dionyius the Areopagite, in Eriugena,
and again in the high medieval period in Meister Eckhart, in Tauler and in
anonymous works such as The Cloud of Unknowing. One even finds the via
negativa hinted at in the works of Jacob Boehme, in particular in his terms
Nichts, or the Divine Nothing beyond all that exists, and Ungrund, or the
Not-ground as the means by which being-time comes into existence.1 One
also sees this kind of via negativa terminology in the works of English
theosophers, notably, John Pordage (1608–1681), who used the word
“Chaos” to describe the transcendent plenitude out of which existence
emerges.
But by the early modern period, exponents of the via negativa for the most
part seem to have disappeared. Most of what has come to be termed
“Western esotericism” is chiefly occupied with cosmological concerns –
alchemical, magical, or related currents predominate. By the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, one can find almost no exemplars of the via
negativa, and even in the twentieth century, instances are few and far
between. In fact, the absence of via negativa from theology or religious
philosophy during this period is quite noteworthy. It is only in the mid-
twentieth century, in part due to the influx of Asian religious traditions into
the West, that we find the via negativa beginning to reappear. The via negativa
is esoteric in a functional sense – that is, its adherents focus on absolute
transcendence, which functionally generates an insider/outsider dynamic.
1
See Arthur Versluis, “The Mystery of Böhme’s Ungrund,” Studies in Spirituality 11 (2001),
205–211.
322
V i a ne g a t i v a i n t h e T w e n t i e t h C e n t u r y 323
2 What Is the Via negativa?

Already by the second century, Basilides, the earliest of the Alexandrian
Gnostics (ca. 120 CE), and said to be a disciple of St. Matthias and of
Glaucias (a disciple of St. Peter), taught a negative mysticism that is quite
similar to the central Buddhist work, the Prajnaparamita sutras. Both reject
the ultimate value of any analogy in understanding the nature of direct
spiritual knowledge: It is not like this, or like that. It is not up or down,
black or white, but in the words of the Prajnaparamita sutras, echoing the
earliest Buddhist sources, it is “gone-beyond”; that is, it is absolute transcen-
dence of all dualistic knowledge. According to Hippolytus, Basilides empha-
sized the sheer and utter transcendence of the divine nature, which is not
even conceivable by man.2 Basilides held that prior to creation, “nothing
existed”: “not matter, nor substance, nor what is insubstantial, nor is abso-
lute, nor composite, nor conceivable, nor inconceivable, nor sensible, nor
devoid of senses, nor man, nor angel, nor a god, nor any object with a name,
or apprehended by sense, or cognized by intellect.”3
This tradition of via negativa was ridiculed by some of the Ante-Nicene
Church Fathers, including Hippolytus, but it was brought into orthodox
branches of Christianity largely through the works of the pseudonymous
author Dionysius the Areopagite, who probably lived in the fifth century.
In his Mystical Theology, Dionysius writes lyrically of the “divine dark,” of
mystical contemplation that goes beyond “all sensation and all intellectual
activities,” “all non-beings and all beings,” and the ecstasy of being raised
up into the “divine darkness beyond being.” This experience, he writes, is
not without intellect, but it is not body, not form, not in space, not visible,
not perceivable through the senses.4 These Dionysian negations also
resemble those of the Prajnaparamita sutras but derive from the Platonic
tradition.
The Dionysian tradition had a significant influence on both Western and
Eastern forms of Christianity. In the West, both the via negativa and the via
positiva (the way of ascent through symbols and images) are cited and recur in
the works of many individuals, including John Eriugena (flourished ca. 850
CE), whose Periphyseon clearly draws on the Dionysian corpus, citing Eastern
fathers such as Maximus the Confessor. Eriugena also translated Dionysius’s
works and thus made them more available to medieval Europe. He wrote at
2
Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, VII.ix
3
Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, VII.ix
4
See The Divine Names and Mystical Theology, trans. John D. Jones (Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 1999), 211–212, 219–220.
324 A rt h u r V er sl u is
length about what he called the divine “Nothing” that precedes and trans-
cends all being, in this theme following Dionysius but also anticipating such
prominent figures as Eckhart, Tauler, Boehme, and many others.5
3 Key Exemplars of the Via negativa in the Twentieth Century

When we look for examples of the via negativa in the twentieth century,
however, we do not find many. Of course, a few scholars alluded to the
tradition, among them Evelyn Underhill, and there are others who incorpo-
rated some elements of the tradition while not necessarily belonging to it. In
this category, we could place the Catholic priest Thomas Keating, influential
for his “centering prayer.” But figures such as these are not really exemplars
of the via negativa tradition proper. Of these, there are only a few, among
them the philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1948), Franklin Merrell
Wolff (1887–1985), and Bernadette Roberts (b. 1931).
We should also mention here the Hungarian philosopher Béla Hamvas
(1897–1968), a remarkable figure who wrote numerous books while under
great ideological pressure from the Communist authorities. Strongly criti-
cized by Marxist ideologue Georg Lúkacs, he was forced to live as a laborer,
and his books were banned. Among his works, few of which are available in
English, are a series of novels, volumes of art and cultural criticism, and
sweeping works on the collective human religious inheritance. In a collec-
tion of essays entitled Silentium (1947), he writes eloquently about mysticism.
While Hamvas does not belong exclusively to the via negativa current himself
(he is more of a perennial philosopher), still his work is at least worth noting
here, despite its relative obscurity.6 But there are other figures who clearly
place themselves in the intellectual current of the via negativa, and we shall
focus on them.
The first of these, philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, belonged to a relatively
wealthy Russian family; by his student years, he was drawn to philosophy.
Later, he became deeply involved in the lively religious ferment of what is
now called the Russian Silver Age, editing periodicals and writing on a wide
range of subjects, all tied to religious themes. In 1924, following the
Communist revolution, Berdyaev went into exile in Paris with his wife,
where he was to remain. His religious background was Russian Orthodox,
and Berdyaev situated himself explicitly in the current of Christian
5
Periphyseon 687A, B.
6
See Béla Hamvas, Silentium (Munich: Editio M, 1999). For some information on Hamvas, see
www.hamvasbela.org
theosophy whose founding figure is Jacob Boehme (1575–1624).7 In Nicolas

Berdyaev: Theologian of Prophetic Gnosticism (1948), Charles Knapp observes,
correctly, that Berdyaev did not belong to the Blavatskyan Theosophical
Society, which he thought “quite devoid of historic sense or real philosophic,
theological, or scientific rigor.” Rather, he espoused a mystical theology that
had at its center the Dionysian via negativa.8
In The Meaning of Creativity (1914), Berdyaev began to explore his most
characteristic subjects, including the nature of human freedom, the power of
creativity, and the significance of mysticism. By Freedom and the Spirit (1935),
he had developed his mature philosophical approach, which has as its center
the transcendence of being or the via negativa, drawn explicitly from
Boehme’s concept of the Ungrund. This approach reaches its culmination
in his important book The Beginning and the End (1941/1952). Berdyaev
expresses the transcendence of being with the term meontic, and in The
Beginning and the End, we find what was also published as “The Doctrine of
the Ungrund and Freedom in Jacob Boehme.”9 Berdyaev follows Boehme in
emphasizing the centrality of the concept of Ungrund for achieving human
freedom. Ungrund is the undifferentiated source of all existence, and so it is
also the source of our primordial human freedom. Modern philosophy and
theology in general lack an understanding of this primary concept, and as a
result they remain, in Berdyaev’s view, disconnected from a profound
metaphysical basis for understanding.
Berdyaev is important not least because he applies the Dionysian tradition
of via negativa (and the Boehmean concept of the Ungrund) in a modern
philosophical context. He draws from the via negativa a thoroughgoing
critique of modern philosophical figures and tendencies, and affirms instead
his own theological philosophy, for which human creativity and freedom
derive from the meontic possibility of the via negativa. While Berdyaev is not
an exponent of the via negativa as such, his work establishes the apophatic
theological tradition as absolutely central to religious-cultural renewal, and
indeed is unique in the twentieth century in injecting the via negativa into
contemporary philosophical discourse.
7
On Christian theosophy, see Arthur Versluis, Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); see also Versluis, Wisdom’s Book: The
Sophia Anthology (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2000).
8
Charles C. Knapp, “Nicolas Berdyaev: Theologian of Prophetic Gnosticism” (Ph.D.
Dissertation, Toronto: 1948), 40.
9
On this topic, see Knapp, “Nicolas Berdyaev,” 275 ff. See Berdyaev’s introduction to Jacob
Boehme’s Six Theosophic Points (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958).
Franklin Merrell-Wolff was trained as a mathematician and taught mathe-

matics at the university level. But in the 1930s, while living in California, he
underwent a profound series of spiritual experiences. Merrell-Wolff’s pri-
mary account of his spiritual awakening is to be found in Pathways through to
Space (1944), which he describes as “a record of transformation in conscious-
ness written down during the actual process itself.”10 During this time, while
prospecting for gold in California, Merrell-Wolff read a book detailing the
Vedantic metaphysics of Shankara. Then, sitting on a porch swing, he had
what he called a “Recognition,” after which, he wrote, “I have been
repeatedly in the Current of Ambrosia. Often I turn to It with the ease of a
subtle movement of thought. Sometimes it breaks out spontaneously.”11
What he called a “Current” could be perceived by others, he wrote, and
although he was inspired by Vedanta, he combined Vedantic terms with
Western alchemical language: “Emptiness is thus the real Philosopher’s Stone
which transfers all things to new richnesses; It is the Alkahest that transmutes
the base metal of inferior consciousness into the Gold of Higher
Consciousness.”12
Central to Merrell-Wolff’s thought is the idea of “consciousness without
an object.” For instance, in Philosophy of Consciousness without an Object, he
writes that he had three successive experiences of “Recognition,” and “in the
third instance, I isolated the subjective moment from the relative manifold of
consciousness . . . and the result was Emptiness, Darkness, and Silence, i.e.,
Consciousness with no object.”13 Later, he writes in an aphorism that
“Consciousness-without-an-object may be symbolized by a SPACE that is
unaffected by the presence or absence of objects, for which there is neither
Time nor Timelessness; neither a world-containing Space nor a Spatial Void;
neither Tension nor Equilibrium; neither Agony nor Bliss; neither Action
nor Rest; and neither Restriction nor Freedom.”14
Here, as is often the case, Merrell-Wolff expresses himself in clearly
apophatic language. But Merrell-Wolff’s experiential philosophy is not
explicitly indebted to Dionysius, because his primary sources of inspiration
are from Asian religious traditions, in particular Shankara and the Buddha.
One must also note that Merrell-Wolff associated himself with the
Theosophical Society in California. Although he certainly cannot be termed
10
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1994), x.
11
Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy, 7.
12
13
14
a Blavatskyite, he shares with it an indebtedness to Asian religious traditions.

This is a significant shift: In the West of the twentieth century, the via negativa
largely appears as a synthesis of Asian and Western traditions and is not
exclusively Western as in earlier centuries.
Clearly, Merrell-Wolff’s “Consciousness-without-an-object” belongs to
the via negativa: It represents the negation/transcendence of sensory and
rational forms of knowledge, as well as the realization of a higher state of
consciousness marked by bliss and, he tells us, ultimately by intense intellec-
tual power. In keeping with the history of the via negativa, Merrell-Wolff
does not offer the details of what practices he had undertaken, how specifi-
cally he meditated, and so forth. He begins at the point of realization, just as
Meister Eckhart did. But unlike Eckhart, Merrell-Wolff does offer a wealth
of autobiographical detail and personal reflection.
The Catholic mystic Bernadette Roberts of California is similar in many
respects to Merrell-Wolff. Although she claims that her work is off “the
beaten path of mystical theology so well-travelled by Christian contempla-
tives,” nonetheless it certainly resembles the via negativa.15 Roberts’s writings
chronicle her journey into experiences of what she came to call “no-self,” or
the falling away or disappearance of ego, which she claims to be her unique
discovery.16 However, in The Experience of No-Self, she does acknowledge
Meister Eckhart as “one who has made the journey [to no-self] and crossed
over.”17
Roberts discusses her progressive realization of no-self in her books
The Experience of No-Self (1982) and The Path to No-Self (1985/rpt. 1991).
In the former, Roberts relates that during a two-year period, she “experi-
enced the falling away of everything I can call a self. It was a journey through
an unknown passageway that led to a life so new and different that, despite
nearly forty years of varied contemplative experiences, I never suspected its
existence.”18 She tells us that her journey began with her realization that she
had no self, whereupon she experienced a sensation like an elevator falling
hundreds of floors. This realization of no-self had a corollary, a realization of
no-God: “When there is no personal self, there is no personal God.” She
15
See Bernadette Roberts, The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1993), 128.
16
Bernadette Roberts, The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1991), xv.
17
Roberts, The Path to No-Self, 199. After acknowledging Eckhart as one of her predecessors,
Roberts then states that “he is unique and unlike any other Christian mystic” (p. 203). This is
true but invites the question of whether he nonetheless belongs to a larger current in the
Christian tradition, that of the via negativa, to which Roberts herself also belongs.
18
Roberts, The Experience of No-Self, 9.
writes that God and self belong together, so “where they went, I have never
found out.”19
By the strictest definition, Roberts’s work belongs to the via negativa.20 In
the writings of both Meister Eckhart and Roberts, we encounter sheer
transcendence. The difference, and this may be a particularly modern differ-
ence, is that Roberts’s work is strikingly autobiographical in nature; she takes
us along with her on her personal journey to no-self. Roberts is not interested
in her predecessors and even goes far as to suggest that to read the works of
prior mystics is misguided.
Roberts’s accounts are quite harrowing, and she does not like to use
conventional theological terms, even words such as “God,” noting that “I
am always reluctant to use the word ‘God,’ because everybody seems to carry
around their own stagnant images and definitions that totally cloud the ability
to step outside a narrow, individual frame of reference.”21 Her descriptions
are experiential, not theological:
Initially, with the falling away of all sense of having an interior life, there
had been a turning outward to the seeing of Oneness and the falling away of
everything particular and individual. The seeing itself was not located
within, but first seemed to be like 3D glasses imposed upon my ordinary
vision, and later, localized as a seeing “on top of the head.”22
Robert’s experiences of no-self include what she terms a “great passage-
way,” in which she feared madness, and which raised the profound question
of what is conscious of the disappearance of self. She writes of “Something
that is just there, just watching, and ‘that’ is true life, while all the energies
that come and go are not true life. But what is ‘that’ that remains and
observes?”23
Roberts’s discussion of what she terms no-self is certainly a discussion of
negation, but it contains no allusion to Dionysius the Areopagite or other
scholarly reference points. It is, rather, an account of her personal struggle to
explain what she herself had experienced:
19
20
Some have expressed skepticism about Roberts’s experiences, which some have suggested
exemplify “depersonalization disorder” (or DPD). See Daphne Simeon, Feeling Unreal:
Depersonalization Disorder and the Loss of the Self (New York: Oxford University Press,
2006), in particular, 140–145. Disentangling DPD and the via negativa is beyond our scope
here.
21
Roberts, The Experience of No-Self, 37
22
23
The step beyond no-self is like the dissolution of that which remains when
It draws back into Itself as if overcome by Its own intensity. Even though
what Is is all that Is, its acts or doing – which is identical with Itself – is not its
entirety, for what we ordinarily know of It, is only that which falls into the
realm of the known – the created, that is. But there seems to exist a fullness
of act that does not fall into the known or created, and to be overcome by
this fullness means that at any moment all we know to exist may easily,
instantly, and painlessly be dissolved into what Is. I do not understand this
mechanism, but I do know this dissolution, this enduring intensity, is the
ending and last of all silences.24
In such passages, we can see Roberts struggling to express her experiences in
comprehensible language; like Merrell-Wolff, she sometimes resorts to unu-
sual capitalization and other devices that highlight the unreliability of lin-
guistic expression.
In The Path to No-Self, Roberts describes her experiences, but in a way that
is both more abstract and explicitly Christian. However, Roberts rejects a
Christ of social works, emphasizing instead that Christ was
a mystic who had the continuous vision of God and whose mission was to
share it, give it to others. Few people see it this way; instead, they have
exploited Christ’s good works to justify their own busy lives, lives without
interior vision and therefore lives without Christ. As already said, perfor-
mance of our duties and responsibilities as human beings, respect for the
rights of others, lending a helping hand are what it means to be human;
there is nothing particularly Christian about it.25
Roberts emphasizes what she terms “the awakening of the inner butterfly,”
or spiritual vision, even remarking that someone who affirms his own “self-
abandonment” in the manner of Henry Suso is roundly condemned, perhaps
even crucified, because “unwittingly, he is saying that he is a man without
sin!” But in reality, “a man without a self is not about to stand up and say ‘I
have no sin.’ He cannot say this because the truth of the matter is: he has no
‘I’.”26 Clearly Roberts is trying to express in new terms an age-old conflict
between what we might term exoteric and esoteric Christianities. The via
negativa is functionally or experientially esoteric and can be misunderstood
from an exoteric, dualistic perspective. This is at least one implication of
Roberts’s point here.
24
25
Roberts, The Path to No-Self, 124.
26
Although Roberts remains Roman Catholic, the tradition into which she
was born, she did spend time with Zen Buddhist contemplatives, and her
mysticism does have affinities with Buddhism.27 In fact, in a later book, What
Is Self?, she writes that in the Zen Buddhist concepts of kensho and satori, she
finds the closest parallels to her experiences of no-self. It is curious that
although she describes herself as a Christian contemplative, she does not
readily acknowledge her predecessors in the Christian tradition – figures such
as Dionysius, Eckhart, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing – nor does
she acknowledge that she belongs to the long-standing tradition of the via
negativa. Possibly this is because of the experiential dimensions of her work,
but the lack of reference is noteworthy all the same.
What else is Roberts writing about, however, if not the via negativa? She
asserts that one “has no peace until all the energies, will, desires and feelings
are totally submitted to the divine – a dark, unrecognized silent void in
ourselves.”28 Later, she writes that “the major question is the true nature of
‘that’ which remains or exists when there is no self or consciousness.” Hence
“part of the acclimation to the no-self condition is getting around without a
bodily experience, or experience of a body. But obviously some type of form
remained, a form that was as void as all the forms beheld by the senses.” In
Buddhist language drawn from the Prajnaparamita sutras, she writes that
“Form then IS void and this void IS form.”29 In the end, she may be more
comfortable with Buddhist than with Dionysian expressions.
Unlike Berdyaev, who is almost completely indebted to Western tradi-
tions, Merrell-Wolff and Roberts represent the emergence of a new, twen-
tieth-century synthesis of East and West. Characteristic of this synthesis is the
via negativa, which is certainly present as an element in all three of these very
different authors. Berdyaev’s via negativa comes to him in a lineage from
Dionysius to Boehme, whereas Merrell-Wolff’s is inspired by Vedanta, and
Roberts, she insists, is uniquely her own mystic. The presence of Asian
influences in the work of Merrell-Wolff and Roberts brings us inevitably
to the larger question of Asian-Western cross-pollination.
4 Via negativa and Asian Religions in Diaspora

It is true that one does not find many exemplars of the via negativa in the
twentieth century – that is, not many figures whose work can be said to stand
27
28
See Bernadette Roberts, What Is Self? (Austin: M. B. Goens, 1989), 22.
29
Roberts, What is Self?, 190.
more or less within the Dionsyian tradition. In one way or another, however,
Berdyaev, Merrell-Wolff, and Roberts do express their primary insights in
apophatic terms. But it may well be that although the Dionysian apophatic
current is not so visible in Christianity any longer, or for that matter in secular
modernity, it appears now in a different context, that of East-West synthesis,
often in the form of new religions.
In his The Book of Enlightened Masters: Western Teachers in Eastern Traditions
(1997), Andrew Rawlinson provides biographical introductions to hundreds
of Westerners who have taken on the role of spiritual teacher, sometimes in
Asian religious traditions, but often as independent syncretic figures.
Rawlinson provides entries on traditional Zen teachers such as Robert
Aitken (1917–2010), Philip Kapleau (1912–2004), John Daido Loori (1931–
2009), or Jiyu Kennett (1924–1996). A well-known Western author in the
Tibetan tradition is Pema Chödrön (b. 1936). There are a great many such
figures now, as Buddhism has taken root in the West.30
One also finds numerous religious teachers in the West who have been
more or less strongly influenced by Asian religious traditions but who also
draw on Christian or other Western traditions. Syntheses of this kind became
fairly widespread by the end of the twentieth century, more or less after the
example of Thomas Merton (1915–1968), the influential Catholic monastic
and author. East-West synthesis was made popular by Alan Watts (1915–
1973), author of such books as Behold the Spirit (1947) and Beyond Theology
(1964), which did incorporate elements of negative mysticism. We should
note the numerous works by William Johnston (1925–2010), including not
only Christian Zen (1997) but also The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing
(2000) and Mystical Journey: An Autobiography (2006). Johnston, a Catholic
priest in Japan, brings his Zen Buddhist practice to interpretations of classical
negative mysticism of the West.
A. H. Almaas (A. Hameed Ali; b. 1944) also incorporates some aspects of
the via negativa into his mysticism. Almaas is founder of the Ridhwan School,
an esoteric group that draws from Tibetan Buddhism and from Sufism,
combining various religious teachings with an emphasis on contemporary
psychological theory and practice. Almaas draws on some aspects of
Buddhism but maintains an emphasis on the self and on psychology.
Similar or related teachings drawn in part or primarily from Buddhism are
to be found in the work of Ken Wilber (b. 1949). It is not that the via negativa
30
The reverse is also true. See, for instance, Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982), 61–68, for a discussion of negative theology and
Eckhart from a Buddhist perspective.
is central to these figures, but rather that one finds instances of it woven into
their works.
What these Buddhist-influenced individuals and their groups offer is
very much akin to what one finds in via negativa texts throughout
Christian history, only now appearing in a new religion or a Western
Buddhist context. The emergence of Buddhist praxis in the West is under-
standable, not least because traditionally in the West, esotericism often has
been conveyed elliptically, through enigmatic writings and images.31 In
Western esotericism, the individual is on his or her own, whereas in
Buddhism, the aspirant is given detailed practical guidance. Likewise,
in the history of via negativa mysticism, from Basilides and Dionysius all
the way through the twentieth century, one finds almost no instances of
written practical instruction. The closest might be the anonymous Cloud of
Unknowing, but even in this instance, the author does not provide the kind
of specific instructions and detailed practical guidance that one finds in the
various schools of contemporary Buddhism (e.g., posture, breathing, and so
forth). Even Bernadette Roberts, who is unprecedented in her autobio-
graphical detail, does not really provide instructions on what practices one
ought to undertake to realize no-self.
5 Conclusion
The via negativa, particularly in its Western context, not only remains esoteric
up to and through the twentieth century but arguably becomes even more
so. Only a handful of authors clearly exemplify this tradition of Western
mysticism in the twentieth century, and even many of those owe as much to
Asian religious traditions (in particular Vedanta and Buddhism) as they do to
the classical Western via negativa. None of these authors – neither Berdyaev,
nor Merrell-Wolff, nor Roberts – is widely known or influential, and that
fact is itself revealing. While it is an important pattern in the tapestry of
Western esotericism, the via negativa rarely has been visible in exoteric forms
of Western religion, nor has it been acknowledged by them.32 What is more,
despite (or because of) the exponential growth of evangelical forms of
Christianity, this tendency toward omission of the via negativa continues
31
On the means of transmitting esotericism in the West, see Arthur Versluis, Restoring Paradise:
Western Esotericism, Literature, and Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2004).
32
“The tapestry of Western esotericism,” here, means esotericism as broadly defined in Arthur
Versluis, Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism (Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2007), with the primary characteristic of gnosis.
right through the twentieth century and, if anything, becomes more

pronounced.
But omission is not obliteration. Marginalized from the beginning of
Christianity, the via negativa nonetheless is an important aspect of Christian
theology, and probably its most esoteric aspect. Western esotericism, histori-
cally, has always been fluid and syncrasic (i.e., joining practices, not only
beliefs), and it is not surprising that we find exactly these characteristics
describing the forms that the via negativa took during the twentieth century.
Apophatic mysticism has much in common with Buddhism, and if the
twentieth century is any indication, we should not be surprised to find that
in the future, as in the past, the via negativa continues to be a creative esoteric
juncture of Eastern and Western religions.
28
CONTEMPORARY PAGANISM
C has S. C l if to n
1 Introduction
With few exceptions, such as Feraferia and the Church of All Worlds in the
United States (both products of the 1960s), today’s Pagan religions present
themselves as reviving, reconstructing, or somehow connecting with a pre-
Christian past. For example, the founders of modern Wicca initially claimed
an unbroken continuity with the Stone Age via a persecuted, underground
religious tradition that persisted in England until the 1930s – a claim that
owed much to the theories of the English archaeologist Margaret Murray.1
Other contemporary Pagan leaders and theorists have claimed that earlier
forms of their religions can be recovered from fragments of folklore, folk
dance, ancient artwork, and mythic tales. Homo religiosus prizes that which is
ancient, but the actual development of contemporary Paganism primarily
occurred in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, involving the work
of many creative men and women, some of whom merely expressed their
own spiritual longings while others sought consciously to create a communal
movement – a religion. But before examining this history, let us consider
how “Pagan” is defined today.
2 Defining Paganism
Pagan religions, while varied in their expression, offer certain common
expressions and family resemblances.2 These include a view of deity as
multiple rather than single; a view of nonhuman nature as valuable in and
1
Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1921).
2
Although the use of lowercase “pagan” to mean irreligious is still used by some, I capitalize
Pagan when referring to any self-conscious religious tradition that fits the definitions set forth
in this section.
334
C onte mp ora ry P a g an is m 335
for itself, and not created merely for our use; and a tendency to focus on time
as cyclical, rather than as moving toward an apocalypse, last judgment, or
final goal. Thus, from the contemporary Pagan’s viewpoint, such varied
traditions as classical Roman religion, shrine Shinto, Wicca, aspects of
Hinduism, and indeed any “indigenous” religion might all be seen as
Pagan. Attempting to reduce these multiplicities to their simplest terms,
Michael York in Pagan Theology offers this broad definition: “an affirmation
of interactive and polymorphic sacred relationship by the individual or
community with the tangible, sentient, and/or nonempirical.”3
In other words, for the Pagan, “sacred relationships” may be with tangible
objects that evoke holiness, awe, or humility. These might be natural objects
or persons – a mountain, a canyon, a tree, an animal – or they may be
manmade. They may include other humans, when those persons manifest a
deity or a deity’s attributes. Pagans may also, of course, enjoy a relationship
with “the sacred” expressed in nonempirical form – through contemplation,
dreams, visions, and so on. York’s definition is drawn broadly enough to
include humanism, pantheism, and panentheism. However, the majority of
contemporary Pagans follow some sort of polytheism, which is often divided
by practitioners themselves into the categories of “hard” and “soft.”
A soft polytheism may be summarized by the aphorism of Dion Fortune,
an English ceremonial magician and novelist of the early twentieth century:
“All gods are one God, and all goddesses are one Goddess, and there is one
Initiator [the Higher Self].”4 It permits the blending of pantheons from
different times and cultures, encouraging syncretism and a softening of
boundaries between religions traditions. For example, a soft polytheistic
Pagan could easily regard the Virgin Mary as yet one more manifestation of
the Great Goddess, the Magna Mater. These Pagans are most likely to speak
of deity in general as “immanent” rather than “transcendent,” an attitude
linked to a rejection of hierarchical religious authority in favor of more self-
directed authority, as in songwriter Catherine Madsen’s 1980s composition
“My Heretic Heart,” whose refrain is, “My skin, my bones, my heretic heart
are my authority,” as opposed to “law and scripture, priest and prayer.” In
some expressions, such as the writing of the Wiccan theologian and novelist
Starhawk (Miriam Simos), the proclaimed immanence of deity is linked to
utopian-leftist politics, although Wiccans in general may be found across the
political spectrum.
3
Michael York, Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion (New York: New York
4
Dion Fortune, The Sea Priestess (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1978; originally published
1938), 227.
336 C ha s S . C l i fton
Hard polytheism, on the other hand, generally characterizes reconstructed

Pagan religions, for example, Norse, Slavic, or Hellenic, in which the various
pantheons are treated as assemblies of distinct spiritual beings with distinct
attributes and personalities, with or without an application of the Interpretatio
graeca. Hard polytheism is often associated with Paganism of an ethnic (and in
Eastern Europe, nationalist) cast, whose adherents state that “these are the
gods of our people.” Pagans describing themselves as hard polytheists may
place great value on learning archaic languages such as Old Irish or Old Norse
in order to read the oldest available texts that treat of the pre-Christian
religion of a particular region, as well as to perform religious rituals in the
language associated with their favored pantheon. Likewise, they will study
folk life, create customs, and perform music associated as much as possible
with the pre-Christian era. In Latvia and Lithuania, for example, folk music
played a key role not only in the creation of national identity but also of
contemporary Pagan movements. The Lithuanian Romuva (sanctuary)
organization, named for an ancient Pagan Prussian religious site, was founded
in 1926, repressed by the Soviet Union, but revived in the 1960s as a
nonreligious, folkloric association devoted to the singing of dainos, folk
tunes believed to contain fragments of pre-Christian religion. Romuva
bloomed during the perestroika era of the 1980s and after Lithuanian inde-
pendence openly proclaimed its religious nature, including the performance
of religious rituals.5 In the case of both Latvian and Lithuanian Paganism,
emigrant followers in North America were important to sustaining the
movement during the decades when the home countries were under
Soviet and German domination.
Similarly, contemporary Pagan movements have arisen in Russia,
Ukraine, Hungary, and other former Soviet bloc nations. Russian anthro-
pologist Victor Shnirelman, who has written extensively on new Paganism
movements in the former Soviet Union, notes that they are often character-
ized by a defiant anti-foreign (or anti-modernist) message that often includes
a large dose of anti-Semitism. Among non-Russian peoples of the former
Soviet Union, artists and ethnographers have begun to find inspiration in
local pre-Christian religious practices, and to systematize fragments of them.
These new Pagans rebel against both Orthodox Christianity’s smoothing
over of ethnic differences and the central government’s Russification of
other ethnic groups.6
5
Michael Strmiska, “The Music of the Past in Modern Baltic Paganism,” Nova Religio 8:3
(2005), 39–58.
6
Victor A. Shnirelman, “‘Christians! Go Home’: A Revival of Neo-Paganism between the
Baltic Sea and Transcaucasia,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 17:2 (2002), 197–211.
Whether hard or soft polytheists, followers of most new (and arguably,

those not so new) Pagan religions are non-creedal. In the framework created
by anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse, who divides religious dynamics into
“doctrinal” and “imagistic” modes, they are firmly imagistic. Pagans favor
performance over doctrine, and the question “What do you believe?” is apt
to be met with either a blank look or the response, “What matters is what we
do, not what we believe.” The imagistic mode of religiosity, Whitehouse
explains, “consists of the tendency . . . for revelations to be transmitted
through sporadic collective action, evoking multivocal iconic imagery,
encoded in memory as distinct episodes, and producing highly cohesive
and particularistic social ties.”7 A classic example of this episodic collective
action would be the Eleusinian mysteries: They were experienced collec-
tively, involved thousands of initiates over a period of centuries, and were
apparently significant life events for most of the mystai. The social cohesion
they produced was so strong that to this day, we do not know precisely what
the mysteries entailed, although they may well have conveyed a teaching
about life after death, or reincarnation.
The Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – while
including collective action and multivocal imagery, are above all concerned
with doctrine, with specified beliefs, and consequently with heresy as well, a
concept outside most Pagan religious experience. The contrast of these
religious modes offers the potential for numerous interfaith misunderstand-
ings, generally to the detriment of the new Pagans, who lack codified
scriptures, credentialed clergy, and weekly worship. In the United States in
particular, Pagans seeking to become prison, hospital, or military chaplains
have faced numerous institutional barriers not placed in front of clergy of
Abrahamic faiths. While some Pagan prison chaplains are in place, the
military remains closed, despite the presence of Pagan service members.
Only the pressure of a federal lawsuit forced the Veterans Administration
to permit distinctive grave markers for Wiccan veterans. (Other Pagan
groups are now applying for their own symbols.) What remains unanswered
is the question of how the attempt to meet bureaucratic requirements for
chaplaincies, and so forth, will in turn transform the Pagan religions, whether
they were initially conceived of as mystery cults, as in the case of Wicca, or as
re-creations of pre-Christian religion, as in the case of Ásatrú (revived Norse
religion), for example.
7
Harvey Whitehouse, Arguments and Icons: Divergent Modes of Religiosity (Oxford: Oxford
Another significant difference between the contemporary Pagan world-

view and that of the Abrahamic faiths is that Pagans generally do not
experience a conflict with science. The beginnings of that conflict in the
West – arising (in the eighteenth century) from geologists challenging the
literalness of the biblical story of the flood, and then (in the nineteenth
century) biologists championing the theory of evolution – for the most
part predate the contemporary Pagan revival, which is a twentieth-century
creation. Today’s Pagans do not experience scientific knowledge as a threat
to religious authority. Those who perceive deity or “the Goddess” as
immanent in creation may feel strongly about the moral implications of
applied scientific knowledge, as expressed, for example, through atomic
bombs or the side effects of pesticides, but they rarely criticize science itself.
If anything, they are likely to accept uncritically some ways in which New
Age thinking has absorbed modern science – believing, for example, that
quantum physics can show how magic works.
3 Origins of Today’s Pagan Movements

Today’s Pagan religions have multiple roots. Most claim a connection with the
past that frequently puts their adherents into confrontation with current scho-
larship, yet folklorists can see in their practices “responses to novel situations,
which take the form of reference to old situations”; in other words, they are
“invented traditions,” as Eric Hobsbawm defined them.8 All Pagan religions
are built on old texts – and some on forgeries of old texts, such as the works of
Iolo Morganwg (1747–1826) for British Druids, or the Book of Veles for many
Slavic Pagans.9 Interestingly, Pagan groups that are more or less sui generis, such
as the Church of Aphrodite, founded by Russian émigré Gleb Botkin in 1939,
or Feraferia, founded by Frederick Adams in Southern California in 1967, tend
either not to survive their founders or to survive only in a diminished state.
(Feraferia, while borrowing much terminology and imagery from classical
Greek Paganism, was perhaps too linked to Adams’s own utopian ecological
vision of “Wilderness Mysteries” to have lasting appeal.10)
Wicca, the largest form of contemporary Paganism, arose in England
around 1951. Its history in the United Kingdom is described in Ronald
8
Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 1–2.
9
Victor A. Shnirelman, “Ancestral Wisdom and Ethnic Nationalism: A View from Eastern
Europe,” The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies 9:1 (2007).
10
Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (Lanham,
MD: Altamira Press, 2006), 142–149
Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft.11 Its
roots are multiple. One important root is a nineteenth-century recasting of
the figure of the “witch” as an antiauthoritarian and Romantic (and sexy)
lover of liberty and freedom who carries on the almost-forgotten worship of
Pagan gods.12 This view dominates two well-known works, La Sorcière, by
Jules Michelet (1865?), and Aradia, or The Gospel of the Witches (1899), by
Charles Godfrey Leland, an American folklore collector living in Florence.
Both Michelet and Leland (who may have met during the revolutionary days
of late 1840s France) rejected any nostalgia for the Middle Ages and were
strongly anticlerical, blaming the Roman Catholic Church (erroneously) for
the medieval and early modern witch trials. (The church, in fact, was more
concerned with heresy than witchcraft, the bulk of trials for witchcraft being
conducted by secular governments, often in Protestant lands.)
Another root, of course, is “witchcraft” in the popular sense – the perfor-
mance of spell casting, divination, and so forth, with little reference to any
larger theological framework, also known as “low magic.” This form of
witchcraft has commonly been believed to be passed on in certain bloodlines,
acquired by sexual intercourse with an established witch, or granted through
a pact with the Christian Devil. Sometimes referred to as “anthropological
witchcraft” to differentiate it from the new Pagan witchcraft religion
(Wicca), its history in Western Europe provided both inspiration and pro-
blems for the mid-twentieth-century Wiccan witches. Gerald Gardner
(1884–1964), chief architect of Wicca, drew on an unorthodox interpretation
of the earlier European witch trials advanced by Margaret Murray in the
1920s: that the witches, male and female, were followers of a suppressed
Pagan religion and that the Devil before whom they bowed at the witches’
sabbath was actually its high priest.13 If Wicca were to grow as a religion,
ideas of witchcraft as an inherited taint or as a perversion of Christianity
would have to be cast away. At the same time, the mystique and aura of
earlier witchcraft could be applied liberally to the new religious movement,
with much description in Gardner’s writing of witches organizing like World
War II resistance fighters, expecting torture and death if caught practicing
their religion.14
11
Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
12
Ronald Hutton, “Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of Tradition,” Folklore 119
(2008), 251–273.
13
Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. A similar idea had been advanced in Germany in
the 1820s, to different purposes. See Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 136–137.
14
Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1973), 51–53.
In creating Wicca, Gardner and his associates also drew on Freemasonry

and ceremonial magic, the “high magic” of the Renaissance. As Ronald
Hutton notes, the rituals of Freemasonry influenced countless other societies
and associations throughout the nineteenth century and afterward.15 From
high magic came not only a vocabulary of symbolic forms – most notably the
pentagram – but also the attitude of nineteenth-century esoteric practitioners
that magic’s purpose was the transformation of the magician, not worship of
deity.16 To this combination – the allure of historic witchcraft, the claim
of ancient roots, and the techniques of high magic – we may add a matrix of
attitudes about nature and humanity that would later create an attraction
between Paganism, environmentalism, and feminism.
By contrast, the “reconstructionist” contemporary Pagan groups look
chiefly to ancient texts (including, as noted earlier, certain “manufactured”
ancient texts) to leapfrog the Christian era. Hellenic and Roman reconstruc-
tionists have ample resources in both pre-Christian texts and for learning the
languages in which they were written. Norse reconstructions, by contrast,
must rely on texts collected and copied by Christians, usually monks or
clergy, and thus wrangle over the issue of how “corrupted” these copies
are. Some passages, such as the description of the trance seer (völva) in the
Saga of Erik the Red, have become normative for present-day practitioners.
4 Nature Religion and Feminist Influences on Paganism

By the time of the twentieth-century Pagan reemergence, another spiritual
current had arrived to challenge the scriptural or creedal faiths: nature
religion. As Catherine Albanese described it, “nature religion” was a category
that could include Deism as well as “natural” foods, healing methods, and
lifestyles.17
English Wicca and Druidry both benefited from the so-called Pagan
writers of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, who were disenchanted by
modernity, especially industrialization, and by a Christianity they found to be
both oppressive and increasingly irrelevant.18 Kenneth Grahame’s chapter
“The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” from The Wind in the Willows, which
15
Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 58.
16
Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 78–79.
17
Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990).
18
Jennifer Hallett, “Wandering Dreams and Social Marches: Varieties of Paganism in Late
Victorian and Edwardian England,” The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan
Studies 8:2 (2006), 162.
personifies nature in the form of the god Pan, is typical.19 Rudyard Kipling’s
“A Tree Song,” from his book of short stories Puck of Pook’s Hill has actually
been incorporated into contemporary Pagan rituals.20 These “Pagan writers”
(as they were labeled by critics) looked for cultural roots in the “eternal”
countryside – but different circumstances prevailed in the New World.
Prevented by barriers of language and culture from participating in the
religious lives of its native peoples, European settlers in America projected
their attitudes onto this new land. While some Puritans saw the indigenous
people as devilish inhabitants of a godless wilderness, Americans commonly
saw the land as a place of new beginnings, one untainted by European
feudalism and clericalism. This attitude contributed to an increasing reliance
in the nineteenth century on nature itself as a source of sacred value, an
attitude that persists today in the prevalence of outdoor camping festivals in
American Paganism. By 1970 – not coincidentally, the year of the first Earth
Day – American Pagans, particularly Wiccans, were beginning to refer to
theirs as an “earth religion” or “nature religion,” drawing on the cultural
stream of sacred nature as a way to legitimize religious traditions that lacked
scriptures, prophets, and similar elements. This claiming of nature’s mantle
marked both followers of imported English Wicca and indigenous new
Pagan religious movements such as Feraferia (“Wilderness Festival”) and
the Church of All Worlds, which grew partly from co-founder Tim (now
Oberon) Zell’s vision of earth as a single organism, with humans and
cetaceans as her neo-cortex – a vision he received, not coincidentally, in
September 1970.21 In the 1960s, the members of what became the New
Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, a seminal West Coast
Pagan group, held outdoor celebrations at the solstices and thought of
themselves as Druids before realizing that they had more in common with
Gardnerian Wicca. (In the United States, the term “Druid” lost its associa-
tions with English, Scottish, or Welsh nationalism and heritage, retaining
only a literary association with primeval religion and oak groves.)
Nature religion may be further subdivided into three categories: “cos-
mic,” “Gaian,” and “embodied.”22 Cosmic nature religion may be paired
with Renaissance high magic, seeking to unify the cosmos in the interests of
the practitioner: “As above, so below.” Cosmic nature religion, which
19
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (London: Methuen, 1908).
20
Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill (London: Macmillan, 1906).
21
Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, “Theagenesis: The Birth of the Goddess,” in Green Egg Omelette:
An Anthology of Art and Articles from the Legendary Pagan Journal, ed. Oberon Zell-Ravenheart
(Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2009).
22
Clifton, Her Hidden Children, 37–70.
concentrates on calendrical and astrological features, organizes worship

according to the eight-festival wheel of the year popularized by English
Druid Ross Nichols and Gerald Gardner.23 One of the first attempts to
codify Wiccan belief, developed at a 1974 conference in Minneapolis spon-
sored by the occult publishing house of Llewellyn, opened with this state-
ment: “We practice rites to attune ourselves with the natural rhythms of life
forces marked by the full of the Moon and seasonal quarters and cross-
quarters.”24 Indeed, it has been observed that the ritual year is more impor-
tant than gods, goddesses, and spirits to many contemporary Pagans.
Studying the relationship of folk music and the Pagan revival, Christopher
Chase asks, “If folk music has not bequeathed sacred persons to whom
worship and relationship are directed, then what other specific elements
(besides nationalism, populism, and identity politics) has it given contem-
porary Paganism?” He answers that it “seems to have been the ritual year,
that ‘old time religion.’”25
Gaian nature religion concerns itself with the practitioner’s relationship to
the planet-as-divinity, following Oberon Zell’s 1970 vision of “Gaia” as an
organism. It could be seen as the spiritual wing of the broader environmental
movement, and arguably it is the reason that some monotheist writers attack
environmentalism as “false religion.” The Gaian vision, however articulated,
follows on the heels of Transcendentalism and Swedenborgianism; it was the
eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg who enunciated, “All
nature is full of confirmation of the Divine.” The key difference between
Pagan nature religion and its previous manifestations is that most Pagans saw
Mother Earth as divine, not merely as metaphor. For Wiccans, the post–
Earth Day emphasis on nature religion served to counterbalance the idea of
folk witchcraft as spell casting only. By connecting themselves with the
spiritual stream of nature as source of sacred value, Wiccans of the 1970s
were able to cling to the folk idea of the low magic-working witch, while
casting themselves as followers of a religion – nature religion – and thus able
to claim the mantle of religious choice and freedom.
Finally, some contemporary Paganisms offer a new theology of the body.
Whereas Christianity sought to control the body, European folk witchcraft
retained a tradition – emphasized in literary and artistic depictions – of literal
transformation into an animal or of flying in one’s human form. For many
23
See Hutton, “Modern Pagan Festivals.”
24
Clifton, Her Hidden Children, 49.
25
Christopher Chase, “‘Be Pagan Once Again’: Folk Music, Heritage, and Socio-Sacred
Networks in Contemporary American Paganism,” The Pomegranate: The International
Journal of Pagan Studies 8:2 (2006).
Pagan women in particular, control over their own bodies and their own
pleasure is described in religious terms: “It sacralizes the body and the cycles
of nature . . . [rejecting] any form of authority imposed from without or
perceived as coming from a locus of power within the hegemony.”26 Inanna,
a Pagan blogger, writes, “For we Pagani, all glory is in embodiment. We
don’t honor asceticism, chastity, or restraint. There is no reason to deny the
pleasures of the flesh.”27 Pagan religionists sometimes embody the gods
through trance possession. Wicca also offers a ritualized form of sexual
intercourse, usually expressed symbolically through the union of the athame
(ritual dagger) and chalice, representing the creative powers of the universe.
Under some circumstances, ritualists themselves physically unite as represen-
tatives of the divine.
For Wicca, in particular, which was cast in 1950s Britain as a surviving
Stone Age fertility cult, the religious language of the body ran directly
counter to the dualistic spirit expressed in much of Christianity (not to
mention by heretics such as the medieval Cathars). It is the most direct
expression of Michael York’s formula of a sacred relationship with the
“tangible” and “sentient.” Likewise, the regard for the body in the religion,
combined with the rejection of hegemonic authority and a valuing of female
religious leadership, was one way in which the new religion of Wicca found
common ground with Second Wave feminism. Arguably, America’s con-
tributions to the Wiccan movement were the stress on feminism (through
such writers as Zsuzsanna Budapest, Starhawk, Margot Adler, and others) and
an expanded concept of nature religion. Both have helped Wicca become a
world religion, albeit still a small one, moving beyond the English-speaking
world to such nations as Germany, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, and India. Not
bound by nationalist or ethnic qualifications, Wicca has “experienced an
explosive growth in English-speaking countries” and appears poised to thrive
in the contemporary religious marketplace, where “in tandem with the
weaker social relationships that characterize modern society, there is an
increasing tendency for people to ‘hand craft’ their own individual
spirituality.”28
26
Sabina Magliocco and Holly Tannen, “The Real Old-Time Religion: Towards an
Aesthetics of Neo-Pagan Song,” Ethnologies 20:1 (1998), 175–201.
27
Inanna, “Pagan Values: Pleasure and Beauty,” At the End of Desire, June 18, 2009, http://
attheendofdesire.blogspot.com/2009/06/Pagan-values-pleasure-and-beauty.html
28
James R. Lewis, “The Pagan Explosion,” in The New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft
in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hannah E. Johnson and Peg Aloi (Aldershot: Ashgate
Publishing, 2007).
29
THE NEW AGE
Olav Hammer
1 Introduction: “The New Age,” A Catchall Term?

In modern society, an astounding range of religious or “spiritual” alternatives
to organized religion are available. A very incomplete list includes tarot
reading, Reiki healing, swimming with dolphins, astrology, (neo-)shaman-
ism, crystal healing, psychic phenomena, the recall of past-life memories,
Aura-Soma remedies, fire walking, and various modes of “positive think-
ing.” Among the list of the spiritual, one also finds vast numbers of books,
with titles such as A Course in Miracles, Conversations with God, and The
Celestine Prophecy. The term “New Age” is often affixed to them all, at least
by people who do not personally share any of these interests. Insiders will, on
the contrary, often insist that the label is derogatory or even meaningless.
Rather than seeing their own beliefs and practices as part of any wider social
movement, many hold that they have embarked on a thoroughly individual
quest. Scholarly literature hovers uncertainly between the two views, some
authors insisting that there is a minimal shared discourse uniting these various
practices and ideas, others rejecting “New Age” as a thoroughly vacuous
term.1 One difficulty with the expression is that, in common with many
other terms employed in the study of religion, it was a designation coined by
the members of a particular religious milieu and has since become employed
in a wide and not always compatible variety of ways.
The concept “New Age” is diffuse also because it consists of a combina-
tion of a common adjective and an equally common noun and has therefore
historically been repeatedly used in contexts that would seem to have few
points of contact with the modern concept. William Blake uses the term in a
1
For a discussion of the issues involved, see especially George D. Chryssides, “Defining the
New Age,” in Handbook of New Age, ed. Daren Kemp and James R. Lewis (Leiden: Brill,
2007), 5–24.
344
The New Ag e 345
publication dated 1804, in a context that has roots in the writings of the
eighteenth-century visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, and earlier.2 Other
early references are Warren Felt Evans’s book The New Age and Its
Messenger (1864), and the literary magazine The New Age founded in 1894.
New Age as label for a utopian vision with an occultist tinge is a later
creation. It originally arose in the 1930s in the Theosophical works of Alice
Bailey (e.g., in titles such as Discipleship in the New Age) and spread in the years
shortly after World War II in connection with the millennialist belief pre-
valent in certain occultist and UFO-oriented circles that the world was on
the brink of a major evolutionary transformation of consciousness. At the
time, the phrase “New Age” was not the only way to designate such
eschatological views. Astrological symbolism was also prevalent, and the
period of global “consciousness revolution” was often identified in literature
dating back to the 1960s and earlier as the “Aquarian Age.”
Around 1970, the designation New Age began to be regularly affixed to
the amalgam of spiritual interests outlined earlier. Millennialism and astro-
logical symbolism were still frequent references, and the various techniques
of healing, divination, and so on that were available were often seen as tools
that could be used to effect the transformation of consciousness. At this point,
using a generic label was still often perceived as quite unproblematic, and
New Age was an insider’s term. However, the millennial vision of the
movement rapidly lost strength; increasingly during the 1980s and beyond,
the various concepts and techniques were adopted by people who did not
share the vision of a collective transformation.
Wouter Hanegraaff helpfully suggests distinct terms for the two divergent
forms of New Age.3 The social movement that looked forward to a major
transformation of human consciousness can be called the New Age in the
restricted sense (sensu stricto). New Age in the broad sense (sensu lato) of the
word refers, by contrast, to the wide array of ideas and practices, united by
little more than historical links, a partly shared discourse, vague resemblances,
and particular settings (e.g., New Age book stores, festivals) where the
various interests coexist. Whether these hazy similarities are sufficient to
make it meaningful to identify such diverse practices by a shared designation
and, if so, whether it is acceptable to use a term abandoned by nearly all who
are sympathetic to these practices remain issues about which scholars
disagree.
2
Christoph Bochinger, “New Age” und moderne Religion: Religionswissenschaftliche Analysen
(Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1994), 280–281.
3
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular
Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 94–103.
346 Olav Ha mme r
It is not my intention here to attempt to solve the questions of coherence

and acceptability. These questions are by no means particular to the New
Age label, and arguably not even particularly fruitful ones to pose. After all,
what non-arbitrary criteria could establish whether two practices are “suffi-
ciently similar” to be labeled Christian, Islamic, or Hindu? Rather, the
remainder of this essay will be devoted to outlining a few of the historical
links, making the shared discourse explicit, and discussing some potential
reasons for the family resemblances connecting an otherwise truly diverse
and eclectic set of religious options.
2 Precursors, and a First New Age Generation

The 1967 musical Hair may have garbled its astrological terminology, but its
opening lyrics did express a feeling common to the late 1960s and early 1970s:
“This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” The “Age of Aquarius” was
firmly anchored in countercultural pursuits. The anticipated transformation
was to be ushered in by a diverse set of spiritual paths. Astrology, as can be
expected from the term itself, held a prominent place. But so did varieties of
Hindu philosophy, Zen, mysticism, and also psychedelic drugs, the latter the
preferred means to the transformation of consciousness of at least some
sectors of the late 1960s spiritual milieu. There is certainly an element of
Western esotericism in all of this, but the Age of Aquarius was omnivorous in
its spiritual appetites and respected few boundaries.
By the early 1970s, the Age of Aquarius had transformed into the first
generation of the New Age. Books for Inner Development, a catalogue of
literature on the vast variety of books available to those early New Agers,
published in 1976 and therefore generously including literature of the
immediately preceding years, provides examples of what the spiritually
adventurous could sample.4 Most of the topics would be instantly recogniz-
able to a present-day spiritual seeker. These include alchemy, astrology,
biorhythms, Buddhism, Edgar Cayce, color and aura, divination, dreams,
the occult properties of gems and stones, psychic healing, humanistic psy-
chology, Indian philosophy, Jewish mysticism, meditation, mythology, para-
psychology, reincarnation and karma, Tantra, tarot, UFOs and yoga. There
are few readily detectable changes in content from the more countercultural
1960s; even the literature on psychedelics is amply represented, albeit under
the somewhat more discrete rubric Consciousness Expansion. The catalogue
4
Cris Popenoe, Books for Inner Development: The Yes! Guide (Washington, DC: Random
House, 1976).
The New Ag e 347
is also a product of a New Age sensu stricto. The jacket blurb clearly indicates
that the disparate interests included are paths toward an overarching trans-
formation: “[The author] realized that the changes needed in the society
weren’t going to happen until changes took place within us.”
An interesting, almost postmodern aspect of Books for Inner Development is
its inclusion of high and low: from scholarly literature, to abstrusely esoteric
source texts, and to truly mass-market–oriented titles. Coexisting in the
pages of this catalogue are academic works by Frances Yates, editions of
works by various Christian and Islamic mystics, Theosophical texts, “chan-
neled” books such as the Urantia Book and Jane Roberts’s Seth materials, the
collected works of Carl Jung, titles by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, and some
popular and accessibly written books on topics such as health food, sun signs,
and psychedelics. While the sun sign and health food literature is ubiquitous
also in contemporary New Age bookshops, the intellectual aspiration of a
good deal of the literature from the mid-1970s is a distinctive trait of this first
generation of New Age. The hope for an imminent transformation of human
consciousness was a topic of interest also to numerous individuals with
considerable social and cultural capital. The attempt to formulate an intellec-
tually viable vision inspired by spiritual concerns can for example be seen
from the New Age science formulated by Fritjof Capra (b. 1939) and other
authors who were especially popular in the 1970s and into the 1980s.
Besides being apparent from the literature, the utopian drive of this first
generation of the New Age also displayed itself in concrete initiatives, such as
the communes and growth centers that were established at the time. Since its
inception in the early 1960s, the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland has
offered workshops and lectures on spiritual topics and has attracted thousands
of short- and long-term residents. The Esalen Institute on the coast of
California has similarly functioned as a center for alternative religiosity
since the 1960s.
Scientific aspirations and practical attempts to disseminate this utopian
vision went hand-in-hand with occultist and mystical concerns inherited
from earlier esoteric currents. An example is the early work of David
Spangler (b. 1945), whose claim to clairvoyance and connection to the
Findhorn Foundation made him a major influence on the first generation
of the New Age. His channeled texts from the early 1970s functioned as a
conduit for Theosophical ideas into the New Age. Another example is the
British writer George Trevelyan (1906–1996), whose book A Vision of the
Aquarian Age (1977) also helped promote a Theosophically based worldview
in New Age circles. Anthroposophy, Jungianism, and the works of Gurdjieff
are other esoteric influences on the first New Age generation.
348 Olav Ha mme r
3 Elements of a New Age Milieu

Much has changed since the New Age of the early 1970s. The present-day
(sensu lato) milieu of spiritual seekers is considerably less oriented toward
eschatology, and less clearly influenced by Theosophical ideas. It is more of a
mass-market audience and arguably even more diverse than was the first
generation. Diversity is an inevitable result of the most overt social char-
acteristics of this milieu. In a centralized organization, one will typically find
authoritative statements of doctrine. The New Age milieu is so fragmented
that no such list of “acceptable views” can be made. What we have are
commonly voiced opinions in the literature and among people involved in
various loosely organized forms of “spirituality.” Furthermore, the diversity
of the New Age milieu is connected to its rapid rate of change over time.
Books, ideas, and practices that captivated large audiences at one time can be
marginalized a few years later. James Redfield sold millions of copies of his
novel The Celestine Prophecy, published in 1993. After some years, Redfield
was largely eclipsed by Neal Donald Walsh’s book series Conversations with
God, the first volume of which appeared in 1995. More recently, the top
best-seller in the “alternative spirituality” genre has been Dan Brown’s The
Da Vinci Code, which has perhaps more tenuous links to a New Age form of
religiosity, however defined.
Despite the vast variety of individual doctrines and practices, and the
rapid rate of change, a few prevalent and more stable themes can be
discerned. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these themes tend to gravitate toward
matters frequently addressed in non-scriptural or folk religions around
the world and are of immediate concern to many: illness, death, mis-
fortune, difficult life choices, and perceived personal shortcomings.
Theological and philosophical issues are also treated in the literature,
but they play a more subordinate role. New Age therapists can wax
eloquent on the beneficial modes of healing that involve “balancing
one’s energies” but can be remarkably vague when it comes to discussing
the nature and origins of these energies.
The matter of most concern to New Age religiosity, judging from the
literature, is the perceived shortcomings of our lives. We are, it is suggested,
living well below our optimum potential. Fulfilling our potential can, at a
minimum, entail good health and a well-functioning life in terms of work
and personal relationships. Beyond those basic concerns, New Age literature
will often go further and challenge us to overcome suboptimal levels of
vitality, creativity, and energy. Self-improvement at various levels and in
the most diverse forms appears to be a major topic.
The New Ag e 349
Questions prompted by the quest for health, vitality, and self-improve-

ment are often dealt with by New Agers through various ritual techniques.
The specific methods employed in healing vary from the laying on of hands
to the use of a variety of ritual substances and objects. Reiki involves the use
of the healer’s hands. Crystal healing depends on the idea that gems and
minerals possess healing properties. Color therapies and Aura-Soma therapy
assume that colors influence physical and spiritual well-being. One promi-
nent subset of rituals that promote spiritual self-improvement consists of
divinatory practices. Astrology obviously predates the emergence of the
New Age by many centuries. However, the interpretations of the various
symbols of the birth chart have changed considerably over time and have
become steadily more integrated into the New Age focus on the individual,
his or her life situation, and inner spiritual change. The difficulties encoun-
tered in life are explained in terms of lessons to be worked on and absorbed
into the individual’s present existence on earth. Other forms of divination,
such as the use of tarot cards, also typically concern the spiritual development
of the individual.
The specific concepts and rituals involved in healing and self-improve-
ment can be rooted in the personal experience of those who create them.
Quite commonly, however, these concepts and methods are held to have a
suprahuman origin. In traditional cultures around the world, religious spe-
cialists have functioned as links between human beings and what each culture
understands to be spiritual reality. The New Age counterpart of this process
of prophetic communication is widely known as “channeling.” Channeled
messages generally convey the idea that we are functioning at suboptimal
levels and issue the same sort of call for self-improvement that we encounter
in the context of healing and divination. Channeled texts can suggest that fear
and guilt, negative thinking, the blockage of spiritual energy, or the forces of
rationality and materialism are obstacles to a higher, intuitive mode of
thinking and impede us from recognizing our spiritual natures. A related
credo that permeates much of the channeled material is that we “create our
own reality.” If guilt or fear burdens us, our world will be dark and frighten-
ing. If we bring out our inner divine selves, however, the world will become
filled with apparent miracles.
These basic doctrinal elements were at the core of an early series of
channeled messages, set forth in a series of books by Jane Roberts known
as the “Seth material.” In these works, Roberts (1929–1984) claimed to have
channeled the messages of the discarnate entity Seth. Her writings spread
through the emerging New Age network throughout the late 1960s and early
1970s and became trend setting for subsequent claims of channeled messages.
350 Olav Ha mme r
They also contain a number of innovative religious ideas and concepts that
have been adopted as normative by the wider New Age culture.
A quite different but also very influential channeled text in the contem-
porary New Age milieu is A Course in Miracles. According to this work’s
founding legend, the text was received by psychologist Helen Schucman
(1909–1981) through dictation from an inner voice that she identified as that
of Jesus. According to A Course in Miracles, our everyday image of physical
reality is illusory. Our conventional view of the world shows us a place where
human beings are separated from one another and from the divine, and
where pain, disease, and disharmony exist. However, this worldview is in
reality a projection of our frightened egos.
4 Unity in Diversity?
The description given earlier of a loose social milieu where, among other
things, New Age science, astrology, healing, and channeling coexist can give
the impression of a true anarchy of opinions, where anything goes.
Nevertheless, a reasonably coherent underlying set of conceptions can be
identified within the various practices and ideas. This underlying core
includes a cosmology, a view of human nature, and a set of postulates
regarding the nature of spiritual knowledge. Although rarely spelled out in
full by insiders, these conceptions can be made explicit as follows.
The entire cosmos is not so much a vast collection of material objects as a
great, interconnected web of meaning. The underlying “stuff” of the cosmos
is therefore not matter but something intangible, identifiable as “conscious-
ness” or “energy.” We humans contain a spark of this energy or conscious-
ness within us, a resource that we can tap into to change reality and create our
own worlds. The human being is thus not only a material body but also
contains a spiritual element. That such a spiritual component exists is appar-
ent in a variety of contexts. Healing, for instance, addresses our spiritual
nature, rather than merely treating isolated physical symptoms. The spiritual
aspect of the human constitution can also be invoked in the concept of
reincarnation: Each of us is on a journey of spiritual development, in which
our true, inner self develops as we incarnate again and again over a series of
many lives.
It is also generally held that there are normally invisible vital forces
(“energies”) that surround and/or permeate the human body, and which
the New Age therapist is able to manipulate. Thus, the human aura, a colored
sheath said to enclose the physical body, is held by many healers to provide
clues to the state of the client’s health. The hidden anatomy is often
The New Ag e 351
understood to be composed of seven or more centers of vital force, the

chakras. The body is furthermore perceived as a holistic system. The body as a
whole is mirrored in the feet (reflexology), in the outer ears (as in one
modern, Western development of acupuncture), and in the eyes (iridology).
Theories of Chinese origin, according to which the vital forces flow through
channels connecting all parts of the body into an integrated whole, have been
eagerly embraced by New Age healers.
But how can we know what a particular tarot card entails for our self-
understanding, what a particular crystal will do to our chakras, or what the
colors of the aura signal? The New Age literature presupposes a particular
view of knowledge. It holds that there are potentially better ways to come to
understand ourselves and the world than those that depend on rationality and
the intellect. Perhaps we can gain spiritual insight in flashes of intuition.
Perhaps there are altered states of consciousness in which we can access
knowledge from various highly developed beings, or from a divine part of
ourselves. Similar insights into the workings of the cosmos and into our own
selves, it is often suggested, were granted to a number of ancient cultures,
ranging from Egypt and India to the Native Americas and are confirmed by
the most recent developments of Western science, especially quantum
mechanics. Ultimately, however, spirituality is not a matter of accepting
doctrines formulated by others but rather a highly individual quest that can
(and perhaps should) be based primarily on personal experience.
5 The New Age as Cultic Milieu?

One reason that has been cited in the scholarly literature for the apparently
chaotic plurality of opinions and practices to which the New Age label is
often affixed is that the New Age constitutes a cultic milieu.5 The “cultic
milieu,” a term coined by Colin Campbell, consists of people who have
adopted a variety of beliefs that from the majority point of view may seem
more or less unorthodox.6 They have done so with varying degrees of
commitment, without expressing them in an organized setting. The cultic
milieu can support unrelated and at times even mutually contradictory
beliefs, simply because they share certain important characteristics. For
instance, the belief in psychic messages, in astrology, or in the prophecies
of Nostradamus constitute minority views that flourish in a society whose
5
Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, 14–18.
6
Colin Campbell, “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization,” A Sociological Yearbook of
Religion in Britain 5 (1972), 119–136.
352 Olav Ha mme r
institutions take little notice of them or can attempt to suppress them. People
who want to defend the value of such views often do so in defiance of the
worldview of the majority and will seek support among others who espouse
equally “alternative” ideas.
Colin Campbell contrasts “alternative” or (in his terminology) “deviant”
ideas with those that are mainstream or socially accepted. His theory thus
appears to presuppose that there is one dominant, nearly monolithic culture,
in opposition to an underground of divergent and rather marginalized
innovations. Other theories, developed by cultural anthropologists over
the past several decades, afford opportunities to understand religious innova-
tion, and thus New Age religiosity, in different terms.
Since at least the 1980s, the representation of cultures as stable systems
regulating individual behavior has come under considerable criticism. The
assumption that a particular group shares a culture has been seen as masking
the hegemony of the dominant strata of that group and as being blind to
variability and diversity. Numerous anthropologists have suggested that
“culture” is a problematic term, an abstraction created by the anthropologist
to describe the manifold things that people do, rather than a monolithic
model that people collectively inherit and embody.7 A useful metaphor to
conceptualize this more recent approach to culture and cultural variability is
that of culture as a large repertoire of discourses and practices. The repertoire
metaphor is helpful in describing both the diversity and the rapid change over
time just discussed. Variation, as Fredrik Barth argues, is part of any complex
society that encompasses people with different levels of expertise, different
received traditions, local variations, different social strata, and various prac-
tical interests.8 Rapid change is the effect of agents with different compe-
tences and interests picking different elements from the repertoire, and
occasionally adding novel components to it.
A number of constraints on variability and change prevent New Age
religiosity (or any other tradition) from becoming entirely devoid of specific
content. The constraints include the net composition of the repertoire at any
given time, the social and historical context that makes a particular selection
from this repertoire relevant, the individual creativity of particular agents,
and the ability of dominant players in the religious environment to enforce
their own selection on others. Jointly, many of these factors can be summar-
ized in a model of religious supply and demand.
7
For a background to older views of culture and to the debate of the 1980s and 1990s, see
Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
8
Fredrik Barth, Balinese Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4–5.
The New Ag e 353
6 The Supply and Demand of Religion

The view of the New Age as a set of selections from a vast repertoire of
cultural elements has specific consequences. Clearly, not all selections and
combinations of cultural elements are equally successful: Some innovations
catch on and become major trends, whereas others remain associated with
individual people and their closest networks. Two major views of what
allows certain movements to grow are supply-side and demand-side theories.
Supply-side theories look at the ability of religious movers and shakers to
formulate their message in an appealing way. Demand-side theories focus on
the preferences of the potential consumers. Since the New Age is a largely
unregulated market, the viability of its individual elements is dependent on
both aspects, that is, on supply meeting demand. Only to the extent that New
Age suppliers supply what consumers require can they hope to make an
impact.
The demands of the New Age consumer can be inferred by looking at a list
of traits shared by many of the products on offer. Successful New Age
innovations will typically be characterized by the following:
1. A sufficient distance from beliefs and practices supported by major social
institutions. New Age healing, to take just one example, is often in
marked disagreement with the ideals and practices of mainstream
medicine.
2. Individualism. As noted earlier, many New Agers see themselves as
pursuing an individual spiritual quest.
3. Nostalgia and exoticism. New Agers will typically understand their own
doctrines and rituals as rooted in ancient cultures, such as Egypt, India,
China, Tibet, or the Native Americas.
4. Needs in the here-and-now, with a particular a focus on the self as
functioning suboptimally but embarked on a voyage of self-
improvement.
5. Recognizability. Innovations rarely stray too far away from the already
acceptable. A new mode of healing that manipulates energies differently
will no doubt be better received than a therapy based on concepts of
witchcraft and exorcism.
This perspective of the New Age as supply meeting demand has two
important and seemingly contrary consequences. The first, conservatism, is
readily accounted for by the fact that spokespersons of the New Age generally
pick elements from an already existing religious repertoire. Available meth-
ods of healing, divination, or channeling will be reformulated or recombined
354 Olav Ha mme r
in new ways. Due to this element of recognizability and the conservatism it

entails, a historical chain of doctrines and their predecessors can be traced
back in time. The second consequence is innovation: As long as the resulting
mix of cultural elements attracts customers, it can also contain components
that are not selected from the already existing pool. The relationship between
the New Age and Western esotericism is a result of this tension between
conservatism and innovation.
The conservative aspect of this form of religiosity is evident from the
existing literature. Paul Heelas points at predecessors in fin-de-siècle occultism,
Jungianism, Lebensreform movements, and so forth.9 Hanegraaff pursues the
historical roots further back in time and sees the New Age as an eclectic
combination of several strands of Western esotericism, ultimately stretching
back to the Renaissance, but radically modernized from the eighteenth
century onward.10 Much of the present New Age is prefigured by the ideas
and practices created by individuals crucial to this process of modernization,
such as Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1722) and Franz Anton Mesmer (1731–
1791). From the mid-nineteenth century on, at least two main currents have
come to influence the history of the New Age. The first is Theosophy and its
heirs. The second is the “harmonial religions” that followed in the wake of
the American mesmerist healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866).
The Theosophical strand leads us to Alice Bailey (1880–1949), where we
started our historical journey at the beginning of this essay.
The description given earlier emphasizes the continuity of the emerging
New Age of the 1970s with earlier forms of Western esotericism. The
innovative aspect should, however, not be underestimated. As long as supply
matches demand, there is no inherent mechanism in the New Age milieu
that necessarily favors Western esoteric elements over any other sources.
Loans from other religious traditions and the various products of individual
creativity are equally important ingredients. It can, of course, be argued that
the already familiar colors the hitherto unknown to such an extent that even
elements borrowed from, for example, Sufism, Tantrism, or shamanism are
reinterpreted and become integrated into a Western esoteric framework.
Nevertheless, individual beliefs and practices can be picked from anywhere
9
Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 41–48 et passim.
10
Hanegraaff, New Age Religion, esp. chap. 14. Modernization in Hanegraaff’s perspective
includes the adoption of mechanical causality, an interest in the Orient, the idea of
evolution, and psychologization. For a complementary, more sociologically oriented
approach to modernization, see Olav Hammer, “New Age Movement” in Dictionary of
Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill 2005), 855–861.
The New Ag e 355
on the globe, from the Native Americas to Egypt, from China to Polynesia,
as long as they fit the specific preoccupations of the New Age.
A case in point is Transcendental Meditation (TM), a practice into which
vast numbers of people have been initiated because it addresses the demands
outlined earlier. It advocates beliefs and practices that run counter to those
supported by major social institutions, such as the educational and scientific
communities (e.g., by suggesting that accomplished meditators can over-
come the force of gravity); it is individualistic (promising each initiate a
uniquely tailor-made mantra), exotic (Indian), centered on the here-and-
now needs of the self (from relaxation to increased vitality and creativity), and
recognizable (by referring, for example, to scientific evidence for its effec-
tiveness, and blaming “stress” instead of karma as the cause of spiritual
malaise). Nevertheless, the historical roots of TM lie in a particular inter-
pretation of Vedantic philosophy, and not with any current of Western
esotericism. Paradoxically, although much of the New Age turns out to be
affiliated with earlier esoteric currents, it is so for no deeper reason than sheer
historical contingency.
V
Common Threads
M
30
ALCHEMY
Lawrence M. Principe
1 Introduction
Alchemy is a complex and wide-ranging discipline that is difficult to char-
acterize in simple terms. In the course of nearly two millennia, alchemy has
appeared in many guises; was formed and reformed by various cultures, ideas,
and locales; and was directed toward a variety of goals by its thousands of
practitioners. Perhaps the greatest obstacle in gaining an accurate historical
understanding of the subject today is the fact that alchemy continues to be
misrepresented in many modern accounts. In many quarters, reinterpreta-
tions and programmatic reassessments of alchemy that date from the eight-
eenth to the early twentieth centuries continue to dominate and to be read
back onto earlier epochs. Recent scholarship, however, has shown that these
latter-day perspectives are historically untenable. Indeed, the past forty years
have witnessed a remarkable blossoming of scholarly studies of alchemy, with
the felicitous result that we now have access to a vastly more accurate
understanding of what alchemy really was at various points in its long history.
A key point to stress at the outset is the internal diversity of alchemy. It is
not an unchanging monolithic tradition, although it is sometimes repre-
sented as such by both its practitioners and its commentators. This issue
becomes especially critical when the question of alchemy’s connection to
esotericism and mysticism arises. It is true that alchemy can be seen as a
“common thread” running through various topics addressed in this volume.
Nevertheless, both the degree and the uniformity of those connections are
frequently overstated, and their nature misunderstood. The source of the
problem is twofold. On the one hand, interpretations of alchemy dating from
the Enlightenment and the Victorian era recast the subject into much closer
association with topics routinely labeled as “occult” than had ever been the
case historically. Thus, many popular treatments of alchemy today, and even
359
360 Lawrence M. Principe
some scholarly ones, regularly and rather casually claim that alchemy was
“magical,” “spiritual,” “occult,” or “mystical.” The general aim of these
characterizations has been to define alchemy as something very distinct from
chemistry. By doing so, these accounts perpetuate – often unwittingly – the
ahistorical claims of uniquely eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interpre-
tations or reformulations of alchemy.
On the other hand, the terms “mysticism” and “esotericism” tend to be
employed in so loose and vague a manner that they sometimes fail to retain
any precise or consistent meaning. Caught between the opposing forces of
the exuberant extravagance of nineteenth-century occultism and the smug
aridity of nineteenth- and twentieth-century positivism, these terms (and
related ones such as “occult,” “magical,” and even “scientific”) have become
so overburdened with accreted connotations that they have come to be
deployed more often as terms of opprobrium or approbation than of precise
or meaningful description. Their incautious use invites misunderstanding.
For example, if we define “esoteric” in its strict sense of “abstruse or secret
knowledge possessed only by a small group,” then some parts of alchemy are
indeed esoteric: In almost all historical contexts, these parts are considered to
be secret and privileged knowledge. Examples include the operational details
for making the Philosophers’ Stone and for transmuting base metals into
gold. Yet even in this strict sense, only some parts of alchemy qualify as
esoteric: Throughout alchemy’s history, most of its basic principles – for
example, theories of matter or of the nature, composition, and subterranean
production of metals – were readily available and widely known. The
situation is similar to that of contemporary physics, where its fundamental
principles are easily accessible and known to a broad audience, while its most
advanced concepts remain abstruse and incomprehensible to non-physicists,
and some applications (e.g., the specifics of constructing nuclear weapons)
remain guarded secrets. When we move to usages of the adjective “esoteric”
that depend on a link to “esotericism” (a term of nineteenth-century coin-
age) and thereby relate to specifically religious, spiritual, or occultist currents,
then the great majority of alchemy is not esoteric at all. A similar argument
may be made, mutatis mutandis, about “mystical” (in the senses of “mysterious
and secret” versus “pertaining to mysticism”) and “occult” (in the senses of
simply “hidden” versus “pertaining to occultism”).
The balance of this essay attempts to clarify these points and to provide a
historically accurate presentation of the main features of alchemy and their
historical development, with emphasis on alchemy’s contact with topics that
can be (or have been) classed as esoteric. It surveys the history of alchemy
through its four major phases in the West, from its origins in Late Antique
Alc hemy 361
Egypt (100–700 CE), through its elaboration in the Arabic world (750–1400),
to its broadest development in Latin Europe (1150–1750), and finally
through its period of retrospective evaluation and revivals (after 1750).1
2 Greco-Egyptian Alchemy
Alchemy’s origins lie in Greco-Roman Egypt of the first centuries CE, when
two preexistent traditions began to merge. One component was a practical
craft tradition of metalworking that included techniques for imitating gold,
silver, and other precious materials. Traces of this artisanal tradition survive in
the Leiden and Stockholm Papyri, documents dating probably to the third
century, which list practical recipes for such things as how to alter the surface
color of metals to make them look like silver or gold. The other component
was Greek philosophical speculation about the nature of matter and change,
intellectual currents dating back to the Presocratics. Thus, alchemy repre-
sents, from its beginnings, a fusion of theory and practice, of knowledge and
craft, of epistēmē and technē.
One early witness of this mingling is the Physika kai mystika of pseudo-
Democritus. The title (probably added later) is often translated as Physical and
Mystical Things, but it is more accurately rendered as Natural and Secret Things.
Most of the text, dating probably to the late first or second century CE,
contains recipes such as those in the Papyri, but these are interspersed with
the refrain “Nature (physis) delights in nature, nature conquers nature, nature
masters nature.” This phrase can be interpreted as the expression of a
theoretical principle about how to use and manipulate the properties (“nat-
ures”) of materials for practical ends.
A full synthesis of the practical and theoretical appears in the writings of
Zosimos of Panopolis (fl. 300 CE), the most important Greco-Egyptian
alchemist. Most of Zosimos’s writings are lost; however, surviving fragments
describe an array of (often quite sophisticated) apparatus for chemical pro-
cesses, alongside guiding theoretical principles regarding the nature and
composition of metals. Significantly, Zosimos’s goal is not the imitation of
precious metals but rather their real production from baser metals. This
process of transmutation is undergirded by the theoretical principle that all
metals share a common underlying matter and are therefore capable of being
interconverted. The process of making gold, or chrysopoeia, is to be done by
combining baser metals with one or more materials prepared from other
1
For a fuller account of the history of alchemy, see Lawrence M. Principe, The Secrets of
Alchemy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
substances. The transmuting agent would later (not before the seventh
century) be called the Philosophers’ Stone.
Several enduring features of alchemy are established in Zosimos’s writings,
perhaps none more significant than the commitment to secrecy. Both of
alchemy’s progenitors incorporated secretive elements. The recipe tradition
undoubtedly relied on keeping techniques secret to preserve “proprietary”
methods, and the philosophical tradition likewise contained secretive, or
privileged, elements – particularly the more esoteric branches of Alexandrian
Neoplatonism current in Zosimos’s day. A further incentive to secrecy may
have been the emperor Diocletian’s contemporaneous decree to destroy
Egyptian books dealing with “the cheimeia of silver and gold.”2 Secrecy
manifests itself both in Zosimos and in later alchemy in several ways. Most
commonly, substances are not called by their usual names. Instead,
Decknamen (cover names) are used, and authors often “call a single thing by
many names while they call many things by a single name.”3
Zosimos considers metals to be composed of two substances: a nonvolatile
part he calls “body” (sōma) and a volatile part he calls “spirit” (pneuma). The
spirit carries the properties particular to each metal, while the body seems to
be common to all metals. The metal’s identity thus depends on its spirit;
hence, Zosimos uses fire – in distillation, sublimation, volatilization, and so
forth – to separate spirits and infuse them into other substances to bring about
transmutation. This body-spirit nomenclature for metals naturally leads to
(and derives from) a metaphorical linkage with death and the soul of man.
Accordingly, Zosimos expresses some technical processes allegorically in the
form of dreams (sometimes misleadingly called “visions”). He describes men
made of metals, an altar shaped like a chemical vessel, sacrifices, death, and
torments. Zosimos draws on details of contemporaneous temple practices for
his imagery, but he is likewise clear that these “dreams” are to be interpreted
allegorically, as providing technical details or theoretical foundations for
practical metallic transmutation. This secretive, allegorizing tendency
would become typical of alchemical writing and reached its zenith in early
modern Europe.
Gnostic ideas are expressed in Zosimos’s Letter Omega. (Zosimos’s writings
were apparently classified according to the Greek alphabet; what we have as
the Letter Omega is only the preamble to a treatise on apparatuses and furnaces,
now lost.) Zosimos attacks rival alchemists who claim that specific materials
2
Acta sanctorum julii, 7 vols. (Antwerp, 1719–31), 2:557.
3
Zosimos, “Twenty-Sixth Epistle,” in Benjamin Hallum, “Zosimus Arabus” (Ph.D.
dissertation 2008, Warburg Institute), 366.
Alc hemy 363
and techniques are not needed to prepare transmuting tinctures. Zosimos

declares that their success is only an illusion produced by daimons. This
daimonic trickery is akin to that which – gnostically speaking – tricked Adam
into taking on a body, with all its ill effects. Zosimos insists on tinctures that
act completely naturally, and that human beings remain free of daimonic
influence and the control of fate.
Most of the later Greek alchemical writings are commentaries on the
earlier material, often relating it more closely to Greek philosophical spec-
ulation. A significant expansion of alchemy dates from the Islamic period.
The Arabic world inherited Greek texts and added enormously to their
conceptual and practical content.
2 Arabic Alchemy
The early period of Arabic authorship produced the Emerald Tablet, one of
the most revered texts relating to alchemy, attributed to the legendary figure
Hermes Trismegistus, a complex layering of Greek and Egyptian mythic
figures. Zosimos cited “Hermes” as an authority, and by the tenth century
Hermes had grown into the founder of alchemy. The Tablet is probably an
Arabic composition of the eighth century, although it later appeared in
various versions. In all cases, its text is obscure and of debatable meaning
but seems to adopt Greek ideas about monism and celestial-terrestrial
interrelationships.
The largest set of Arabic alchemical writings is connected to the name Jābir
ibn-Hayyān. It is doubtful that Jābir actually existed; these writings are the
product of many authors, a “school” of alchemists operating over several
generations, from roughly 800 to 1000.4 “Jābir” presents himself as the
favored student of the sixth Shi’ite imam, Jaʽfar al-Sādiq (700–765). Jabirian
writings display features of ninth-century Shi’ite ideas; the earlier linkage of
them to the Ikhwān al-Safā’ (Brethren of Purity) now seems less tenable.5
Connection to this Shi’ite sect did however lead to an initiatic style, whereby
the author calls readers his sons and promises to reveal privileged knowledge
to the worthy. This style was later propagated and developed throughout
Latin alchemy, as the earliest Latin authors endeavored to imitate Jabirian
literary style. Another literary feature is the “dispersion of knowledge,” a
4
Paul Kraus, Jābir ibn Hayyān: Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam, Volume I:
Le Corpus des écrits jābiriens, Mémoires de L’Institute d’Égypte 44, (1943) and Volume II: Jābir et la
science grecque, Mémoires de L’Institute d’Égypte 45, (1942).
5
Yves Marquet, “La place de l’alchimie dans Les épîtres des Frères de la Pureté,” Chrysopoeia 7
(2000–2003), 49–59.
technique of secrecy that divides a single process or concept into pieces and
scatters the pieces through one or more texts.
Jabirian transmutational theories are often based on the four elements of
Empedocles and Aristotle: fire, air, earth, and water. These works, such as the
Book of Seventy, endeavor to prepare “elixirs” that, when mixed with a base
metal, are capable of adjusting the proportions of these elements in the metal
to turn it into gold. Other texts adopt the Mercury-Sulphur theory of the
early ninth-century Book of the Secrets of Creation of Balı̄nūs. This Mercury-
Sulphur theory states that all metals are compounds of two ingredients called
Mercury and Sulphur. These two combine in different proportions and
degrees of purity to produce the various metals. Gold results from the best
Sulphur and Mercury combined in exact proportions. When the Mercury
and Sulphur are impure or combined in the wrong ratio, base metals are
produced. This theory provides a strong theoretical foundation for transmu-
tation: If all metals share the same ingredients and differ only in the relative
proportions and qualities of those ingredients, then purifying the Mercury
and Sulphur in lead and adjusting their ratio should produce gold. The
Mercury-Sulphur theory would endure until the eighteenth century.
Later Arabic authors, such as al-Rāzı̄ (or Rhazes, ca. 865–923/4) and ibn-
Sı̄nā (Avicenna, ca. 980–1037), would add dramatically to the practical and
material repertory of alchemy. Ibn-Sı̄nā, however, wrote dismissively of the
possibility of transmutation, based on his belief in a fundamental difference
between natural and artificial products. Nevertheless, many contemporary
and subsequent Arabic writers continued to pursue chrysopoeia. The Arabic
world also records the appearance of “false alchemists” – those who use
alchemy as a pretext for defrauding the unwary with deceptions of various
sorts.
3 Latin Alchemy
Alchemy came into Europe through translations of Arabic texts, part of a
broad translation movement beginning in the twelfth century. By 1300,
numerous original Latin compositions had appeared, perhaps none more
influential than the Summa perfectionis. Its author, possibly the Franciscan
lecturer Paul of Taranto, wrote under the name Geber to coopt the authority
of Jabir. “Geber” displays extensive knowledge of practical processes and
develops an influential quasi-particulate matter theory for explaining chemi-
cal phenomena from density to transmutation. While deploying the initiatic
tone, Geber’s style is predominantly Scholastic: clear, orderly, and without
overt secrecy. The earliest Latin alchemical works share this style.
Alc hemy 365
By 1300, transmutational alchemy had become controversial. Some

debates focused on intellectual issues such as the limits of human ability and
differences between natural and manmade substances.6 Others drew on
linkages between chrysopoeia and dishonest practices, particularly counter-
feiting; these links, cited in the Islamic world, became more pronounced in
Europe. Accordingly, Dante placed alchemists alongside forgers and coun-
terfeiters in the eighth circle of Hell.7 In 1317, Pope John XXII issued a
decretal skeptical of transmutation and forbidding the sale of artificial metals.
Similar decrees followed from secular authorities, motivated by practical
concerns over counterfeiting and the debasement of the currency.
Alchemy thereafter became more secretive, employing authorial pseudo-
nyms, Decknamen, and allegory more extensively. Many allegories were
drawn from Christian concepts. As Zosimos had compared his treatment of
metals to torments and sacrifice, so did some Christian authors compare their
treatments of materials in making the Philosophers’ Stone to Christ’s passion,
death, and resurrection. Fourteenth-century authors such as John of
Rupescissa and pseudo-Arnald of Villanova wrote explicitly that they were
describing laboratory operations in metaphorical terms; however, they also
expected analogical affinities to exist between material and spiritual aspects of
the world. Such allegorical speech was later (ca. 1400) cast into pictorial
format, giving rise to emblematic depictions of alchemical processes and
ideas.8
4 Early Modern Alchemy (or “Chymistry”)

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, commonly called the “scientific
revolution,” saw alchemy’s greatest flowering. It is crucial to note, however,
that throughout its Arabic and European history, alchemy encompassed
more than chrysopoeia. The preparation of an array of chemical materials –
pigments, dyes, pharmaceuticals, perfumes, acids, salts, and so forth – as well
as theories of material composition also fell under alchemy’s rubric. Indeed,
until circa 1700 “alchemy” and “chemistry” were largely synonymous terms;
hence, historians have suggested using the term “chymistry” to refer to this
6
See William R. Newman, “Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages,”
Isis 80 (1989), 423–445.
7
Dante, La divina commedia, Canto XXIX.
8
See Barbara Obrist, Les débuts de l’imagerie alchimique (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982); Rosarium
philosophorum: Ein alchemisches Florilegium des Spätmittelalters, ed. Joachim Telle, 2 vols.
(Weinheim: VCH, 1992).
undifferentiated domain to avoid the connotations now attached to

“alchemy” (old and discredited) and “chemistry” (modern and scientific).9
Chymistry was ubiquitous in early modern Europe. Thousands of practi-
tioners from all ranks of society pursued it for diverse reasons. Some saw
chrysopoeia as a “get rich quick” scheme and ruined themselves in its pursuit.
Some chymists found employment in princely courts; some signed contracts
with rulers to make gold or improve mining extractions – failure under such
conditions could result in imprisonment or execution.10 Still others used
chymical techniques and processes (in refining, mining, pharmacy, or other
manufactures) to earn a middle-class living. More educated or leisured
practitioners engaged in lengthy practical investigations, developing or refin-
ing chymical theories and writing scholarly treatises – ranging from straight-
forward to highly allegorical and secretive. Many respected figures of the
scientific revolution also studied chrysopoeia seriously, such as Robert
Boyle, John Locke, and Isaac Newton. Chymical emblemata flourished not
only as veiled communication but also as learned play and art. Painters
depicted chymists at work, and poets and preachers alike borrowed images
and concepts – especially those dealing with distillation, purification, and
transformation – for use as metaphors in their own works.11
Medicinal applications represent an important addition to chymistry.
Although originating in the Middle Ages, medical chymistry (iatrochemistry)
owes much of its establishment to Theophrastus of Hohenheim, called
Paracelsus (1493/94–1541). Paracelsus used chymistry primarily for medicine
and was little interested in chrysopoeia. Through Scheidung (separation),
ordinary materials could be freed of impurities and toxins and transformed
into medicines. Paracelsus expanded the Mercury-Sulphur dyad by adding
Salt to provide the tria prima – a material trinity reflecting the immaterial
Trinity. Division of a substance into its tria prima and recombination of these
9
William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The
Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake,” Early Science and Medicine 3
(1998):32–65; also Robert Halleux, Textes alchimiques (Turnhout: Brepols, 1979), 43–49.
10
Tara Nummedal, Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007); Bruce Moran, The Alchemical World of the German Court, Sudhoffs
Archiv 29 (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1991); Pamela H. Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science
and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
11
Lawrence M. Principe and Lloyd Dewitt, Transmutations: Alchemy in Art (Philadelphia:
Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2002); Stanton J. Linden, Darke Hieroglyphicks: Alchemy in
English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1996); Sylvain Matton, “Thématique alchimique et litterature religieuse dans la France du
XVIIe siècle,” Chrysopoeia 2 (1988), 129–208; Sylvia Fabrizio-Costa, “De quelques emplois
des thèmes alchimiques dans l’art oratoire italien du XVIIe siècle,” Chrysopoeia 3 (1989),
135–162.
Alc hemy 367
purified essentials – a process called spagyria – “perfected” the substance,

allowing it to manifest its properties most powerfully. Paracelsus’s chymical
world-system embraced both theology and natural philosophy. Chymical
processes provided fundamental models for natural processes in the macro-
cosm (the world) and the microcosm (the human body). He envisioned
everything from digestion to the weather and God’s creation of the world
out of chaos as chymical processes. Later followers organized Paracelsus’s
often obscurantist and chaotic system; thus, Paracelsianism proved extremely
influential.12
Jacob Boehme (1575–1624) deployed Paracelsian language in his complex
theology. (The Lutheran cobbler borrowed ideas from astronomy and other
disciplines as well.) For Boehme, the tria prima are not constituents of material
substances but rather aspects of God. Boehme’s Salitter is a nexus of divine
creative powers, while the name refers to sal niter (potassium nitrate), a salt
that displays physical properties analogous to the spiritual ones of the divine
Salitter.13 Boehme’s terminological borrowings, however, are quite distinct
from contemporaneous chymistry.
The relationship between chymistry and religion is complex. While it is
often claimed that alchemy bears a special relationship to religion, the links
between the two reflect broader interrelationships between religion and all
early modern natural philosophy. For example, many chrysopoeians called
the Philosophers’ Stone a Donum dei (gift of God); in doing so, they both
acknowledged the ultimate source of all good and elevated their knowledge
to privileged status. Yet this denomination, understood in the context of
contemporaneous piety, does not mean that alchemists viewed the Stone as
something spiritual or something acquired miraculously without laboratory
work, or that their goals and practices were radically different from those of
other contemporaneous practitioners. The Stone’s preparation, although
considered knowledge of the highest kind, is a Donum dei in much the
same way as a laborious farmer’s harvest, an assiduous scholar’s rare knowl-
edge, or a theologian’s special insights.
Heinrich Khunrath (ca. 1560–1605) provides another example. While
often loosely cited as a “spiritual alchemist,” Khunrath was clear about the
physical nature of preparing the Stone. Nevertheless, he also asserted the
12
Didier Kahn, Alchimie et Paracelsisme en France (1567–1625), (Geneva: Droz, 2007); Walter
Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era in the Renaissance (Basel:
Karger, 1958); Allen G. Debus, The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York: Science History Publications, 1977).
13
Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth Century Philosopher and
Mystic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), esp. pp. 65–69.
value of theurgical practices for gaining knowledge of secrets, and empha-

sized analogies between physical and spiritual, for example, between the
Philosopher’s Stone and Christ.14 Drawing and relying on such analogies
was widespread in early modern thought of all kinds.
Despite ubiquitous metaphorical linkages to theological and spiritual mat-
ters, the overwhelming majority of chymical books and manuscripts indicate
that virtually all early modern alchemists strove to prepare in their workshops a
material Philosophers’ Stone that operated purely naturally to transmute base
metals into gold. Only a few writers envisioned literal connections between
chymical products and the supernatural. Robert Boyle (1627–1691), for exam-
ple, sought to prepare the Stone for transmutational and medicinal purposes
but also thought that it might facilitate communication with angels.15
Early modern chymical practices enriched commerce and medicine, chy-
mical theories provided ideas and concepts for natural philosophy, and
chymical experiments revealed the workings of nature. Yet chymistry suf-
fered from a poor public image in the seventeenth century, partly due to the
dirty, laborious nature of its practice, and partly due to the long-standing
association of chrysopoeia with counterfeiting and fraud.
5 Reevaluations and Revivals of Alchemy

The early eighteenth century witnessed the dramatic collapse of chrysopoeia.
In 1700, pursuit of transmutation remained strong, but by 1725 it had largely
disappeared from view in many (but not all) national contexts. On one hand,
the increasing professionalization of chemistry virtually required a repudia-
tion of chrysopoeia, the topic within chymistry that had brought the whole
discipline into disrepute. Consequently, period refutations of chrysopoeia
depended not on new experiments or theoretical structures disproving
transmutation but rather on moral and social denunciations of chrysopoeia
as fraud.16 On the other, the increased role for non-transmutational chym-
istry (e.g,. in commerce and medicine) meant that the chymically interested
14
Peter Forshaw, “Alchemy in the Amphitheatre: Some Considerations of the Alchemical
Content of the Engravings in Heinrich Khunrath’s Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1609)” in
Jacob Wamberg, Alchemy and Art (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006),
195–220.
15
Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998).
16
On the demise of chrysopoeia, see Lawrence M. Principe, Wilhelm Homberg and the
Transmutations of Chymistry (forthcoming), and until then, “A Revolution Nobody
Noticed? Changes in Early Eighteenth Century Chymistry,” in New Narratives in
Eighteenth-Century Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 1–22.
Alc hemy 369
could easily find more promising activities than seeking the Stone. The result
was a sundering of the terms “alchemy” and “chemistry” into nearly their
modern connotations. The “chemical” part of chymistry continued into an
increasingly accepted and useful scientific discipline; the “alchemical” part
was repudiated as delusion and dishonesty.
Enlightenment partisans made alchemy an exemplar of the outdated and
unenlightened. They set it in opposition to the new chemistry and regularly
associated it with witchcraft, magic, and necromancy. It is largely to this
period that we owe the notion of alchemy as magical, superstitious, and
foolish. Although the serious pursuit of chrysopoeia greatly diminished,
some work continued “underground,” including among some prominent
chemists; indeed, it persists to this day. One early reemergence occurred in
late eighteenth-century German secret societies such as the Freimaurer and
Gold- und Rosenkreuzer. Their alchemical activities included running com-
munal laboratories and republishing alchemical classics. Significantly, their
alchemy was predominantly practical – manufacturing pharmaceuticals and
seeking the Philosopher’s Stone – and thus extended work typical of the
seventeenth century.17
The greatest rupture in the history of alchemy began in the mid-nine-
teenth century. In 1850, Mary Anne Atwood claimed that alchemists of
earlier ages were really practitioners of Mesmerism or “animal magnetism”–
a practice then in vogue in Britain.18 She claimed that alchemical practice was
not physical but spiritual; it had no connection to chemistry but aimed at the
purification and development of the practitioner. In self-induced Mesmeric
trances, alchemists endeavored “magnetically” to draw in “Ether” and con-
dense it within themselves into an incorporeal Philosophers’ Stone, an agent
of universal change and advancement.19 Atwood’s reading obviously has no
historical validity. Nevertheless, her ideas propagated widely in the subse-
quent Victorian occult revival. The notion of alchemy as a self-transforma-
tive psychic practice originates predominantly with Victorian occultists.20
17
Renko Geffarth, Religion und arkane Hierarchie: der Orden der Gold- und Rosenkreuzer als
geheime Kirche im 18. Jahrhundert (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 242–265; Christopher McIntosh, The
Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: Eighteenth Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and Its
Relationship to the Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
18
Mary Anne Atwood, A Suggestive Inquiry into the Hermetic Mystery (London: T. Saunders,
1850); on Mesmerism, see the essay in this volume.
19
Atwood, Suggestive Inquiry, esp. pp. 78–85, 96–98, 162, 454–455.
20
For more details, Lawrence M. Principe and William R. Newman, “Some Problems in the
Historiography of Alchemy,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern
Europe, ed. William Newman and Anthony Grafton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001),
385–434; see especially pp. 388–401.
This Victorian perspective influenced the psychologist Herbert Silberer

and, later, the celebrated formulations of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav
Jung. Jung claimed that alchemy deals “not with chemical experimentations
as such, but with something resembling psychic processes expressed in
pseudo-chemical language.”21 He claimed that alchemy involved a halluci-
natory state wherein the alchemists’ psyche was “projected” onto their
materials. In other words, during laboratory work, alchemists fell into an
altered state of consciousness in which their unconscious produced halluci-
nations reflecting mental contents and activity, not unlike dream images.
Thus, Jung claimed that alchemical texts really describe the unconscious, and
that the alchemist’s “experience had nothing to do with matter in itself.”22
Jung’s views proved enormously influential throughout the twentieth
century. While his interpretations may have interest and value as objects of
study in their own right, they are not historically valid explanations of
alchemy; they have been thoroughly refuted by scholars working in various
fields.23 The extravagant alchemical language and imagery that Jung thought
to be “irruptions of the unconscious” have been decoded into replicable
laboratory procedures and their conscious creation as methods of secrecy has
now been well documented.24
6 Conclusion
Alchemy boasts a rich and diverse history. Careful scholarship of the past
forty years has corrected many errors and revealed much new information.
There is now no question that alchemy (or chymistry) played a significant
21
Carl Gustav Jung, “Die Erlösungsvorstellungen in der Alchemie,” Eranos-Jahrbuch 1936
(Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1937), 13–111; English translation “The Idea of Redemption in
Alchemy,” in The Integration of the Personality, ed. Stanley Dell (New York: Farrar &
Rinehart, 1939), 205–280, quotation from p. 210. Jung’s contributions on alchemy are in
The Collected Works of Carl Gustav Jung, 20 vols. (London: Routledge, 1953–79), vol. 9, pt. 2:
Aion; vol. 12: Psychology and Alchemy; vol. 13: Alchemical Studies; vol. 14: Mysterium
Coniunctionis.
22
Jung, “Idea of Redemption,” 206, 213, 215; “Erlösungsvorstellungen,” 23–24.
23
E.g., Obrist, Les débuts, 11–21 and 33–36; Principe and Newman, “Some Problems,”
401–408; Dan Merkur, “Methodology and the Study of Western Spiritual Alchemy,”
Theosophical History 8 (2000), 53–70; Halleux, Textes alchimiques, 55–58.
24
Lawrence M. Principe, “Apparatus and Reproducibility in Alchemy,” in Instruments and
Experimentation in the History of Chemistry, ed. Frederic L. Holmes and Trevor Levere
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 55–74; William R. Newman, “Decknamen or
‘Pseudochemical Language’? Eirenaeus Philalethes and Carl Jung,” Revue d’histoire des
sciences 49 (1996), 159–188; and William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy
Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002), especially pp. 177–195.
Alc hemy 371
role in the history of science, contributing to chemical and medical theories

and practices, technical production, experimentalism, and the understanding
of the natural world. Considerable further work is both needed and now
underway to address continuing questions. At present, however, we have
learned that we must view “historical alchemy” (from Late Antiquity to the
Enlightenment) on its own terms and in its due historical context, rather than
reading nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments back into it.
31
ASTROLOGY
K o c k u v o n St u c k r a d
1 Introduction: Astrology Defined

Astrology (from Greek, “science of the stars”) belongs to the oldest cultural
phenomena of humankind. Its persistence from antiquity to modernity –
despite many transformations and various developments – is remarkable. If
we want to define this phenomenon, we can say that, most generally,
astrology engages the supposed relationship and correspondences between
the heavenly realm (the stars, planets, zodiacal signs, etc.) and the earthly
realm. To interpret these correspondences and interrelationships, astrology
developed different and often conflicting strategies. On the one hand,
astrologers asserted a causal influence of heavenly bodies on the sublunar
world, which consequently seems to lead to a deterministic or even fatalistic
worldview. Ancient Greek philosophers – particularly the Stoics – spoke of
the cosmos as a complex network of correspondences and influences, gov-
erned by a hidden power. On the other hand, astrologers argued that the stars
do not exert influence themselves but that they are mere “signs” or “sym-
bols” of powers that are active throughout the cosmos. The intellectual,
religious, and ethical issues that are linked to these alternatives have been part
of astrological discussion ever since. Are the heavenly signs simply accom-
panying the mundane events, or are they responsible for them? And if there is
a sympathetic correspondence between the celestial sphere and the earth,
does this necessarily imply a deterministic or fatalistic influence?
The answers to these questions evidently challenge philosophical and
religious convictions. Particularly in Western scriptural religions, a determi-
nistic interpretation of astrology was often seen as problematic because it
seems to eliminate freedom, the prerequisite of moral action and the pre-
condition of redemption, punishment, and sin. Not surprisingly, then, it was
the second alternative that gained the upper hand in Western cultural history:
372
Astrology 373
The stars were deprived of their divine power and were seen as mere
“instruments of God,” their path interpreted as “God’s handwriting”
(already in Origen’s Philocalia).1
The search for underlying principles in the correspondence between
heavenly and earthly realms brought forth several fields of interest that can
be distinguished as different areas of astrological practice. Already at an early
stage, the prediction of agricultural matters and weather conditions was made
on an astrological basis. This could mean that eclipses of the sun and moon,
conjunctions of planets, or the paths of individual planets were correlated
with climatic conditions. In addition, an astrological theory was developed
that purported to predict the outcome of an initiative (a war, business
venture, foundation of a city, etc.) on the basis of the horoscope cast for
the moment the initiative was undertaken.
The reading of an individual birth chart was a relatively late development
(after the fourth century BCE), although in antiquity there already was a
complex theory available concerning this field of astrological practice.
Usually the individual was the king or another high-ranking person, whose
horoscope thus represented not only a forecast of an individual’s life course
but also that of the political or religious community as well. Although today
the main focus of astrological practice is on the interpretation of individual
nativities, we should not forget that the move from “mundane astrology” to
“individual astrology” happened only after the Renaissance and was further
fostered by the development of “psychological astrology” in the twentieth
century. I will explain this in more detail when I present a historical over-
view. Before doing so, however, it is necessary to discuss the relationship
between astrology and what is usually referred to as “Western esotericism.”
2 Astrology and Esoteric Discourse

When we look at publications in the field of Western esotericism, it is
striking that despite their different approaches there seems to be little doubt
among scholars that astrology is an important part or “discipline” of esoteri-
cism. This, however, is by no means self-evident. Why would scholars
choose to disconnect astrology from the history of science and philosophy,
or from disciplines such as medicine and politics? Questions such as these lead
us directly into historical developments that are of quite recent origin. It may
1
See Kocku von Stuckrad, Das Ringen um die Astrologie: Jüdische und christliche Beiträge zum
antiken Zeitverständnis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 771–782; Tamson Barton, Ancient
Astrology (London: Routledge, 1994), 75–76.
374 K o c ku v o n S t u ck ra d
even be argued that the lumping together of astrology and esotericism is itself
characteristic of a cultural dynamic that came to full fruition after the
Enlightenment. In the service of that ideology, astrology was pushed away
to the margins of science and reason, a development that served the modern
view of Western identity as enlightened, rational, and immune from its
religious and mythical past.2
In general, the discourses of inclusion and exclusion that have accompa-
nied the process of forming the modern identity have affected the way in
which scholars describe the status of astrology. Besides labels such as
“pseudo-science” or “superstition,” astrology has often been called an
“occult science.” This term probably originated in the sixteenth century,
along with notions of occulta philosophia. “Occult,” in this context, refers to
hidden or secret powers that inform a substantial part of the disciplines
lumped together under the rubric “occult sciences” – notably astrology,
alchemy, and magic.3 Twentieth-century scholars turned this rubric from
an emic (an “insider’s”) into an etic (an “outsider’s”) category, positing a unity
to these various disciplines. While Keith Thomas believed that astrology
formed the basis of the occult sciences – and that consequently the “decline”
of astrology would inevitably lead to the decline of magic and alchemy –
Brian Vickers encouraged this interpretive trend by arguing that all “occult
sciences” share a common mentality that is clearly distinguishable from a
rational, “scientific” mentality.4
However, such a distinction is problematic for several reasons. First,
although these disciplines overlap in varied and complex ways, all of them
have distinct histories with quite different and complex intersecting trajec-
tories. As William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton put it, “Even during
the heyday of Renaissance neoplatonism, astrology and alchemy lived inde-
pendent lives, despite the vast inkwells devoted to the rhetorical embellish-
ment of occult philosophy.”5 Second, other disciplines and practices had
2
See Charles Zika, Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft, and Visual Culture in Early Modern
Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 4.
3
In an influential work, Wayne Shumaker also adds witchcraft to this mélange; see his The
Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1972).
4
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971), 631–632; Brian
Vickers, “On the Function of Analogy in the Occult,” in Hermeticism in the Renaissance, ed.
A. G. Debus and Ingrid Merkel (Washington, DC: Folger Books, 1988), 265–292, at p. 286;
see also Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984).
5
William R. Newman and Anthony Grafton, “Introduction: The Problematic Status of
Astrology and Alchemy in Premodern Europe,” in Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy
Astrology 375
direct and long-standing links to astrology, especially mathematics, philoso-

phy (natural and moral), medicine, historiography, theology, and politics.
Configuring astrology with the other so-called occult sciences tends strongly
to distort our understanding of its relationship with these other areas of
knowledge. Third, the heuristic notion of “hidden powers” continues to
remain important within the more “legitimate” sciences, from the scientific
revolution to the present. Fourth, it is difficult to demonstrate that astrology
is “irrationalism,” given that astrology (Latin ars mathematica) was part of the
curriculum taught in universities until the seventeenth century and that it was
based on empirical and rational methods of argumentation.6
Indeed, it is important to note that until the eighteenth century, astrology
had been intrinsically linked to astronomy, mathematics, natural philosophy,
and medicine.7 Thus, the fact that astrology was subsumed under the artificial
category of occult sciences has to do, again, with the formation of a modern
self-understanding that seeks to distance itself from these disciplines. But it is
precisely in terms of the interface of science, philosophy, religion, and other
cultural phenomena that the role of astrology in the West must be
understood.
Why then, one might ask, should astrology be studied as part of Western
esotericism, mysticism, or Hermeticism? If astrology is closely linked to the
history of science, to natural philosophy, and to other cultural domains, it is
difficult to escape the impression that connecting it to esotericism is nothing
more than a prolongation of the Enlightenment agenda of marginalizing
astrology. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere,8 the entire scholarly field of
esotericism should be integrated or even dissolved into an analysis of the
dynamics that are operative in European history of culture. Notwithstanding
in Early Modern Europe, ed. Newman and Grafton (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press,
2001), 26.
6
I deal with this topic in more detail in Geschichte der Astrologie: Von den Anfängen bis zur
Gegenwart, 2nd ed. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007); see the index for “Empirie” and “Astrologie
und wissenschaftliche Methode.” Cf. Lynn Thorndike, “The True Place of Astrology in the
History of Science,” Isis 46:3 (1955), 273–278.
7
See, for instance, H. Darrel Rutkin, “Astrology, Natural Philosophy and the History of
Science, ca. 1250–1700: Studies toward an Interpretation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s
Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University,
Bloomington, 2002); Monica Azzolini, “Reading Health in the Stars: Politics and Medical
Astrology in Renaissance Milan,” in Horoscopes and Public Spheres: Essays on the History of
Astrology, ed. Günther Oestmann, H. Darrel Rutkin, and Kocku von Stuckrad (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 183–205.
8
Kocku von Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric
Discourse and Western Identities (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), particularly chaps. 1–3.
this methodological caution, let us see whether there is more to say about
astrology, esotericism, and Hermeticism.
If we conceptualize esotericism as a discourse of “perfect knowledge”
involving a dialectic of concealment and revelation, astrology is seen as
a means to unlock hidden knowledge of the universe and to grant
human beings perfect understanding of the ultimate meaning of exis-
tence and of human history. As an example of this, we may consider
the concept of the so-called Great Conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn
elaborated by Abū Maʿshar in the ninth century, and subsequently
applied to Shi’ite, Jewish, and Christian apocalyptic speculation. But
even here, we should not forget that the best astrologers have never
claimed that astrology offers perfect understanding or knowledge;
rather, astrology has usually been understood to be conjectural or
probable knowledge.
When it comes to Hermeticism, a similar observation can be made. There
is no reason to assume that astrology as such is hermetic, or that there exist
intrinsic links between astrology and Hermeticism.9 On the other hand, the
figure of Hermes Trismegistus has featured prominently in the legitimization
of astrological doctrines from antiquity through the twentieth century. Early
on, Mercury, Hermes, and Hermes-Thot were credited as significant repre-
sentatives of astral knowledge. Subsequently, Jews combined this tradition
with their understanding of Enoch and Metatron as revelatory entities that
knew “the secrets of the heavens.” Muslims, for their part, blended this idea
with the figure of Idris. The result is a rich and complex literary,
iconographic,10 and magical tradition centering on the figure of Hermes as
the revealer of astrological knowledge. Interestingly enough, the authority of
Hermes Trismegistus was so strong that leading scholars of the scientific
revolution still legitimated their new astronomical models with reference to
him. Nicholas Copernicus, for instance, in the tenth chapter of his De
revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543), justified the importance of the sun as
9
The only exception perhaps is the doctrine of correspondences that is a basic component of
astrology (even if a causal relationship between objects is assumed, see von Stuckrad,
Geschichte der Astrologie, 16) and at the same time is reminiscent of the alleged Hermetic
doctrine of “as above, so below.”
10
The iconographic tradition of the zodiac in the Muslim Middle Ages has been studied by
Anna Caiozzo, Images du ciel d’Orient au Moyen Âge: Une histoire du zodiaque et de ses
représentations dans les manuscrits du Proche-Orient musulman (Paris: Presses de l’Université de
Paris-Sorbonne, 2003), with many references to Hermes. An important publication is also
Jean-Patrice Boudet, Entre science et nigromance: Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occident
médiéval (XIIe–Xve siècle) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006).
Astrology 377
the center of the universe with the assertion of the “Thrice Greatest” that the
sun was a “visible god.”11
The example of Copernicus shows how problematic it is to approach
esotericism and Hermeticism as “marginal” or “suppressed” parts of Western
culture. When scholars today conceptualize Western esotericism with refer-
ence to traditions that have been neglected or marginalized by mainstream
culture, they are – unwittingly, to be sure – part of a discursive formation that
has taken shape during the past three hundred years. This discourse is
characterized by what may be called a “strategy of distancing,” or a “process
of disjunction.” These disjunctive strategies artificially distinguished
astrology from astronomy, alchemy from chemistry, magic from science,
and so on. Self-evident as these disjunctions may seem to the modern reader,
they are in fact of quite recent origin. As scholars, we should not apply the
rhetoric of synecdoche here and take relatively recent phenomena as repre-
senting the West in all its history.12
Astrology should be studied as part of the history of science, philosophy,
mathematics, medicine, politics, historiography, art, and religion. Only
when it comes to the revelation of hidden, perfect knowledge by means of
astrological methods does it make sense to speak of esoteric astrology.
3 The History of Astrology in Western Culture: An Overview

The origins of Western astrology lie in the Mesopotamian cultures of the third
millennium BCE. From the fifth century BCE onward, both the zodiacal
scheme – with twelve zodiacal signs of equal size – and horoscopic astrology
were developed. In this process, the influence of Greek mathematics and
astronomy played an important role. Later, some elements of Egyptian tradi-
tion were adopted, as well. In Imperial Rome, a full-blown astronomical and
astrological science was available that is usually referred to as “classical
astrology.”13 This tradition was canonized by Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 100–178
CE) in his Syntaxis mathematica (for astronomy) and Tetrabiblos (for astrology).
Despite the fact that ancient scholars differentiated the calculating and the
interpreting branch of the science of the stars, the utter devaluation of
11
See von Stuckrad, Geschichte der Astrologie, 255.
12
For a critique of these approaches to Western esotericism, see von Stuckrad, Locations of
Knowledge, chap. 3.
13
As important works on ancient astrology, see Auguste Bouché-Leclercq, L”astrologie Grecque
(Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899); Wilhelm Gundel and Hans Georg Gundel, Astrologumena: Die
astrologische Literatur in der Antike und ihre Geschichte (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1966);
Tamsyn Barton, Ancient Astrology (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
astrology vis-à-vis astronomy is a modern phenomenon that led – in the

aftermath of the scientific revolution – to the dismantling of astrology from
the accepted sciences. In antiquity, however, astrology held a key position
among the reputable sciences. As ars mathematica closely connected with
astronomy, it made its way into the highest political and philosophical orders
of the Roman Empire and became the standard model of interpreting past,
present, and future events.14
In the Middle Ages, astrological theory – both calculative and interpreta-
tive – was expanded on, particularly by Muslim scholars. While Christian
astrologers usually clung to a few Latin sources of late antiquity seen as
compatible with Christian theology, Muslim and Jewish scholars absorbed
theories of Indian astrology, combined them with the Greek and Latin
sources of Roman times, and developed complex and mathematically more
exact hermeneutical systems. From the ninth century onward, Christian
circles increasingly felt the need to catch up with Muslim and Jewish science,
and in many monasteries translations of Arabic texts were provided. The
interaction between scholars of different religious backgrounds was particu-
larly fruitful in Spain and Italy, leading to a shared astrological field of
discourse in the High Middle Ages.
Characterized by a new interest in Platonism and the availability of redis-
covered Greek Hermetic texts in Latin translation, the period between 1450
and 1650 can be seen as the pinnacle of astrological research in Europe.
Astrology played a decisive role in religious controversies and discussions
both intra-faith and interfaith. One example of this is the debate about the
cycles of historical development that were interpreted with reference to the
cycle of Great Conjunctions between Jupiter and Saturn, a theory mentioned
earlier. Already a part of ancient discourse, the theory of the cyclical succes-
sion of religions, kingdoms, and powers on the basis of Great Conjunctions
was developed by medieval Muslim astrologers. Shi’ite scholars interpreted
these events as indications of the return of the “hidden Imam.” Jews joined
this debate with prognostications of messianic events, and Christians referred
to the Great Conjunctions as signs for the second coming of Christ. The
interconfessional debate about Luther’s horoscope, for instance, was strongly
informed by speculations about the messianic impact of Great Conjunctions.
14
On the political influence of astrologers in Rome, see Frederic H. Cramer, Astrology in
Roman Law and Politics (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1954). On the
dramatic change with regard to the legal status of astrology under the impact of Christian
emperors, see Marie Theres Fögen, Die Enteignung der Wahrsager: Studien zum kaiserlichen
Wissensmonopol in der Spätantike (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993).
Astrology 379
Within an apocalyptic and millennialist mindset, astrology was a key factor in

the legitimation of identity and power.15
The scientific revolution changed the position of astrology in scholarly
discourse. It is often argued that the crisis of astrology was due to the victory
of the Copernican heliocentric model of the cosmos, while astrologers still
clung to the geocentric Ptolemaic model. This is too simplistic, however.16
Kepler, for instance, argued in several treatises that the heliocentric model
would pose no problem for astrologers, because for astrology it makes no
differences how the paths of the planets are to be explained. More important
for the crisis of astrology, in fact, was that from the seventeenth century
onward, radical empiricism gained the upper hand in scientific research.
Empiricism led to a rejection of theories involving invisible (occult) powers
in nature, and astrologers had serious problems in justifying their concepts of
“sympathy” and “correspondences.”
In the eighteenth century, astrology in Europe had completely lost its
status as a scientific discipline – with the exception of England, where a
continuous development of astrology is attested.17 It was no longer part of
university programs, a critical factor of the so-called decline of astrology. The
result, however, was not that astrology vanished from intellectual discourse,
but that it shifted from the realm of science to that of art and literature. Even
before the era of Romanticism, astrology entered those cultural areas, for
instance, in the writings of Schiller and Goethe, who made use of astrological
symbolism to establish an alternative to Christian monotheism.18 In the
nineteenth century, then, astrology played a role in Romantic concepts of
“living nature,” concepts that challenged the then-dominant mechanistic
materialism.
However, it was the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875, that was
chiefly responsible for reawakening interest in astrology on the Continent.
15
See Paola Zambelli, ed., “Astrologi halluzinati”: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986); Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and
Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
16
Aside from the impact of the new scientific paradigms, it is important to note the influence
of Pico della Mirandola’s harsh refutation of astrology – or certain aspects of astrological
theory that he refuted. On the response to Pico’s critique, see Steven vanden Broecke, The
Limits of Influence: Pico, Louvain, and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology (Leiden and Boston:
Brill, 2003).
17
See Patrick Curry, Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1989); and his A Confusion of Prophets: Victorian and Edwardian Astrology (London:
Collins and Brown, 1992).
18
See Kocku von Stuckrad, “The Function of Horoscopes in Biographical Narrative:
Cardano and After,” in Horoscopes and Public Spheres, 225–240; von Stuckrad, Geschichte der
Astrologie, 281–286.
The Theosophists developed mystical and karmic readings of astrological

concepts that ran counter to the prognostic emphasis of older astrological
currents. In the twentieth century, the growth of psychology provided a
second major influence on the new appreciation, and reconfiguration of
astrology. Now, it was the individual and the inner qualities of the human
psyche that came to the fore. Certainly, without C. G. Jung’s psychology and
its adaptation in New Age culture, the history of astrology in the twentieth
century would have been completely different.19
Today, the majority of professional astrologers cling to a non-determinis-
tic, psychological concept of astrology. In all Western countries, societies
have been founded that strive for the advancement of what they see as serious
astrology, in a culture ambivalent about the science of the stars. While
astrology is mostly neglected and ridiculed by scholars and scientists today,
a significant percentage of the population in Europe and North America
nonetheless still believes it can provide guidance in life. It is the task of the
scholar of religion to analyze the underlying polemical structures and the
discourses of modern identity formation that have led to this state of affairs,
rather than taking sides for or against astrology.
19
On modern astrology, see the overview in von Stuckrad, Geschichte der Astrologie, 287–368.
32
GNOSIS
W o u t e r J. H a n e g r a a f f
o understand the role of gnosis in the history of

T Western esotericism, we must begin by detaching it from a too close
and exclusive association with Gnosticism. Gnosis is Greek for “knowledge,”
and in the Hellenistic milieus of Late Antiquity, it was understood more
specifically as a special kind of salvific knowledge by which the soul could be
liberated from its material entanglement and regain its unity with the divine
Mind.1 The search for such salvation was by no means limited to gnostics;
rather, it seems to have been the central preoccupation of a kind of “trans-
confessional” cultic milieu that flourished particularly in Egypt, and whose
adherents – whether they were pagans, Jews, or Christians – all interpreted
(Middle) Platonic metaphysics in such a way as to transform it into religious
worldviews with their own mythologies and ritual practices. This does not
mean, however, that they themselves considered their religious beliefs as
something new: On the contrary, the common assumption in this period was
that the oldest was always best, and therefore the most ancient sages had been
closest to divine truth.2 Accordingly, even Plato himself was not supposed
to have been an original thinker, but merely an important link in the chain
of transmission of the ancient and universal spiritual wisdom, the origins of
which could be traced back to the most ancient “barbarian” peoples of
the Orient and their legendary sages: notably Hermes Trismegistus in
Egypt and Zoroaster in Persia. To distinguish such perspectives from strictly
1
Note that it would be artificial to consider the noun gnosis in isolation: It belongs to a
complex semantic field consisting of several related families of words concerned with
perception, cognition and intuition. See Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 96.
2
Arthur J. Droge, Homer or Moses: Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture
(Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1989), 9 and passim.
381
382 Wouter J. Hanegraaff
philosophical Platonism, they will be referred to here as “Platonic

Orientalism.”3
Scholars have long tended to discuss this entire milieu in rather
denigrating terms as an “underworld” of Platonism, a “murky area” full of
“sub-philosophical phenomena,”4 although we are clearly dealing with
religious phenomena that should not be judged by the yardstick of philoso-
phical rationalism but deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms.
Traditional prejudices in this regard have slowly begun to vanish in recent
scholarship, but what still remains is a tendency to focus more or less
exclusively on philosophical and doctrinal matters while downplaying or
ignoring the fact that when it comes to grasping the true mysteries of divinity,
the sources never cease to emphasize the total inadequacy of discursive
language.5 It is precisely this point that is crucial to understanding what gnosis
is all about. It implies that theoretical discussions about such matters as
cosmogony, anthropology or eschatology, no matter how much space may
be devoted to them or how interesting they may be to modern scholars, were
considered of strictly secondary importance. As formulated in the Hermetic
writings, reasoned discourse (logos) simply “does not lead as far as the truth.”6
It follows that one should not expect the relevant sources to describe the
contents of gnosis: At most, they contain stammering expressions of amaze-
ment and awe about a range of spiritual experiences that defy verbalization
and can only be hinted at by very inadequate analogies. Rather than direct
descriptions of gnosis, we find idealized narratives of how it has been attained
by exemplary seekers such as Hermes Trismegistus and his pupil Tat. These
figures are depicted as going through a series of ecstatic or “altered” states,
which allow them to perceive progressively more exalted dimensions of
reality beyond what is accessible to the five senses.7 The direct perception
of such spiritual dimensions, by means of “higher senses” equivalent but not
identical to bodily hearing and sight, is what gnosis was all about. The
3
Coined by John Walbridge, The Wisdom of the Mystic East: Suhrawardı¯ and Platonic Orientalism
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), the term “Platonic Orientalism” makes
explicit what was implied already by André-Jean Festugière, La révélation d’Hermès
Trismégiste, vol. 1 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1950), 19–44.
4
John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: A Study of Platonism 80 B.C. to A.D. 220 (London:
Duckworth, 1977), 384; and cf. Majercik, The Chaldean Oracles: Text, Translation, and
Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 3–4.
5
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Altered States of Knowledge: The Attainment of Gnōsis in the
Hermetica,” The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 2 (2008), 128–163; 129–130,
and passim.
6
C.H. IX: 10.
7
See detailed analysis in Hanegraaff, “Altered States.”
Gno si s 383
knowledge attained in this manner was salvific for at least three reasons. First,
it is described as freely given from above, as a divine reward from the “realms
of light” in response to the pupil’s persistent efforts at transcending the realm
of the senses and the human passions. Second, it claims to provide direct and
irrefutable evidence not only that those realms of light really exist but also
that it is possible for the pupil to enter them as his true home. They are no
longer something to believe in blindly, or merely speculate and talk about:
The pupil knows, for he has now seen and heard them himself. Third, the
light of the divine realms is believed to be identical to the seeker’s own
essential nature; hence, the process of return means a radical end to alienation
from one’s own divine essence. It is not just that the seeker returns to the
spiritual light from whence he has come, but he discovers that he is that light.
This idea of “self knowledge as knowledge of God” is often conveyed by the
image of a “divine spark” that has been trapped in matter and is now liberated
from it and reunited with its source, but it is important to realize that that is
just one possible conceptualization. For example, in the Hermetic
Poimandres, the same point is made in an entirely different manner, by the
dramatic image of the visionary looking for a long time into Poimandres’s
eyes and realizing that he is looking at himself: divine light looking at divine
light.8
The Hermetic writings may be seen as paradigmatic of what gnosis must
have meant in its original late Hellenistic context, but the term and its
meaning came to be separated from each other in the later history of
Western esotericism. The possibility of gaining direct access to the realms
of light by means of ecstatic states was inherent in Platonic Orientalism;
therefore, one should not be surprised to see it return in later developments
of the same tradition, such as notably the Islamic esotericism of Suhrawardı̄:
That there are dominating lights, that the Creator of all is a light, that the
archetypes are among the dominating lights – the pure souls have often
beheld this to be so when they have detached themselves from their bodily
temples. . .. Whoso questions the truth of this . . . let him engage in mystical
disciplines and service to those visionaries, that perchance he will, as one
dazzled by the thunderbolt, see the light blazing in the Kingdom of Power
and will witness the heavenly essences and lights that Hermes and Plato
beheld.9
8
C.H. I: 7–8; and see analysis in Hanegraaff, “Altered States,” 139–140.
9
Suhrawardı¯, Ḥikmat al-ishrāq II.2.165–166, trans. according to Suhrawardı¯, The Philosophy of
Illumination, ed. and trans. by John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University Press, 1999), 107–108.
In the Latin West, this tradition was eclipsed for many centuries. The
Platonic and Hermetic writings known to the Middle Ages were mainly
concerned with philosophical and cosmological problems; even the revival
of Platonism (more precisely, of Platonic Orientalism) since the fifteenth
century did not initially lead to anything resembling a rehabilitation of gnosis.
The term was associated much too strongly with the gnostic heresies to be
eligible as a positive category, and it is important to realize that in his epochal
translation of Corpus Hermeticum I–XIV, Marsilio Ficino completely over-
looked the special connotations of gnosis (translated as cognitio) and its
cognates.10 The term and its connotations simply did not register on the
screen of Renaissance Platonism and Hermetism.
Nevertheless, it would have been strange if the humanists who were so
busy studying and translating the entire referential corpus of Platonic
Orientalism – the Hermetica, the Chaldaean Oracles (attributed to Zoroaster
since George Gemistus Plethon), and a variety of Middle-Platonic and
especially Neoplatonic writings – had remained entirely oblivious to its
message of salvation. And indeed, although the term gnosis is never used,
the kind of suprarational ecstatic knowledge to which it refers did become an
important theme. One can see this already in the work of Ficino’s contem-
porary Lodovico Lazzarelli, who translated the final three treatises of the
Corpus and seems to have understood its basic message far better than the
great Ficino: For Lazzarelli, the Hermetica were all about attaining salvific
knowledge of one’s own divine nature and origin by means of an ecstatic
ascent back to the realm of light.11 As for Ficino, his primary reference for the
same idea seems to have been not the Corpus Hermeticum but Plato’s Phaedrus,
with its description of four divine “frenzies” (furores) that allow the famous
“chariot of the soul” to make its ascent back to the divine.12 In various later
Renaissance thinkers, one can observe how Hermetic religiosity and the
Platonic frenzies were associated to a point of virtual identity.13 It is therefore
reasonable to conclude that in this tradition of “ecstatic religion” on
10
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “How Hermetic Was Renaissance Hermetism? Reason and Gnosis
from Ficino to Foix de Candale,” in Hermetism and Rationality, ed. Jan Veenstra (Louvain:
Peeters, 2010).
11
See Lazzarelli’s Crater Hermetis, in Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico
Lazzarelli (1447–1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (Tempe: Arizona Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005).
12
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “The Platonic Frenzies in Marsilio Ficino,” in Myths, Martyrs and
Modernity, ed. Jitse Dijkstra, Justin Kroesen, and Yme Kuiper (Brill: Leiden, 2009), 553–567.
13
On du Preau and Foix-Candale, see Hanegraaff, “How Hermetic Was Renaissance
Hermetism?”; on Agrippa, see Hanegraaff, “Better than Magic: Cornelius Agrippa and
Lazzarellian Hermetism,” Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 4:1 (2009), 1–25.
Gno si s 385
Platonic-Hermetic foundations, the Late Antiquity tradition of gnosis sur-

vived incognito.
Due to the wholly negative image of Gnosticism, it was to be expected
that connections between Renaissance Platonism-Hermetism and the dua-
listic heresies of the first centuries would be drawn not by the defenders of the
prisca theologia but by its critics. During the second half of the sixteenth
century, largely under the impact of the witchcraft debate, various forms of
anti-Platonism, and Protestant attacks on Roman Catholicism, it became
increasingly common for polemicists to imagine historical “lineages of dark-
ness” from Oriental barbarism (Egypt, Persia, Babylonia) to Pythagoras,
Plato and Platonism, and from there to Gnosticism.14 Eventually, this per-
spective gave rise to full-blown “histories of error” in which the spread of
heresy was traced from its origins through the centuries, and up to the
present. The culminating examples of this genre, known as “anti-
apologeticism,”15 were Ehregott Daniel Colberg’s Platonisch-Hermetisches
Christentum (1690–1691), which presented contemporary currents such as
Paracelsism, Rosicrucianism, and Christian theosophy as latter-day manifes-
tations of the perennial Platonic-Hermetic enemy; and Jacob Brucker’s great
Historia Critica Philosophiae (1742–1744), where it was described as the super-
stitious shadow of true philosophy.16
Interestingly, the virtual founder of the anti-apologetic genre, Jacob
Thomasius, discussed the idea of gnosis much more explicitly than his
successors: His pioneering Schediasma Historicum (1665) even carries the
term in its full title.17 For the Protestant Thomasius, gnosis was a core element
of heresy, referring to the attempt (vain and illegitimate by definition, and
closely linked to curiositas) to gain knowledge about divine realities by merely
human means, independent of the biblical revelation. As such, he demarcated
it from two other categories: the legitimate although limited knowledge
gained by rational philosophy on the one hand, and the superior knowledge
14
E.g., Johann Weyer, De praestigiis Daemonum (1563) II.3; Martin Del Rio, Disquisitionum
magicarum libri sex (1599) I.3; Giovanni Battista Crispo, De Platone caute legenda (1594),
Preface.
15
That is to say, against the Patristic apologetic tradition: see Sicco Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit
in der Weltgeschichte: Philosophiegeschichte zwischen Barock und Aufklärung (Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer, 2004).
16
On Colberg, see Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit, 223–265. On Brucker, see Wouter
J. Hanegraaff, “Western Esotericism in Enlightenment Historiography: The Importance
of Jacob Brucker,” in Constructing Tradition: Means and Myths of Transmission in Western
Esotericism, ed. Andreas Kilcher (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
17
Jacob Thomasius, Schediasma Historicum, quo, Occasione Definitiones vetustae, quâ Philosophia
dicitur ΓΝΩΣΙΣ ΤΩΝ ΟΝΤΩΝ, varia discutiuntur . . . (Leipzig: Joh. Wittigau 1665); cf.
Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit, 21–111.
about divine things revealed by God and received by pistis (faith) on the
other.18 In Brucker, this triad corresponded with a distinction between (1)
the true religion of biblical revelation, (2) the history of philosophy, and (3)
the history of (crypto) pagan religion as the negative counterpart of both,
containing essentially everything we nowadays study under the rubric of
“Western esotericism.” As the history of philosophy established its identity as
an independent discipline from the eighteenth century on, it did so by
sharply excluding the third category, which became academically homeless
for centuries.
In Thomasius’s analysis, the search for gnosis was highlighted as central to
that third category, thus resulting in the suggestion of three essential “paths of
knowledge”: reason, faith, and gnosis. With hindsight, it was only a question
of time before authors critical of Enlightenment rationality and science, but
unwilling to simply return to Christian orthodoxy, would therefore begin to
see gnosis in a more positive light.19 In most such cases, however, the term
was used not in the specific sense of a special type of salvific knowledge, but as
a general label for the various currents in Late Antiquity (including, but not
limited to, Gnosticism) to which we have been referring as Platonic
Orientalism. Thus, Jacques Matter, who seems to have invented the term
“esotericism,” used Gnosticism and gnosis as synonyms and described them as
“the introduction into Christianity of the cosmological and theosophical
systems that had been the chief part of the ancient religions of the Orient.”20
The great historian of Christianity Ferdinand Christian Baur built on
Matter’s work and defined gnosis quite simply as philosophy of religion.21
This was a smart move, which amounted to turning the third category of the
anti-apologists (from Thomasius through Brucker) into a neutral one: The
human attempt to investigate the divine mysteries was now presented not as
punishable hubris, but as a legitimate pursuit that could be traced from the
ancient gnostics through Jacob Boehme, culminating in Hegel’s system of
idealism. That gnosis was turning into a positive category in the circles of
18
See analysis in Lehmann-Brauns, Weisheit, 89–99.
19
As pointed out by Antoine Faivre, the term begins to make its first “timid” appearance in the
context of Western esotericism in the early nineteenth century. See Faivre, “Le terme et la
notion de ‘gnose’ dans les courants ésotériques occidentaux modernes (Essai de
périodisation),” in Les textes de Nag Hammadi: Histoire des Religions, Approches contemporaines,
ed. Jean-Pierre Mahé and Paul-Hubert Poirier (Paris: Institut de France, 2010).
20
Jacques Matter, Histoire critique du Gnosticisme, et de son influence sur les sectes religieuses et
philosophiques des dix premiers siècles de l’ère chrétienne (1828; 2nd ed., Strasbourg / Paris,
1843), 15.
21
Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Gnosis, oder die christliche Religions-Philosophie in ihrer
geschichtlichen Entwiklung (Tübingen, 1835), vii.
Gno si s 387
German idealists and admirers of Boehme is also demonstrated by the case

of Franz van Baader, who presented “the true gnosis” as an alternative to
linear causality in several of his essays.22
In the occultist milieus of the later nineteenth century, gnosis remained a
general label for Platonic Orientalism, rather than for some special type of
knowledge. Thus, in a chapter with the significant title “Christian Dogmas
Derived from Heathen Philosophy,” Helena P. Blavatsky declared that
although the gnostics were destroyed, “the Gnosis, based on the secret
science of sciences . . . was never without its representatives in any age or
country.”23 Examples were, among many others, Zoroaster, Abraham,
Henoch, Moses, the three Hermeses Trismegisti, Pythagoras, Plato, Jesus,
Philo, and the Kabbalah. Elsewhere, Blavatsky makes clear that for her gnosis
is simply one of the synonyms of Theosophy.24 In many later instances of the
term in esoteric, occultist, or Traditionalist literature, from Blavatsky to the
present, the pattern remains essentially the same: Gnosis stands quite generally
for “the true wisdom” or “secret science” and its many representatives
through the ages, who possessed a superior knowledge about the nature of
reality and the divine.25
Parallel to the history of the term as such, the incognito survival of gnosis as
ecstatic religion based on Platonic and Hermetic foundations did not cease
with the Renaissance either. The notion of an “internal sense” by means of
which the soul can perceive metaphysical realities beyond the realm of the
normal senses continued in the vernünftige Hermetik of the late eighteenth to
the nineteenth centuries, closely connected to the search for a “higher
reason” superior to Enlightenment rationality and a “higher knowledge”
reaching beyond the domain of natural science.26 That the appeal to gnosis
could serve the agendas of the Enlightenment, remarkable though this might
seem at first, may be illustrated here using the example of a rationalist
paraphrase of the Old Testament published in 1735, where the snake tells
Eve: “God knows that you will receive a great illumination when you eat
22
See discussion in Faivre, “La terme et la notion.”
23
H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and
Theology (1877; reprinted Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1972), 38.
24
H. P. Blavatsky, “What Is Theosophy?,” The Theosophist 1:1 (1879), 2–5.
25
Many examples are discussed in Faivre, “La terme et la notion.”
26
Rolf Christian Zimmermann, Das Weltbild des jungen Goethe: Studien zur Hermetischen
Tradition des Deutschen 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1969/1979), vol. 1,
11–43; Monika Neugebauer-Wölk, “‘Höhere Vernunft’ und ‘höheres Wissen’ als
Leitbegriffe in der esoterischen Gesellschaftsbewegung: Vom Nachleben eines
Renaissancekonzepts im Jahrhundert der Aufklärung,” in Aufklärung und Esoterik, ed.
Neugebauer-Wölk (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1999), 170–210.
from this fruit: yes, you will receive a divine intellect and attain to a higher
knowledge.”27 While such a passage clearly served Enlightenment polemics
against ecclesiastical dogmatism, criticized for trying to keep man ignorant, it
implied a criticism of rationalist dogmatism as well: the limitations of the
merely human intellect could be transcended in the attainment of a superior
and divine knowledge. Thus, even though the term gnosis is not used here, we
are dealing with yet another example of a positive reversal of Thomasius’s triad.
Just as in Late Antiquity, the attainment of higher knowledge as an
alternative to strict rationalism and blind faith still appeared to require an
altered state of consciousness. In the late eighteenth century and continuing
through the nineteenth, the techniques discovered by Franz Anton Mesmer
and his successors appeared to make it possible to induce conditions of
artificial sleep, or trance, during which many so-called somnambules claimed
spectacular visions of invisible spiritual realms and their inhabitants.28 In the
post-Kantian era, such experiences were often interpreted as proof that the
categories of time, space, and causality could be transcended after all, making
it possible to gain direct access to the noumenal realm of spirit: In such a
manner, it was claimed, one could gain direct experiential knowledge of the
metaphysical reality from whence the human soul had come and to which it
would return.29 In the same context, the implicit (and often explicit)
polemics against Enlightenment could lead to fascinating mutations of the
light versus darkness metaphor. Thus Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, a key
author in this context, conceptualized the spiritual realms as the “Nightside
of Nature”: Paradoxically, it was precisely in the dark realm of dream and
sleep (often code words for mesmeric trance) that one could find the
immediate spiritual illumination that was being obscured by the superficial
daytime consciousness of the so-called Enlightenment.30 And just as in the
27
Johann Lorenz Schmidt, Die göttlichen Schriften vor den Zeiten des Messie Jesus . . . (Wertheim:
J. G. Nehr, 1735), 13, quoted here according to Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Theodizee
und Tatsachen: Das philosophische Profil der deutschen Aufklärung (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1988), 88.
28
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Magnetic Gnosis: Somnambulism and the Quest for Absolute
Knowledge,” in Die Enzyklopädik der Esoterik: Allwissenheitsmythen und
universalwissenschaftliche Modelle in der Esoterik der Neuzeit, ed. Andreas Kilcher (Paderborn:
Wilhelm Fink, 2010).
29
For an excellent example of such implicit anti-Kantian polemics, see Johann Heinrich Jung-
Stilling, Theorie der Geister-Kunde, in einer Natur-, Vernunft- und Bibelmässigen Beantwortung der
Frage: Was von Ahnungen, Gesichten und Geistererscheinungen geglaubt und nicht geglaubt werden
müsse (Nuremberg: Raw’schen Buchhandlung, 1808), 30–32 (§ 45–46).
30
Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden:
Arnold, 1808) and Die Symbolik des Traumes (1814; facsimile edition Heidelberg: Lambert
Schneider, 1968).
Gno si s 389
context of Late Antiquity, the knowledge thus gained could not be ade-
quately expressed in normal discursive language, such as that of science or
philosophy. It could only be experienced directly or, at best, conveyed
indirectly and quite vaguely by symbols and images, hieroglyphic “inner
languages” of the soul, or numerical abstractions.31
As the mesmeric current developed into occultism, practitioners during
the nineteenth century began to experiment with any possible technique,
whether traditional or novel, by which normal, rational consciousness could
be modified so as to gain access to the “higher world.” For example, one
reads in the early occultist classic Ghost Land that trance states “could be
induced some times by drugs, vapors, and aromal essences: sometimes by
spells, as through music, intently staring into crystals, the eyes of snakes,
running water, or other glittering substances; occasionally by intoxications
caused by dancing, spinning around, or distracting clamors.”32 By the end of
the nineteenth century, experimentation with occult techniques for chan-
ging one’s consciousness and thereby gaining higher knowledge had become
interwoven in complex ways with the emergence of the new science of
psychology, leading to a process of “psychologization of religion and sacra-
lization of psychology” that has continued up to the present day.33 At the
same time, the various manifestations of Platonic Orientalism in Late
Antiquity had become a major focus of scholarly research, particularly in
the context of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (history of religion school);
following a terminological convention that, as pointed out earlier, can be
traced back at least to Ferdinand Christian Baur, that field as a whole was
often referred to by the generic German label die Gnosis.
All these various developments – nineteenth-century occultism (including
a strong concern with phallic and solar mythologies34), experimentation with
altered states of consciousness; clinical psychology; and the scholarly study of
Gnosticism, Hermetism, and other manifestations of the Platonic Orientalist
31
Next to Schubert, a classic example is the famous “Seeress of Prevorst.” See analysis in
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “A Woman Alone: The Beatification of Friederike Hauffe née
Wanner (1801–1829),” in Women and Miracle Stories, ed. Anne-Marie Korte (Leiden: Brill,
2001), 211–247.
32
Ghost Land, or Researches into the Mysteries of Occultism illustrated in a Series of Autobiographical
Sketches, ed. and trans. Emma Hardinge Britten (1876; facs. repr. Pomeroy: Health
Research, no date), 30; and cf. a similar passage on p. 67, which mentions, for example,
“mephitic vapors, pungent essences, or narcotics.”
33
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997), 482–513.
34
As demonstrated in Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1994).
milieus of late antiquity – came together in the work of Carl Gustav Jung.35
Jung’s famous term “individuation” refers to an arduous process of self-
discovery and psychological integration, through confrontation with the
archetypal contents of one’s personal as well as “collective” unconscious.
With explicit reference to gnostic symbolism, it was described by him as an
initiatic process ultimately aiming at unification with one’s own divine self,
or deification. In the wake of Jung’s enormous influence in popular culture,
particularly after Word War II, his psychological interpretation of ancient
Gnosticism (as well as alchemy, seen as a continuation of it36) has become
certainly the most dominant influence on twentieth- and twenty-first-cen-
tury esoteric perceptions of gnosis as a special kind of “knowledge of the Self
as knowledge of God.” As an intuitive “knowledge of the heart,” it is
polemically juxtaposed (as in the days of Jacob Thomasius) against rational
and scientific knowledge, as well as against the claims of religious
orthodoxy.37 In the wake of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library,
this essentially Jungian discourse has developed into a significant current of
New Age religion, in which newly discovered “sacred texts” such as the
Gospel of Thomas are interpreted in a selective manner so as to give support to
“neo-gnostic” holistic spiritualities.38 To this, we might add the popularity of
Traditionalist assumptions about gnosis as a core element of “true” spiritual
wisdom, from René Guénon to Fritjof Schuon and their many contempor-
ary sympathizers.39 Although orthodox Traditionalists reject Jungianism and
other forms of psychologized religion as just another modernist perversion,
in the broader context of contemporary alternative religion the two perspec-
tives are easily combined by enthusiasts of “inner traditions.”40
35
On Jung’s intellectual roots in contemporary philosophical, scientific, and esoteric culture,
see Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton: Princeton
36
Robert Segal, “Jung’s Fascination with Gnosticism,” in The Allure of Gnosticism, ed. Segal
(Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 26–38, here 26.
37
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Reason, Faith, and Gnosis: Potentials and Problematics of a
Typological Construct,” in Clashes of Knowledge: Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Science and
Religion, ed. Peter Meusberger et al. (New York: Springer, 2008), 133–144.
38
Richard Smith, “The Revival of Ancient Gnosis,” in Allure of Gnosticism, 204–223; and
Dylan Burns, “Seeking Ancient Wisdom in the New Age: New Age and Neognostic
Commentaries on the Gospel of Thomas,” in Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and Its
Others, ed. Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 253–289.
39
See Faivre, “Le terme et la notion” (discussing, inter alia, Guénon’s journal La Gnose,
Schuon’s Sentiers de gnose, and Jacob Needleman’s collective volume Sword of Gnosis).
40
I am referring to the kind of spiritual perspectives represented by a publisher such as Inner
Traditions, or the popular journal Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions
(1985–1999).
Gno si s 391
Finally, to an extent that may come as a surprise to some, the term gnosis
has been reunited in contemporary esotericism with its original meaning of
“ecstatic” ascent to, direct perception of, and unification with the higher
realms of spiritual light. In countless cases, historians will have little trouble
recognizing current New Age descriptions of those higher realms as latter-
day variations or mutations of the Platonic hierarchies; although the phe-
nomenon remains under-researched, countless groups and individuals today
are deeply involved in a range of practices and techniques aimed at gaining
experiential access to those invisible spiritual dimensions so as to unite
themselves with their own “inner essence” and regain their original
divinity.41 It is easy for scholars to snicker about such aspirations, but
although the relevant sources are obviously permeated by the characteristic
low-brow jargon of pop science and psychology rather than the philosophi-
cal terminology of its ancient counterparts, it is hard to see why the salvific
knowledge sought in these contexts should not qualify as gnosis.42
In closing, a final remark may be in order about the state of academic
research on the topic of this essay. Entire libraries can be filled with learned
studies of Gnosticism and Hermetism in Late Antiquity, their context in
Hellenistic culture, and later historical developments in which their religious
perspectives were continued in some manner, up to the present day.
However, articles and books devoted specifically to gnosis as “knowledge”
are virtually nonexistent. In a nutshell: many scholars have attempted to
answer the question “what is Gnosticism?” – but answers to the question
“what is gnosis?” are remarkably scarce. Obviously, this is not meant to deny
that one will find at least some discussion of gnosis in most monographs on
Gnosticism or Hermetism. But typically it is discussed there as merely one
element among many others, and not necessarily an important one, especially
if compared with the lengthy and detailed analyses of such dimensions as
cosmic dualism, various elements of gnostic mythology such as the
heimarmenè, the demiurge, the archonts, and so on.43
41
For some examples from the New Age movement up to the early 1990s, see Hanegraaff,
New Age Religion.
42
The essentialism of contemporary esotericists who would claim that ancient and modern
gnosis are all one and the same universal spiritual phenomenon is neither more nor less
problematic than the academic essentialism according to which ancient gnosis was the “real
and authentic” article in comparison to which its contemporary parallels (as discussed, for
example, by Burns, “Seeking Ancient Wisdom”) are just fake surrogates.
43
For Gnosticism alone, see, for example, the classic studies by Hans Jonas, and important
recent monographs such as Michael Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism:” An Argument for
Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) or Karen
L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). The
It is virtually unheard of in serious scholarly literature to see gnosis pre-

sented as the central core of these types of religion, in relation to which the
other dimensions, although obviously important, would be of strictly sec-
ondary importance.44 Admittedly, to pursue such an approach consistently
would imply a kind of Copernican revolution in the study of gnostic,
hermetic, and esoteric forms of religion, since it would promote gnosis
from the status of a minor planet to that of the central sun in the religious
cosmos under discussion. Radical though it may be, this is precisely what the
present contribution would like to suggest.
former has precisely one reference to gnosis in the index, the latter none at all, although the
term is in fact discussed in both works. Garth Fowden does have a special section on gnosis in
The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), 105–114.
44
In sharp contrast, that Gnosticism is all about gnosis is the default assumption in much of the
popular “spiritual” literature referred to earlier; and this is probably among the major reasons
why academics have an instinctive aversion against such suggestions, or at most, pay lip-
service to the centrality of gnosis without drawing the right conclusions.
33
MAGIC
Wouter J. Hanegraaff
1 Introduction
Magic is a wretched subject.1 Perhaps no other concept in the study of
religion has caused so much confusion and frustration among scholars,
because it seems to resist all attempts at defining its exact nature, thus causing
serious doubts about whether it refers to anything real at all – or if so, in what
sense. In spite of all the trouble that the concept has caused, nobody has
seemed capable of exorcizing it from the academic vocabulary.2 Like the
monster in cheap horror movies, “magic” always keeps coming back no
matter how often one tries to kill it.
To explain this strange situation, we must begin by distinguishing sharply
between two ways of understanding magic. On the one hand, we can look at
the many different meanings and connotations that the term has acquired in
Western culture from antiquity to the present. We will see that this gets us
closest to understanding the actual role of magic in the context of Western
esotericism. On the other hand, there is the common use of “magic” as a
general reified concept that is part of the triad “magic–religion–science.” We
will see that this latter perspective is the chief cause of all the confusion about
the term. Thus, before getting to magic in the history of Western esotericism,
we will begin with this second perspective.
2 The Reification of “Magic”

Although there are countless academic definitions of magic, they are essen-
tially variations on three extremely influential theories. First, there is the
1
Otto Neugebauer, “The Study of Wretched Subjects,” Isis 42:2 (1951), 111.
2
H. S. Versnel, “Some Reflections on the Relation Magic-Religion,” Numen 38 (1991),
177–197.
393
“intellectualist” approach, associated with the work of the two famous

Victorian armchair anthropologists Edward Burnett Tylor and James
G. Frazer.3 Tylor, the nineteenth-century pioneer of cultural anthropology,
defined magic as based on “the error of mistaking ideal analogy for real
analogy.”4 In other words, he claimed that it was grounded in the erroneous
assumption typical of “primitive man” that things associated in thinking must
be connected in actual fact. Frazer integrated Tylor’s theory in his famous
evolutionist triad, claiming that humanity had progressed from primitive
“magic,” first to the higher level of “religion,” and from there to “science,”
the highest level of all.
For Frazer, magic actually meant “sympathetic” magic: It was based on the
assumption that “things act on each other at a distance through a secret
sympathy”5 (a concept that goes back to Plotinus) or “an invisible ether” (a
concept that, ironically, was still very popular in mainstream scientific
theorizing even in Frazer’s day).6 The important point to emphasize about
the Tylor-Frazer theory is that it holds science, not religion, to be the
theoretical opposite of magic: The essence of magic was its belief in merely
imaginary analogies, correspondences, and invisible forces, in contrast to the
real causal mechanisms basic to science.
The second, “functionalist” theory of magic concentrates on ritual action
and is linked to another scholarly couple: the French sociologists Marcel
Mauss and Emile Durkheim. For Mauss, the term referred to “any rite that is
not part of an organized cult: a rite that is private, secret, mysterious, and
ultimately tending towards one that is forbidden.”7 Following a similar line
of reasoning, Durkheim defined religious beliefs as shared by, and constitu-
tive of, a social group, which he referred to as a “Church.” In contrast, magic
was inherently nonsocial: “There is no Church of Magic.”8 Functionalist
approaches are therefore based on the opposition of magic to religion, not
3
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “The Emergence of the Academic Science of Magic: The Occult
Philosophy in Tylor and Frazer,” in Religion in the Making: The Emergence of the Sciences of
Religion, ed. Arie L. Molendijk and Peter Pels (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 253–275.
4
Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology,
Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom (1871), vol. 1 (London: John Murray,
1913), 116.
5
James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (1900), vol. 1, 2nd ed. (reprinted London: MacMillan &
Co, 1951), 54.
6
Egil Asprem, “Pondering Imponderables: Occultism in the Mirror of Late Classical Physics,”
Aries 11:2 (2011), 129–165.
7
Marcel Mauss, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie,” (1901–1902), in Mauss,
Sociologie et anthropologie (1950; Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France, 1995), 16.
8
Emile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaire de la vie religieuse (1912; Paris: Quadrige/Presses
Universitaires de France, 1994), 61. Emphasis in original.
M ag i c 395
science. In Durkheim’s opinion, there was “something inherently anti-

religious about the maneuvers of the magician.”9
Finally, a third approach is derived from a theoretical concept that is
central to the oeuvre of the French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (remark-
ably enough, since he himself saw it as applicable equally to magic and
religion). It was based on the perceived contrast between a worldview or
mentality grounded in “instrumental causality” (which assumes the presence
of secondary causes or mechanisms that mediate between causes and effects)
and an alternative one, grounded in “participation” (where causes and effects
are seen as associated, or merging, to the point of identity or
consubstantiality).10 While Lévy-Bruhl originally saw participation as typical
of “primitive” cultures, he eventually came to understand it as a primary and
irreducible constant that is present in any society, including our own. Later
scholars came to assume, quite incorrectly, that participation and magic were
meant to be equivalent terms, resulting in all kinds of theories that interpret
magic as grounded in a “different kind of rationality.”11 In these cases, it is
clear that science, not religion, serves as the theoretical opposite of magic: It is
all about alternatives to instrumental causality.
The three theoretical approaches linked to the names of Tylor and Frazer,
Mauss and Durkheim, and Lévy-Bruhl have been mixed and combined in
many different ways, but almost without any exception this has happened
within a more general context that has very much been taken for granted,
explicitly or implicitly. This is the famous triad “magic-religion-science”
itself, with its ambitious suggestion that all forms of human culture can
essentially be analyzed in terms of three perspectives or worldviews. The
triad has its origin in the period of the Enlightenment, although most of its
underlying assumptions go back much further in history, as will be seen. Its
point of departure is the relatively unproblematic recognition that “religion”
(however defined) is clearly something different from modern science and
rationality.
Once this distinction has been made, it is bound to be followed by the
further observation that a whole class of phenomena in human culture and
society apparently do not fit too well within either of these categories: They
9
Durkheim, Les formes élémentaire, 59–60.
10
Analysis in Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived the Disenchantment of the
World,” Religion 33:4 (2003), 357–380, here 371–374.
11
For example, see Robin Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic,
Religion and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and see the overview in
Tanya M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 345–356.
too appear to be clearly different from science and rationality, and yet one
hesitates to call them “religion.” If one looks at it more closely, one finds that
this third category is in fact a kind of wastebasket filled with materials that
have been known by many different names: Next to the term “magic,” they
have been referred to, or associated with, a whole series of generalizing
concepts such as “the occult” (respectively, “occultism,” “occult science”),
“superstition,” “mysticism,” “esotericism,” “the irrational,” “primitive
thought,” “paganism,” “idolatry,” “fetishism,” and so on. These many
terms refer to an even greater variety of practices and ideas, and their
association is highly problematic. (For example, what does the invocation
of demons have to do with the drawing of horoscopes, or alchemical
transmutation with the animation of statues or the making of amulets?)
Nevertheless, the idea is that they can all be subsumed under the single
unifying label of “magic,” thus setting them apart from whatever belongs
to the similarly unifying categories called “religion” and “science.”
Tacitly assuming the existence of such a triad, scholars and intellectuals
have tended to be favorable toward “science and rationality,” respectful
toward “religion,” and quite negative about “magic” (or whatever equiva-
lent term they might use). Now, to get to the core of the problem: It is quite
evident that the distinction between magic and religion is a direct legacy
from Christian theology and doctrinal polemics. Implicitly or explicitly,
religion really meant Christianity (or more precisely, “true” or theologically
correct Christianity), whereas magic meant such things as demonic worship
and pagan idolatry (i.e., false religion). Clearly, this framework is so trans-
parently normative and biased toward Christian theological agendas that it
should never have had a chance to be accepted in a purportedly neutral
scholarly framework. But the opposite occurred: It has been adopted as a
matter of course by countless academics.
That this could happen so easily and successfully has to do partly with a
second historical legacy in addition to the theological one, which has created
further confusion. Since the twelfth century, as we will see, intellectuals had
begun promoting the idea of magia naturalis: magic understood in non-
demonic terms, as based on the workings of the hidden (occult) forces of
nature, and therefore easier to legitimate theologically. In fact, those who
were defending “natural magic” in the early modern period found them-
selves open to attack from all sides. The Protestant Reformation had given a
new sense of urgency to anti-magical polemics, often targeting Roman
Catholicism. Many theological critics failed to be convinced by the argument
that natural magic was free from demonic influence. And they were now
joined by natural philosophers and scientists who accused any defender of
M ag i c 397
magic – natural or not – of obscurantism and irrational superstition. The

upshot of this confused debate was that magic always found itself on the
wrong side of things, regardless of how it was defined or what arguments
were being used against it.
It is therefore quite evident that the magic-religion-science triad relies
entirely on normative distinctions between “true” and “false” religion as well
as between “true” and “false” science. The fact that, in this context, magic is a
polemical category of exclusion, not an unbiased instrument for analysis or a
straightforward descriptive label should already be sufficient to discredit it as
suitable for scholarly research. But there is more. What makes the triad
particularly problematic (although, paradoxically, it is precisely this further
weakness that accounts for its enormous popularity) is the almost automatic
mental reification of the three terms. In other words, it is widely assumed that
certain kinds of human thought and behavior really are magical in and by
themselves, while others are religious, and yet others are scientific.
Magic, religion, and science come to be perceived as universal categories
sui generis. And this is what made it possible for them to play a central role in
the complex processes of identity formation and “othering” through which
the dominant parties in modern Western culture – Christians on the one
hand, scientists and rationalist philosophers on the other – have been trying
to promote their hegemonic agendas. For example, Protestants might argue
that Catholic veneration of images is not really Christian but a form of magic;
Catholics, however, might come up with sophisticated arguments to the
effect that such practices may look like magic to their opponents but were
really a genuine religious practice; and rationalists could argue that all kinds of
practices that are seen as supernatural by the common people can really be
given a straightforward rational and scientific explanation. The deep irony of
the situation is that the very process of reification, as practiced by Christians
and rationalists alike, is a perfect example of what Tylor had described as
magic! That is to say, it entails the confusion of mental concepts with actual
realities, so that what we believe we understand in our mind seems to exist in
the external world.12
This process of projection makes it possible for magic to be perceived as an
ominous and almost omnipresent threat, often leading to alarmist rhetoric:
It is beneath our feet – and not very far beneath them – here in Europe at
the present day. . . . This universal faith, this truly Catholic creed, is a belief
in the efficacy of magic. . . . [T]he permanent existence of such a solid layer
12
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012), 168.
of savagery beneath the surface of society, and unaffected by the superficial

changes of religion and culture [is] a standing menace to civilization. We
seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by
subterranean forces slumbering below.13
But reification can work in favor of magic as well. Once the magic-religion-
science triad was firmly in place, it became possible for critics of established
Christianity and mechanical science – mostly Romantics and their heirs – to
idealize magic as a noble worldview of enchantment. Not least through the
medium of fiction, such perceptions have become particularly widespread
among the general population.
It is undoubtedly because of its normative and ideological foundations, not
in spite of them, that the magic-religion-science triad has become an indis-
pensable component of how intellectuals have conceptualized modernity.
How deeply the reification of magic is ingrained in modernist theory can be
seen clearly, for example, in Max Weber’s theory of Entzauberung, or
Disenchantment, as explained in a famous lecture, “Wissenschaft als Beruf”
(Science as a Vocation).14 But it also became essential to the missionary and
colonialist enterprise: With constant implicit or explicit reference to tradi-
tional heresiological stereotypes about the alleged horrors of paganism, the
magic-religion-science triad (particularly understood from an evolutionist
perspective) lent intellectual and scientific legitimacy to the project of con-
verting non-European peoples from their supposedly magical superstitions to
the superior truths of Christianity, Enlightenment, and science. In short, the
rejection of magic became a hallmark of civilization. But here, too, the logic
could work in reverse as well: Again, those who were critical of Western
civilization could be attracted, precisely for that reason, to magic as an
enchanted worldview that was still alive among the “primitives” or “noble
savages” and should be revived in the modern world.
We may conclude that precisely because of its status as the “other” both of
religion (i.e., Christianity, or more specifically, Protestantism) and science
(i.e., a mechanistic worldview with atheistic implications), the category of
“magic” since the eighteenth century has become a favorite projection
screen for Western hopes and fears. Far from actually recovering or recon-
structing any observable or structural reality existing “out there” (in the past
or in the present, or on other continents), it constructs such a reality on the
13
Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. 1, 235–236.
14
Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” in Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919. Politik als Beruf
1919 (Studienausgabe der Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe Band 1/17; ed. Wolfgang J.
Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter) (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994),
1–23.
M ag i c 399
basis of normative and ideological assumptions and agendas. Implicitly or

explicitly, its real function is to distinguish “truth” from “error” in terms of a
simplifying post-Enlightenment discourse; but this normative and prescrip-
tive function is concealed behind the deceptive claim of mere objective
description. The discovery of magic is in fact its creation.
3 Concepts of Magic
From a strictly historical point of view, any attempt to write a “history of
magic” is therefore misleading in principle: It can only lead to anachronistic
distortions that prevent us from perceiving what has actually been going on.
What can be written, however, is a history of concepts of magic. In any such
attempt, one must be continually attentive to the question of who is speaking:
Are we dealing with a “self-referential” discourse in which people claim to
be doing magic themselves or with an “other-referential” discourse in which
they claim that others are doing it?15 In this short essay, it is obviously
impossible to make even a preliminary attempt at writing such a history in
chronological order. Instead, we will be looking at some of the main con-
cepts of “magic” that have emerged over the course of time. In what follows,
we will distinguish between seven categories, but this categorization is not
intended to be either final or absolute. It is perfectly possible to expand the
list further, and the main reason for presenting it here is to illustrate that a
great variety of different practices and beliefs have been called “magic” at one
time or another, in some context or other, always according to specific
intellectual contexts and contingent factors, so that the attempt to reduce
them all to some abstract master category is a hopeless undertaking. This
initial list of categories, then, looks as follows:
1. Magic as ancient wisdom
2. Magic as worship of demons
3. Magic as natural philosophy and science
4. Magic as occult philosophy
5. Magic as pseudoscience
6. Magic as an enchanted worldview
7. Magic as psychology
The Greek complex of words relating to magic (μάγος, μαγεία, μαγικός,
μαγεύω, etc.) is derived from the Old Persian magu-. Its exact meaning is
15
Bernd-Christian Otto, Magie: Rezeptions- und Diskursgeschichtliche Analysen von der Antike bis
zur Neuzeit (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011).
unclear, but it must have referred to a religious functionary of some kind.

The historical career of the first meaning of magic, ancient wisdom, relies to a
remarkable extent on only one short reference in Plato’s Alcibiades 1 (122a),
where Socrates refers to Zoroaster’s mageia as “the worship of the gods.” The
passage was quoted by a surprisingly great number of classical authors, and
this initial and quite positive understanding of magic survived at least as late as
Apuleius in the second century.16 It underwent an impressive revival in the
Renaissance, partly under the influence of George Gemistos Plethon’s attri-
bution of the Chaldean Oracles to Zoroaster, who became one of the chief
authorities of “ancient wisdom” in the context of the prisca theologia. Because
Zoroaster was also known as the originator of mageia, Plethon titled his
edition Magical Sayings of the Magi, Disciples of Zoroaster, and the result was a
widely popular perspective that may conveniently be referred to as prisca
magia: Here magic was understood very positively as referring to the wisdom
of the ancients that had been passed on through history to Plato and the
Platonists but had later come to be confused with demonic and superstitious
practices of all kinds. It is on this basis, for example, that Cornelius Agrippa
wrote his famous De occulta philosophia in an attempt to restore magic to its
ancient state of honor. It also led to endless repetitions of the apologetic
argument that true magic is a good and divine thing but should not be
confused with the despicable dark practices of goetia.
This brings us to our second category. Even though the term mageia may
sometimes have been understood in a positive sense in antiquity, it appears to
have rapidly lost that status as it acquired most of the negative connotations
that already adhered to the native term γόης – whence goetia. Such negative
understandings were normative in Christian culture since the first centuries,
leading to the understanding of magic as worship of demons. Christians, of
course, argued that those demons were none other than the gods of the
pagans; what the latter described as “ancient wisdom” was in fact an idola-
trous practice forbidden by the true God. There is no need here to dwell on
this second category: The assumption that magic relies on contact with
demons is so widespread and well known that it hardly needs further
demonstration.
But as already briefly mentioned, the demonic theory of magic came to be
contested beginning in the twelfth century, when great numbers of manu-
scripts concerned with the ancient natural sciences were translated from
16
Albert F. de Jong, Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (Leiden:
Brill, 1997), 213 note 29; Otto, Magie, chaps. 6–7. On the contested authenticity of the
Alcibiades, see Nicholas Denyer, “Introduction,” in Plato, Alcibiades (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
M ag i c 401
Arabic into Latin. This leads us to our third category. Intellectuals began to
argue that many miraculous effects attributed to demonic activity by the
common people could in fact be explained in purely natural terms. The
scholastic notion of qualitates occultae (occult qualities), originating in the
Greek ἰδιότητες ἄρρητοι, came to play an important role in this argument.
It is not entirely correct to describe the new concept of magia naturalis as an
attempt to present magic as scientific: More precisely, it was an attempt to
protect the study of the ancient sciences against theological censure and thus
legitimate them as a serious object of study for natural philosophers.17
The rediscovery of the ancient sciences from Arabic sources was joined,
since the fifteenth century, by the translation of multiple Greek manuscripts
concerned with Platonic and hermetic wisdom, and Hebrew manuscripts
concerned with Kabbalah and other forms of Jewish speculation, followed by
the unprecedented dissemination of these materials thanks to the invention
of printing. As a result, scholars and intellectuals were faced with the daunt-
ing task of trying to synthesize a wide variety of ancient and medieval
traditions concerned with miraculous effects of all kinds. This brings us to
our fourth category. As Jean-Pierre Brach has remarked, “the elaboration of a
synthetic approach had, in many cases, the paradoxical effect of partially
blurring the basic differences that were assumed to exist between them.”18 In
other words, magic in the Renaissance took the form of a syncretic “occult
philosophy” that made heroic attempts at achieving the impossible: harmo-
nizing widely divergent materials from Greek, Arabic, and Latin sources,
combining Aristotelian with Platonic strands of natural philosophy and
metaphysics, convincing theologians that these “pagan” traditions were
strictly natural (in spite of multiple references to the involvement of intelli-
gent agents, whether demonic or angelic), and yet presenting this “natural
magic” as part of one single, supreme tradition of religious wisdom derived
from sages such as Zoroaster or Hermes Trismegistus.
This Renaissance project of an “occult philosophy” – the attempt to
synthesize an enormous range of textual materials concerned with astrology,
alchemy, Kabbalah, magia naturalis, and Platonic or hermetic speculation,
while presenting them as one single whole – was still very well known during
the advent of the Enlightenment and came to be seen by its representatives as
the sum total of “traditional error and superstition.” While orthodox
Christians had already rejected much of it as demon-inspired idolatry and
17
For the longer argument on magia naturalis and qualitates occultae, see Hanegraaff, Esotericism
and the Academy, 170–175, 178–182.
18
Jean-Pierre Brach, “Magic IV,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, ed. Hanegraaff
(Leiden: Brill, 2006), 732.
pagan superstition, representatives of the new science and rational philoso-

phy were bound to perceive it as “pseudoscience” and dismiss it under the
convenient label of “magic.” This, then, is how the magic-religion-science
triad came into existence: The occult philosophy of the Renaissance became
the Enlightenment’s wastebasket of “rejected knowledge.”19 As we have
seen, this fifth understanding of magic was widely adopted as a polemical tool
by intellectuals and academics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
But whatever the Enlightenment rejected as unacceptable was bound to
become attractive to those who criticized or rejected the new forms of
philosophical rationalism and mechanical philosophy. As illustrated in
exemplary form by a large History of Magic published by the Romantic
physician Joseph Ennemoser in 1844,20 it was possible to reinterpret all the
contents of the wastebasket in a positive manner and present them as parts of a
venerable tradition of ancient wisdom grounded in a thoroughly enchanted
view of the world. According to this sixth understanding of magic, nature is
full of strange and miraculous powers – “mysterious and incalculable forces”
in Max Weber’s formulation – that are ultimately grounded in the powers of
the soul. This new theory was part and parcel of Mesmerism as interpreted by
German Romantics. Next to the “daylight rationality” of the
Enlightenment, it claimed that the human mind had a natural connection
to the mysterious and much more profound “nightside of nature”: the source
of dreams, visions, ecstasies, and all the strange powers and abilities that were
ignorantly attributed to demons from a perspective of religious superstition
and prematurely dismissed as nonsense by narrow-minded rationalists.
German Romantic Mesmerism and its concern with the nightside of
nature eventually led to what has been called the “discovery of the
unconscious,”21 and this brings us to our seventh category. As the hard
sciences were more and more successful in uncovering the secrets of external
nature, the human unconscious – internal nature – became the privileged
location of occult or “mysterious and incalculable” forces. The trend toward
psychologization of the sacred went hand in hand with a sacralization of
psychology; it is emblematic of this development that in late nineteenth-
century forms of occultism, and increasingly since the twentieth century, the
personal inner development of the practitioner came to be seen as the main
goal of magic. Another central heir of German Romantic Mesmerism, Carl
19
Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, chap. 3.
20
Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 260–277.
21
Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic
Psychiatry (New York: HarperCollins, 1970).
M ag i c 403
Gustav Jung, developed a highly influential theory of “synchronicity”

designed to rehabilitate the magia naturalis and occult philosophy of the
Renaissance by interpreting it in psychological terms and harmonizing it
with quantum physics as a more advanced alternative to post-Newtonian
science. This meant, quite literally, that in Jung’s perspective, avant-garde
physics and depth psychology had joined forces to unmask positivism as
“superstition” and announce the return of magic as science!
It bears repeating that the series of seven categories briefly summarized
here makes no claim of completeness and might well be expanded further or
arranged differently. The point of this discussion is that the term “magic” has
continuously been acquiring new meanings and connotations through its
long history from antiquity to the present. To the question “what is magic?”
one will therefore receive very different answers depending on the historical
period in question and the personal agendas of whoever is being asked. There
is no convincing way of subsuming all these meanings under one general
heading without making arbitrary judgments along the following lines:
“Although X is known by the term ‘magic,’ it is not really magic, but
although Y is not known by the term ‘magic,’ it really is magic.”
According to whom, and on what basis? The answer must be obvious by
now: according to whoever happens to be speaking, and on the basis of
whatever arguments he or she happens to like.
Although there is no such thing as a history of magic, then, it is possible to
write a history of the discourse on magic. The only solid foundation for such
a history is the detailed analysis of terms and concepts as used in their own
context, and a precise investigation of their continuous transformations
under the impact of changing historical circumstances.22 Such a contextual
historical analysis is not just possible, but highly important, for the obvious
reason that few other terms have been so effective and influential as polemical
and apologetic instruments in the formation of Western identities. As such,
concepts of “magic” are inextricably entwined not only with the history of
modernity but also with the history of how and why Western esotericism has
come to be perceived as a distinct field of study.23 To what extent all the
historical concepts of magic are part of the history of esotericism, and to what
extent they fall beyond its boundaries, is a tricky question that cannot be
answered in general terms. Few scholars would deny that magic as “ancient
wisdom” and as “occult philosophy” are proper objects of research in the
study of Western esotericism; but when it comes to some other terms,
22
For a pioneering attempt along these lines, see Otto, Magie.
23
For this general argument, see Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy.
especially those that are based on what Bernd-Christian Otto calls an “other-
referential discourse,”24 there is bound to be more hesitation.
Whatever one’s position in this respect, one thing seems clear: Magic is
something to beware of. It is such a powerful concept that most scholars and
intellectuals who have come into contact with it have fallen under its spell.
Even its strongest enemies appear to have been unable to resist the enchant-
ment and the illusions it produced: It literally caused them to see things that
were not there. Had these illusions been no more than empty chimeras, then
the problem might not have been too serious. But unfortunately, illusions
that are widely believed to be true become potent factors in the real world, as
one can see from the limitless literature on magic as a concept sui generis and
its enormous impact in such domains as religious rhetoric or colonialist
politics. Ironically, then, it is appropriate to end this short essay with a
warning that will sound uncannily familiar to scholars of magic: Beware of
the power of words!
24
Otto, Magie, 18–19 and passim: Selbstbezeichnung (referring to oneself) versus
Fremdbezeichnung (referring to others), leading to a positive self-referential discourse (“I
am practicing magic”) versus a negative other-referential one (fremdreferentiell in German;
“they are practicing magic”). Cf. Hanegraaff, “Review of Bernd-Christian Otto,” Aries 14:1
(2014), 114–120.
34
MATHEMATICAL ESOTERICISM
Jean-Pierre Brach
1 Theology, Ethics, Cosmology

“Number symbolism” refers to a “qualitative” approach to number and
mathematical objects in general. It is backed by what is known as “correlative
thinking”1 and operates according to a network of analogies linking the
quantitative values of mathematical entities to a vast array of correspondences
throughout the many levels of the so-called Great Chain of Being.2 It is also a
universal cultural phenomenon, likely to have existed from time immemor-
ial. But it should not be confused with “numerology,” a term that has mainly
come to designate contemporary methods of a pseudo-divinatory character,3
which do not concern us here.
Within Western culture, to which we shall limit ourselves in this essay,
explicit considerations pertaining to “arithmology” (or qualitative number) first
appear with the Greeks – insofar, that is, as extant documents are concerned.
Although it is clear that correlative thinking, mathematical symbolism, and
the worldview they both depend on pertain to a type of archaic “wisdom”
predating Greek civilization,4 it is nevertheless the case that the few truly
arithmological texts that have come down to us date from no earlier than the
late Hellenistic period. Still, one must take into account the fact that the
name of Pythagoras (ca. 570–490 BCE) was already synonymous in Ancient
Greece with a “philosophy of number.” It appears that the Pythagorean
1
Jean-Pierre Brach and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Correspondences,” in Dictionary of Gnosis and
Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 275–279.
2
Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); Edward P. Mahoney, “Lovejoy and the Hierarchy of
Being,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987), 211–230.
3
Eric T. Bell, Numerology (New York: Hyperion Press, 1979; originally published 1933).
4
Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
405
406 J e a n -Pi e r r e Br a ch
school, which vanished around the end of the fourth century BCE, never felt
compelled to draw a clear distinction between mathematical research, as we
would understand it, and mystical speculations about arithmetic and geome-
try. Both Proclus5 (412–485 CE) and Damascius (ca. 470–535 CE) ascribe to
Philolaus of Croton6 (fl. ca 450 BCE), one of the main representatives of the
early Pythagorean movement, a discourse on “theological geometry,” which
correlates the respective angles of the triangle and square to the same number
of masculine and feminine Olympian deities, to underline the sovereignty of
the duodenary (3 × 4) associated with the supreme god Zeus. This appears to
confirm the presence of symbolic perspectives from the beginning of the
school, inasmuch as it is feasible to distinguish between supposedly “original”
material and later, “traditional” developments.
What appears to us, accordingly, as a mixture of scientific and symbolic
perspectives results in a general doctrine of cosmic harmony, partly expressed
in mathematical concepts and correspondences that may have exerted a certain
influence on Plato. As far as we know, Philolaus’s cosmology hinges on the
complementarity of the dual principle of Limit and Unlimited, which, through
its assimilation to the categories of odd and even, manifests the development of
the supreme and universal One both in mathematics and in nature.
The early Pythagorean triple focus on cosmology, ethics, and theology (or
on the cosmos, man, and the divine realm), and its relation to number, was
retained by later arithmological literature, which also maintained the original
insistence on the decad. The number 10 was understood to express the
elaboration of the primordial Unity (One), through the agency of the
tetraktys (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10). The Pythagoreans recognized the importance
of the first four numbers in the constitution of the primary musical intervals
(symbolizing cosmic harmony, expressed by proportion and consonance).
The number 4 seems to have been of particular importance to them, as in
Philolaus’s doctrine of the fourfold cognitive faculties of the soul-harmony.
The number 7 was held to be a structural factor of life and nature.
2 A Pythagorean Plato?
Even though it has frequently been considered (most especially in the case of
the Timaeus) as being of Pythagorean inspiration, Plato’s philosophical use of
5
Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, trans. G. R. Morrow (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1970), 173–174; Proclus, Théologie platonicienne, ed. and trans. into French
by H.-D. Saffrey and L. G. Westerink, 5 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1968–87) (I, 20, 11).
6
Carl A. Hufman, Philolaus of Croton Pythagorean and Presocratic: A Commentary on the Fragments
and Testimonia with Interpretive Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Mathematical Esotericism 407
mathematics is for the most part very different in spirit. Whether we consider
the Republic, or the possibly spurious Epinomis (wherein the science of
number is said to constitute a fundamental tool in the search for wisdom),
or the Timaeus and its harmonic cosmogony, traditional numerical analogies
(e.g., 7 planets – 7 metals – 7 Gates of Thebes) play almost no part at all.
In the Timaeus, mathematical proportions – representing an intermediate
order of reality between the intelligible forms and the material corpus mundi –
actually structure the world-soul which, in turn, imparts a measure of order
and musical harmony to the physical universe, inasmuch as it is capable of
receiving it. The polyhedral shapes correlated with the four elements and the
“All,” as well as the minute triangular “particles” they are allegedly composed
of, add a geometrical match to the harmonic intervals of the world-soul.
They figure among the components of a wider philosophical discourse,
which applies mathematics to physics with the aim of providing the rational
basis for an account of the genesis and constitution of the material dimension
of nature. It is still debated whether or not such tenets in fact echo older
Pythagorean speculations, considerably reworked, as do other developments
in Plato linking proportional means to political regimes, justice, and social
order.7
From roughly the second century CE, a widespread philosophical eclecti-
cism makes room also for a neo-Pythagorean current, most often blended with
Middle Platonism or Neoplatonism. Writers such as Nicomachus of Gerasa,
Moderatus of Gadès, Theon of Smyrna, and Anatolius are eager to include
mathematics within the philosophical curriculum and to exploit its supposed
potential, from both a symbolic and a scientific perspective, in expanding
knowledge and supporting the ascensio mentis, the gradual elevation of the
soul from earthly concerns toward the divine. This general tendency to view
the study of numbers as primarily a spiritual exercise is further reinforced by the
fact that late Neoplatonism turns ever more toward theology, as exemplified
by thinkers such as Iamblichus (ca. 245–325 CE) and Proclus. If, after
Nicomachus and Anatolius,8 Iamblichus has left us one of the special arithmo-
logical tracts referred to earlier,9 he is also the author of more doctrinal
expositions bearing on the natural, ethical, and divine transpositions of
7
Gorgias, 508a; Laws V, 737c; 744b, and so on.
8
Nicomachus of Gerasa, Theologoumena arithmeticæ in Photius, Bibliothèque [3], ed. and
trans. into French by R. Henry (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1962), 40–48; Anatolius, On the
Decad, trans. Robin Waterfield, Alexandria: The Journal of Western Cosmological Traditions 3
(1995), 181–194.
9
Iamblichus, Summa Pitagorica, ed. and translated into Italian by F. Romano, (Milan:
Bompiani, 2006; includes the Theology of Arithmetic); Iamblichus, The Theology of
Arithmetic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Phanes Press, 1988).
arithmetic, which have already been mentioned.10 Even his ritual approach to
religion is not devoid of number-symbolical considerations.
As shown by Gregory Shaw,11 the isomorphism Iamblichus assumes
between the soul and mathematical entities makes possible its participation
in the cosmic harmony of the world-soul, while setting up a definite analogy
between the soul’s ascension through theurgical rites and the pursuit of
mathematical knowledge. In this way, numbers are construed as rungs on
the spiritual ladder, as well as intelligible entities that the soul must eventually
sacrifice in ritual worship, on the noetic plane, before it returns to the gods.
Understood as an image of cosmogenesis, or of the descent of the soul into
corporeal matter, geometry is equally involved in the symbolization of
theurgic activity, the more so since forms or linear shapes are sometimes
attributed to the gods themselves, as we have seen.
Equivalents in Greek philosophical culture of the Jewish practice of
gematria,12 that is, of taking into account the numerical value of letters
(sometimes also their geometrical shape, their rank within the alphabet, or
position within a given word), crop up intermittently, for example, in
Plutarch’s On the E at Delphi (ca. 115 CE), the Iamblichan Theology of
Arithmetic, and some fragments by Theodore of Asine13 also quoted by
Proclus.
For the most part, this conscious attempt at “pythagoreanizing” the
philosophical approach to reality belongs to a general, scholarly endeavor
both to interpret Plato’s doctrines and to secure the status of mathematics
amid the official curriculum of the Neoplatonic school. Commentaries on
scientific textbooks (by Euclid or Ptolemy, for instance) and the production
of manuals (e.g., by Nicomachus) constitute an integral part of this intellec-
tual process, which exerted an extremely significant influence on the med-
ieval and early modern understanding of number.
3 The Patristic and Medieval Outlooks

Both contemporary Jewish writers (e.g., Philo of Alexandria, fl. first half of
the first century CE) and the Greek Church Fathers were confronted with
10
In lost portions of a tenfold and explicitly neo-Pythagorean Summa. See Dominic J.
O’Meara, Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1989), 30–105, 217–229.
11
Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 189–215.
12
It should be noted that most of the Neoplatonic philosophers mentioned earlier came in fact
from the Middle East.
13
Wilhelm Deuse, Theodoros von Asine (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1973).
the authority of Scripture and the challenge of interpreting it. Above

“rational” mathematics or philosophy now stood the “divine inspiration”
attributed to the books comprising the Bible. This new outlook necessarily
entailed the spiritual relevance of all numbers featured in Holy Writ, which
were seen as containing a deeper or hidden meaning. Biblical numbers,
moreover, far surpassed those comprised in the Decad sacred to pagan
writers. All this meant that number symbolism now had to adapt to much
broader materials and perspectives, which in turn pointed to the necessity of
elaborating a wider system of hermeneutics, able to take into account the
variety of biblical texts and their multilayered hidden meanings.
Even though Irenaeus, Origen, Clement, and Tertullian long preceded
him in the practice of arithmology, Augustine (354–430) is a case in point
regarding the evolution of number symbolism, an evolution that finds itself,
on the whole, faithfully mirrored in his work. This is probably one of the
reasons why he rapidly became the foundational Latin authority in the field.
Nevertheless, this is relatively surprising since in fact Augustine left no
systematic account of his views on arithmology, only a multitude of instances
and arguments scattered throughout the bulk of his writings. In sentences
that have become famous,14 Augustine contends that the correct interpreta-
tion of numbers and numerical passages in the Bible is essential to the
understanding of its spiritual meaning. Invoking the triple authority of
Scripture, tradition (the teachings of the Church), and the ratio numerorum
(analysis of the arithmetical properties of number), he uses arithmology
mainly as an exegetical tool15 designed to shed light on the inner significance
of the text and, particularly, on the network of spiritual and messianic
correspondences assumed to link both Old and New Testaments.16
In the context of this practice, Augustine also manages to attain an
excellent balance between the attention given to number as such, as “qua-
lifying” its textual environment, and the importance conceded to the biblical
context per se, as the key to the meaning of the numerical figures it contains.
Medieval arithmology, in the wake of Augustine, will revolve around this
central question of whether to privilege secular knowledge over Christian
thought, or vice versa, in interpreting Scripture. These two attitudes are
summed up in the two following quotations, the first by Augustine and the
14
See Jean-Pierre Brach, “The Reception of Augustine’s Arithmology,” in Oxford Guide to the
Historical Reception of Augustine, ed. Karla Pollmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013).
15
A. Quacquarelli, “Recupero della numerologia per la metodica dell’esegesi patristica,”
Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 2 (1985), 235–249.
16
De Trinitate IV, VI, 10, 47–50 (CSEL, °°).
second by his exact contemporary Ambrose of Milan (although neither of

them adhered strictly to a one-sided perspective): “Therefore we cannot say
that the number six is perfect because God perfected all his works in six days,
but that God perfected his works in six days because the number six is
perfect”17; and “We do not treat it [i.e., the Septenary] according to the
Pythagorean manner or that of the other philosophers, but according to the
form and divisions of spiritual grace.”18
Another key feature of Augustine’s arithmology is the frequent display of
triadic analogies developed between the Godhead and creation, on the
model of the famous quotation of the Book of Wisdom: “Thou hast disposed
all things according to measure, number and weight.”19 The Trinitarian
structure is therefore being transposed to man and the universe, thus illus-
trating the ontological participation of creatures in the divine nature. From
the Platonic forms and ideal numbers, mathematical archetypes become
“essences” in the mind of God, presiding over the manifestation of created
beings and constituting the seal of divine wisdom, inasmuch as the material
world is actually capable of retaining it. As for the Greek habit of reducing
higher numbers to those within the Decad, it is still present, yet now
construed as implicating the divine immanence in physical creatures and/
or their return to the Godhead at the end of time.
To give but a few instances of the numerical analogies developed by
Augustine, Unity is understood – in traditional fashion – not as a number
in the ordinary sense but as an immaterial monad, the most perfect entity
aside from God, its immediate origin; 2 denotes separation and the breaking-
up of unity, inherent to both love and knowledge; 3 is, of course, referred to
the Trinity and is, more generally, the heavenly number of the soul, whereas
4 is that of the body and of the material world, a figure of firmness and
solidity; 5 illustrates virginity and the five senses, instruments of the soul; 6 –
as we have seen – represents the accomplishment of creation; 7 symbolizes
the perfection of creation, imaged by the Sabbath and the gifts of the Holy
Ghost; the Kingdom and messianic era are figured by 8, whereas 9 is but the
last step before the denary which, as 3 + 7, introduces the Decalogue and
expresses the ultimate fulfillment of all things; 12 is, of course, the number of
the Apostles, of the Elect (12 × 12 = 144), and of the spreading of the Gospel
(3 [Trinity] × 4 [corners of the world]); 40, of fasting and penance; 50, of the
Jubilee, and so forth. Geometrical symbolism is evoked, in turn, in the De
17
De Genesi ad litteram, IV, 7, ed. and trans. into French by P. Agaësse and A. Solignac, 2 vols.
(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1972), 288–299, 635–639.
18
Ambrosius, Ep. XXXI (44, ML), 32–34; (CSEL, 1968, 217 [O. Faller],**).
19
Wis., XI, 21.
quantitate animae20 to describe the relations between the soul and body. The
characteristics of some elementary, circular, and linear figures (e.g., number
and symmetry of angles and sides), progressively reduced to the non-dimen-
sional dot (representing the immaterial soul), illustrate the way the soul
permeates the whole body and communicates its properties to the different
parts or members of it.
Most later medieval writers who treat number symbolism – from Eucher of
Lyon (died ca. 450) to John Scottus Eriugena (died ca. 870) – can be said to be
dependent on Augustine. Eriugena is, of course, an important and original
thinker, who does not limit himself to reproducing or adapting Augustine’s
views; he develops some quite personal speculations about the process of
emanation of numbers from the uncreated Unity (a process parallel, for him,
to that of creation). Eriugena brilliantly synthesizes the Greek tradition of
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (sixth century) and Maximus the Confessor
(seventh century), both of whom he translated into Latin, with the Western
tradition represented by Augustine himself and his followers (Isidore of Seville
and the Carolingians), as well as by the “Latin Platonists” from Macrobius
(fourth century) to Martianus Capella (fifth century)21 and Boethius (d. 524).
With the rise of the great medieval schools and universities, this current of
Augustinian arithmology gradually blends within the growing body of avail-
able literature and knowledge (mathematical and otherwise), a situation that
is already perceptible in Carolingian authors and becomes ever more present
from the twelfth century on. A number of factors contribute to dissolve
traditional references in the flow of common knowledge. These include the
development of theology, of the sciences of the Quadrivium (backed by the
literature of Latin Platonism, already accessible to the Carolingians), and of
physics,22 plus the attempts at establishing various fixed sets of rules for the
interpretation of scriptural numbers, typical of the Victorine and Cistercian
Schools (Hugh of Saint-Victor, Eudes of Morimond, Guillaume
d’Auberive).23 Although now included in, one might say, a much larger
library, such references nonetheless still retain their power to influence later
writers until the end of the thirteenth century and are eventually rediscov-
ered in the Renaissance.24
20
De Quantitate animae, ed. W. Hörmann (Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempski, 1986).
21
Jean-Pierre Brach, Il simbolismo dei numeri (Rome: Arkeios, 1999), 40–43.
22
For instance, the theological transpositions of physics and arithmetic, mostly based on
reinterpretations of the Timaeus, within the School of Chartres.
23
Jean-Pierre Brach, La symbolique des nombres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994),
41–58.
24
For example, J. Lauret’s Sylva allegoriarum totius Sanctae Scripturae (Allegories of Scripture;
Barcelona, 1570), in which the Appendix in sylvam de allegoriis numerorum (Appendix on
4 “Which I have introduced as new, but which is in fact old”

Interest in the qualitative aspects of numbers suddenly regained favor in the
Renaissance, in the works of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and perhaps most
importantly in those of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) and
Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522). Nevertheless, it is significant that none of
them left a systematic account of the topic in question or wrote a specific
treatise about it. Ficino made occasional references to arithmology, as well as
to geometrical symbolism,25 in the context of his various commentaries on
Plato,26 as well as in his Platonic Theology.27
As early as 1486, in his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man (to which
the section title refers),28 Pico claimed to have rediscovered number
symbolism as a “new way of philosophizing by numbers,” and he made
clear his intention of reinstating it as a current of speculation in its own
right, almost on a par with Neoplatonism, magic, or Kabbalah29.
Arithmology, therefore, ceases to be mainly a hermeneutical tool for the
interpretation of passages from the Bible and becomes – to a certain
extent – an autonomous “art of numbers” capable of addressing problems
of cosmology, metaphysics, or theology. In his Conclusiones (or 900 Theses,
148630) and Apology (1487), Pico introduces the category of “formal
number,” implying that mathematical entities – in typical Neoplatonic
fashion – possess an independent ontological status. Located in an inter-
mediary level of reality, above the material plane, they are endowed with
numerical allegories) still derives its title from Augustine (numerorum sylva – “host” of
numbers – Serm. CCLXX).
25
Michael Allen, “Marsilio Ficino: Demonic Mathematics and the Hypotenuse of the Spirit,”
in Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton
and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 121–137; Stéphane Toussaint,
“Mystische Geometrie und Hermetismus in der Renaissance: Ficinus und Cusanus,”
Perspektiven der Philosophie 26 (2000), 339–356.
26
Michael J. B. Allen, Nuptial Arithmetic: M. Ficino’s Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book
VIII of Plato’s Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
27
Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, ed. and trans. by M. J. B. Allen and J. Hankins
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
28
This title is in fact a slightly later attribution; translated by John Herman Randall Jr., in
Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John H. Randall
Jr. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1948), 223–254.
29
The study of the interactions of number symbolism with early modern alchemy, magic, and
Christian Kabbalah (as in Agrippa, for instance) would require another essay in itself; see
Jean-Pierre Brach, “Number Symbolism,” in Dictionary, ed. Hanegraaff, 874–883 (see esp.
pp. 879–880); J.-P. Brach, Il simbolismo, 102–107.
30
Stephen A. Farmer, Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486) (Tempe, AZ: Medieval
and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998).
the faculty of bestowing “a power and an efficacy” on natural things that

belong to the – less “formal,” therefore less “actual” – physical plane of
existence.31 Number is thus assimilated to a secondary cause, active on the
material world.32 Even though he does not make use of the expression
“formal number” as such, Reuchlin expresses quite similar views in
assimilating in turn the essence of intelligible number to that of the divine
intellect. From there (i.e., from the conjunction of the primordial Unity
and Binary), number “flows” according to a process of emanation and
constitutes, along with its subsequent transformation into tetractys and
Decad, an intermediary realm that, again, “informs” the physical plane.33
Following Pico’s and Reuchlin’s impulse, and obviously facilitated by the
growth of the printing industry, the literature of arithmology enjoyed rapid
development from the early sixteenth century into the eighteenth, and even
later. It gave birth to different typical subgenres and currents, represented by
works that have sometimes become famous. An essentially speculative cur-
rent is that of the French disciples of Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (1460?–1536)
who, between 1510 and 1521, in Paris, published several treatises on number
symbolism. These authors include Charles de Bovelles (1479–1567), whose
philosophical exposition of the ontology of number34 and of the correlated
elevatio mentis toward the supreme Unity is supported by geometrical con-
siderations that frequently owe much to Nicholas of Cusa’s Docta ignorantia
(On Learned Ignorance, 1440). Others worth mentioning include Josse
Clichtove (1472?–1543) and his theological hermeneutics of biblical
numerals,35 and Gèrard Roussel (1500–1550), who produced a learned
arithmological commentary on Boethius’s Arithmetica (Paris: S. de Colines,
1521). All three of these figures demonstrate the continuity of many trends in
the practice of arithmology: for example, the serial examination of the
primary positive integers and of their varied correspondences and analogies,
interpretation of Scripture, and commentary on scientific or philosophical
manuals.
31
Jean-Pierre Brach, “Mathematical Esotericism: Some Perspectives on Renaissance
Arithmology,” in Hermes in the Academy. Ten Years’ Study of Western Esotericism at the
University of Amsterdam, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Joyce Pijnenburg (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 75–89 (see esp. p. 77, and notes).
32
Brach, “Mathematical Esotericism.”
33
Brach, “Mathematical Esotericism,” 76–77.
34
Charles de Bovelles, Liber de XII numeris (Treatise on the [first] 12 numbers) (Paris: H.
Estienne, 1510/11). An ensemble of varied mathematical tracts.
35
Josse Clichtove, Opusculum de mystica significatione numerorum (On the mystical signification
of numbers [which are found in Scripture]) (Paris: H. Estienne, 1513).
Another category within arithmological texts is that of the Summae or

“Encyclopedias.” Such volumes were inspired by the atmosphere of the
Counter-Reformation and aimed at mobilizing vast resources of erudition
to establish the agreement of academic learning with Scripture and Roman
Catholic orthodoxy, via the mediation of number symbolism. Pietro
Bongo’s Numerorum Mysteria (1599)36 and Athanasius Kircher’s Arithmologia
(1665)37 represent the most well-known examples of such efforts, which
have conferred to their topic a wide cultural appeal and relevancy. Other
important essays of this kind, but written in a different spirit, include J.
Lauret’s Sylva allegoriarum totius Sanctae Scripturae (Allegories of Scripture;
Barcelona, 1570), an interpretation of biblical allegories, including numerical
ones, still very much in the medieval tradition (although it makes use of
humanist sources such as the works of the Venetian Christian kabbalist
Francesco Zorzi, 1466?–1540) and Denarius pythagoricus, a compendium of
ancient Greek arithmological literature by Johannes Meursius (1579–1639).38
At the other end of the scale, we find similar endeavors but limited to the
study of a single given number, most often – yet not exclusively – the
septenary. Most important in this respect are Alessandro Farra’s 1562
Settenario dell’humana riduttione (Septenary of the human “reduction” [to
wisdom])39 and Fabio Paolini’s 1571 HEBDOMADES, sive septem de septenario
libri (Hebdomads, or seven books on the septenary).40 The first deals with the
seven degrees of spiritual life leading to the acquisition of divine wisdom,
illustrated by seven mythological figures, from Mercury to Orpheus. Its last
part makes use of numerical and geometrical analogies, which tend to show
how the septenary synthesizes in itself the properties of the other numbers
within the Decad. In the course of forty-nine chapters, Paolini concentrates
on the interpretation of a verse by Virgil,41 as well as on the musical scale,
which both evoke the number seven. His main purpose – relatively typical of
the dominant pursuits of scientific academies of his time, in Northern Italy at
36
Pietro Bongo, Numerorum Mysteria (Mysteries of Numbers) (Bergamo: C. Ventura, 1599;
reprinted Hildesheim: Olms, 1983).
37
Athanasius Kircher, Arithmologia, sive de abditis numerorum mysteriis (Arithmology, or the
hidden mysteries of numbers) (Rome: Varese, 1665). T. Leinkauf, Mundus combinatus:
Studien zur Struktur der Barocken Universal Wissenschaft am Beispiel Athanasius Kirchers SJ
(1602–80) (Akademie Verlag: Berlin, 1993), 192–235.
38
Johann Meursius (the Elder), Denarius Pythagoricus (Pythagorean Decad) (Leiden: J. Maire,
1631).
39
Venice, C. Zanetti, 1571; Armando Maggi, Identità e imprese rinascimentale (Ravenna: Longo,
1998).
40
Venice, F. Senese, 1589. D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003; originally published 1958).
41
Aen. VI, 646.
least – is in fact to study the (sevenfold) ways of correlating music and poetic
discourse to natural and celestial magic to retrieve the “miraculous” achieve-
ments of the art of Amphion or Orpheus. During the seventeenth (and even
eighteenth) century, a number of other treatises concerned with the “mys-
teries” of a single number were published,42 thus perpetuating a tradition
dating back to Greek antiquity. Their speculative value is unequal, and their
contents oftentimes dilettantish and haphazardly compiled.
Following in the wake of Cusa’s Idiota de Mente (The Layman on the Spirit,
1450), certain thinkers evinced a broader, more general interest in the
practical applications of mathematics – even striking up relations with artists
and craftsmen – and in doing so insisted on the role and importance of
geometry, while evoking the spiritual analogies and transpositions of number
and figures. Charles de Bovelles (later Desargues) kept these topics separate in
his handbooks of geometry. Luca Pacioli (1445?–1514), on the other hand,
added to his De divina proportione43 several tracts of a technical nature, praising
sculptors and architects. De divina proportione was devoted to the symbolic
properties of the geometrical division in mean and extreme ratio (the so-
called divine proportion or – later – Golden Section) and of the five Platonic
polyhedra of the Timaeus, which express for Pacioli the way in which the
perfection of divine attributes is mirrored in the fabric of the universe.
In his Mathematicall Praeface to the first English translation of Euclid’s
Elements,44 the famous John Dee also extolled, with didactic precision
enhanced by the use of vernacular language, the merit and usefulness of
applied mathematics (of which he was himself an inventive practitioner). At
the same time, he links mathematics to a superior, “formal” conception of
number as deriving its being from the supreme Monad, a conception he
inherits mainly from Pico. Number as such is present for Dee as a pattern in
the mind of the Creator, in angelic and human intellects, as well as in natural
objects.
5 Lost in Translation
As we have seen, most of these speculative conceptions of mathematics and
number symbolism are supported by a mainly Neoplatonic worldview,
42
All dedicated to the Septenary, with the exception of Antonio Croci’s Breve discorso della
perfezione del numero ternario (Brief Discourse on the Perfection of the Ternary) (Modena: G.
Cassiani, 1623), and Erik O. Tormius’s De Ternario (On the number 3) (Franecker, 1663).
43
On the Divine Proportion (Venice: P. Paganini, 1509).
44
By H. Billingsley (London: J. Daye, 1570); facsimile ed. of the Mathematicall Praeface by Allen
G. Debus (New York: Science History Publications, 1975).
which grounds the study of nature and cosmology in ontological and theo-
logical perspectives. Like all other esoteric currents of the Renaissance
(which it frequently pervades, such as magic, alchemy, and Christian
Kabbalah), Pythagorean arithmology is bound to a conception of number
as “formal cause.” It also depends on the doctrines of the unity of creation,
and of “cosmic correspondences” linking the different levels of creation,
construed as an organic, living being, mirrored entirely (though obviously on
a smaller scale) in man.
The progressive decline of such a worldview within European culture,
from the seventeenth century onward, was inevitably accompanied by the
increasing marginalization of the currents of thought that depended on it,
including, of course, arithmology. Increasingly, number is reduced to the
status of a mere logical operator, without any reference to the inner essence
of things, therefore rendering meaningless its ancient role as a mediator
between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of reality. While concen-
trating on the geometrical and quantitative aspects of space and objects
occupying it, scientists henceforth restrict their efforts to the discovery of a
mathematically effective account of nature and of its workings, understood as
mechanical constructs submitted to verifiable, quantitative laws, in lieu of a
quest for the pattern of natural elements in the mind of God, as expressed by
the mystic harmonies of numbers and geometrical proportions.
35
PANPSYCHISM
L e e Ir w i n
1 Introduction
The term “panpyschism” is a combination of the Greek pan, “all or every,”
and psuchê (or psyche), “breath or soul,” implying life-force, mental activ-
ity, and an animating spirit inherent in all of nature. The historical mor-
phology of the term is complex and it was not until the Renaissance period
that the term panpsychism was first used by Francesco Patrizi in 1591 in an
esoteric, philosophical work. Much of what might be interpreted as panp-
sychism is also interwoven with other late philosophical constructs, such as
“pantheism,” which was first articulated by John Toland in 1705 as “God or
Deity throughout everything”; a bit later, “panentheism” defined by Karl
Krause in 1829 as a theological doctrine that “all is in God.”1
The construction of panpsychism within the history of Western esoteri-
cism is a complex of related ideas forming a rich morphological history
from which ideas of pantheism and panentheism are not easily separated.
Further, the early history of panpsychism is implicit in comparison to
much later writings in which the concept becomes explicit (and where
psyche is usually interpreted as “mind”), although even in contemporary
esotericism, panpsychism tends to cover a range that mediates between
implicit theories and explicit definitions.2 In this essay, I will review some
key implicit morphologies of panpsychism within the history Western
esotericism and, where possible, indicate where the idea becomes more
explicit.
1
For John Toland, see Stephan H. Daniel, John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1984), 211ff.; for Karl Krause, see John W. Cooper,
Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006),
121–122.
2
For more on this topic, see Cooper, Pantheism, 26–30.
417
418 Le e I rwi n
2 Panpsychism in Greco-Roman Traditions

The belief that nature is ensouled can be found in early Greek philosophy as a
classical source for cosmological speculation in Western esotericism. Applied
to the world at large, an implicit panpsychism was constructed as an animate
presence or vital soul principle within the world, imbued with mental
influences, and often conceived as taking the form of gods or goddesses.
Thus, for Thales the world was enpsychion or “ensouled” as a great living
organism, an animal, within which lesser beings had their own lives and
souls. Aristotle cites Thales as the author of the statement “all things are full of
gods,” implying a panpsychism with strong pantheistic content.3
In a related but distinct morphology, Cicero attributes similar panspiritual
beliefs to Pythagoras, whose mathematical theory infused the whole of
nature with divine number and forms, universally spiritualizing nature.4
Empedocles combined the creative principles (archai) of earlier Greek philo-
sophers into a classic unity of four elements (fire, air, water, and earth, from
highest to lowest) as mediated by Love and Strife, thus imbuing the entire
cosmos with passion and soul. His dictum that “all things have thought” is an
expression of implicit panpsychism.5 Plato envisioned the world as wrapped
in a living soul to mediate the Platonic Forms. In the Timaeus, he writes of the
World Soul, “she was woven in everywhere and encompassed it . . . a divine
beginning of endless and reasonable life.”6 Even the atomists such as
Democritus, who conjectured on the “unfeeling” atoms that make up
nature, identified one particular type of atom, the spherical, as possessing
soul and sensitivity. These atoms “permeate everywhere.” Thus, since these
spherical atoms are the primary cause of motion, nature is to some degree
ensouled. Even Aristotle, generally not considered a panpsychist, wrote in a
late work that because life comes from the vital power of spirit (pneuma), then
“all things have soul.”7
The Stoics also formed diverse morphologies of panpsychism, based
primarily on the belief that reason was inherent in nature and the cosmos,
arising from the logoi spermatikoi or active “seeds of universal reason.” These
implicit seeds give rise to pneuma (spirit) as the active principle (symbolized as
3
Aristotle De anima (411a7) in David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2005), 24–26; Conrad Bonifazi, The Soul of the World: An Account of the Inwardness
of Things (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1978), 2.
4
Cicero, De natura deorum (I, 26–28) in Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, 27.
5
Empedocles (frag. 103) and Aristotle De anima (404b11), in Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West,
31–32.
6
Plato, Timaeus (31a–37a).
7
Aristotle, Generation of Animals (736b 29ff.) in Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West,49–50.
Pa npsych ism 419
air and fire) that animates the world and infuses the passive elements (water
and earth) and all beings with cohesion, life, and awareness. The cosmos is
“an animal, rational and alive, intelligent” and thus divine. According to
Cicero, “the parts of the cosmos . . . contain the power of sense perception
and reason” and the stars “perceive and have intelligence.”8 For the Stoics,
the implicit idea is one of pluralistic panpsychism whereby mind (or psyche)
exists in varying degrees, or “parts,” as distinct from the more monistic view
of Plato in which the World Soul is a single animating principle of all nature.
Among Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, the soul is a fundamental unity and
“ensouled reason” permeates earth, water, air, and fire; thus, the World Soul
is an emanation from the One through Mind (nous) such that “there is soul in
everything . . . covering all realms.” Here the panpsychic morphology is both
a transcendent principle of unity, order, and intelligence and a lower prin-
ciple of embodied life and growth, suggesting an emanationist panpsychism.9
Later Neoplatonists such as Iamblichus and Proclus also held a view of the
World Soul as a unitary intelligible medium, hierarchically structured,
through which the souls of individuals could reunite with the One, although
individual souls must overcome intellectual impediments to attain the higher
unity.10
One textual source that contributed greatly to the morphologies of panp-
sychism was the Corpus Hermeticum (ca. second and third centuries CE). For
example, in Book Ten, Hermes cites from the General Discourses that “all
souls that wander . . . as if separate, are from a single soul, the soul of all”; in
Book Eleven, Nous explains to Hermes that “Inwardly, a soul full of mind
and god fills the universe and brings it to life. Outwardly, the universe is this
great and perfect living thing, the cosmos; inwardly, it is all living things.”11
The Asclepius (Logos teleios or “perfect discourse”) states “the soul and cosmos
being embraced by nature are set in motion by her. . . these [diverse] forms
are also united so that all things appear as one whole” and also “the cosmos is
one, the soul is one, and God is one.” Here we can see that, as in the
Hermetica, both God and soul imbue nature with motion and life and
8
Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, 53–58; Bonifazi, The Soul of the World, 4–5.
9
Plotinus Enneads (III 8.4–5, V15 and VI 7). See Cooper, Pantheism, 40–42, who argues that
Plotinus holds a panentheist view because God as the One contains but is separate from the
world (creation).
10
Iamblichus, De Mysteriis (200, 1–10); Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism
of Iamblichus (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967), 63–67; also,
Cooper, Pantheism, 43–44.
11
Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 31, 38,
59–60; Clement Salaman et al., The Way of Hermes (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2000),
47, 53, 75–77.
420 Le e I rwi n
through the agency of gods and spirits form a living cosmos with ranked
ontological order.12
During this same period, Greco-Roman alchemists borrowed from
Empedocles the “living” four elements and united them with a fifth element
(quintessence) to create a pluralistic panpyschism in which soul became a
medium for the transmutation of elements. Some alchemical writers such as
Zosimos strongly reflected Hermetic themes of both panpsychism and
panentheism.13 Implicit panpsychic ideas are also present in many classic
texts of Arabic alchemy, for example, the Tabula Smaragdina (Emerald Tablet,
ca. 650), even though Islamic theology does not generally support ideas of
panpsychism.
3 The Renaissance Rediscovery of Panpsychism

Nicholas of Cusa articulates an implicit panpsychic vitalism in his work De
Docta Ignorantia (1440), where he writes of the anima mundi (World Soul)
that “it co-exists with matter from which it receives a limitation . . . [and is]
not separable from things.” Soul in this case does not mediate between God
and the world but is a universal form containing all other forms known only
through things. Thus, God is a synthesis of opposites such that all things are
in God and God in all things, while soul reflects the immediate, dynamic
bonds between formative elements and all creatures. Such a theory is
implicitly panpsychic and panentheist.14 Many Renaissance thinkers drew
on Cusa in forming their cosmological theories, each modifying the theory.
In addition, Marsilio Ficino in De Vita Coelitus Comparanda (1489) articu-
lated the prisca theologia or “ancient theology” of a panpsychic Hermeticism
and translated into Latin the Corpus Hermeticum (as “Pimander,” 1463),
providing Renaissance thinkers with a primary panpsychic text for further
speculations.15
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in De occulta philosophia (1533) devotes several
chapters to the panpsychic idea of the World Soul. He writes, “The world,
the heavens, the stars and elements have a soul” and “the world lives, has soul
and sense, for it gives life to plants and . . . sense to animals.” He also writes,
12
Ascelpius: The Prefect Discourse of Hermes Trismegistus, ed. and trans. by Clement Salaman
(London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 2007), 54–55.
13
Howard Jackson, Zosimos of Panopolis on the Letter of Omega (Atlanta: Society of Biblical
Literature, 1978), passim.
14
De Docta Ignorantia (II, 4, 9), in Bonifazi, The Soul of the World, 11.
15
Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (London:
Equinox Press, 2005), 53–56.
Pa npsych ism 421
“The Soul of the World fills all things . . . knitting together all things, that it
might make one frame of the world . . . one instrument made of many strings
. . . with only one breath and life.” Here we have a monist expression of the
panpsychic idea according to which while all strings or individual souls have
vibrancy and reason, yet they all harmonize and unite as One.16
Paracelsus also supported the alchemical idea of ensouled nature. Under
the concept of Archeus, as spiritus vitae (or vital spirit), Paracelsus envisions
the perfection of the latent potential of nature in concord with the active
capacities of soul. He writes, “The spirit with all its powers is born of God
and thus the body of the world [nature] is provided with as many powers as
man needs . . . each soul encloses [these powers] within itself.” Thus through
soul, in combination with the agency of Archeus, divine and natural poten-
tials (or “seeds”) could be brought to perfection.17 The Italian naturalist
Girolamo Cardano articulated a similar form of panpsychic dualism:
Among five principles of nature, soul (anima) as the principle of life, inherent
in all natural bodies (composed of matter and form), mediates between body
and mind (the higher form of soul).18
In Nova de universis philosophia (1591), Francesco Patrizi explicitly defined
pampsychia as the necessary, mediating soul (anima) that unified the
Neoplatonic source of light in its descending illuminations with heavenly,
elemental, and worldly bodies. Heavenly bodies (stars) are described as
endowed with “mind” and as “animate” as well as endowed with “light,
heat, motion,” and the “seeds of things.” Patrizi further defined soul as an
“incorporeal-corporeal” – that is, a real being, alive and rational, imitating
higher mind but also with some characteristics of body.19 Soul in this view,
informed by the supersensible through participation in the sensible, is a
mediating presence partaking of both supernal mind and living nature.
Thus, all of nature is infused with ten grades of soul that mediate higher
mind; however, “nature” is further differentiated by explicit qualities that in
turn create generic and individual forms of bodies, such that soul is also
16
Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, ed. Donald Tyson (Woodbury:
Llewellyn Publications, 1998), 419–421.
17
Jolande Jacobi, Paracelsus: Selected Writings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979),
199; Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 109–110; Bonifazi, The Soul of the
World, 7–11.
18
Brian Copenhaver and Charles Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 308–309; Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, 67–68.
19
Benjamin Brickman, “An Introduction to Francesco Patrizi’s Nova de Universis
Philosophiam” (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York: Columbia University, 1941), 27–30,
40–41, 52–53.
422 Le e I rwi n
differentiated in each being.20 The whole cosmos (or Pancosmia) is filled with
soul, and this includes the inorganic, the elemental, the earth itself, as well as
all plants, animals, and humans.21
For Patrizi, space, the first created quality of nature, is infinite, unbounded,
and limited only by human thought or by local bodies. In the center of this
infinity is earth. Maximal space is the primal place of natural creation through
minimal constructs, reducible to Pythagorean number, geometry, and
volumes. Thus, soul infuses all space and is also manifest through mathema-
tical principles inherent in the creation of form, structure, and elemental
bodies created by higher mind and ultimately, by the One-that-is-All. Light
and heat then manifest in primordial space, giving birth to a multiplicity of
forms and bodies connected by flow or “flux” (a medium of soul) that creates
concord or discord between beings.22 Thus, the entire pancosmia is alive,
soulful, infused with divinity and mind, which descends from the divine
essence as the highest quality of soul, above and yet within nature.
Christianizing the One-All, Patrizi claims that the Deep Divine has three
aspects: the Father (Un’omnia, Absolute One), the Son (Unity or First Mind,
containing all essences and ideas), and the Holy Spirit (Second Mind, con-
taining all souls and beings).23
Drawing on Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno constructed a complex
theory of “soul” in a boundless, acentric universe of multiple worlds, suns,
and stars. In a universe without a center, Bruno writes that “all things are full
of spirits, divine power, God or divinity, and the whole of intelligence and
the whole of soul is everywhere.” Paying tribute to Pythagoras, he offers the
analogy that just as a piece of a broken mirror can reflect an image of the
whole, so, too, the “particles of matter” (making up soul) reflect the whole of
creation. These atomic “minima” (“seeds” or “tiny worlds”) are part of every
object, however small, such that even the least corpuscle possesses in itself a
20
Brickman, “An Introduction to Francesco Patrizi’s Nova de Universis Philosophiam,”
32–35; Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, 70–72; Miguel Granada, “New Visions of the
Cosmos,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 275–278.
21
Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 1964), 121–123; Brickman, “An Introduction to Francesco Patrizi’s
Nova de Universis Philosophiam,” 42–43.
22
Brickman, “An Introduction to Francesco Patrizi’s Nova de Universis Philosophiam,”
44–51, 56–57; see also Luc Dietz, “Space, Light and Soul in Francesco Patrizi’s Nove De
Universis Philosophia (1591),” in Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance
Europe, eds. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999),
139–169.
23
Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, 187–195; Brickman, “An Introduction to
Francesco Patrizi’s Nova de Universis Philosophiam,” 36–39, 67–71.
Pa npsych ism 423
portion of spiritual substance that allows it to become alive. Thus, “the soul
of the world, the spirit of the universe, connects and unites everything with
everything else.” Further, soul as a “universal formal cause” animates the
entire infinite universe and “according to the diversity of dispositions of
matter and the capacity of material principles, produces different configura-
tions and realizes different potentialities.” All of the aspects of nature are
ensouled but differentiated; simultaneously, “every soul and spirit has some
degree of continuity with universal spirit.” For Bruno, panpsychism is an
explicit unitary theme in which soul is the vital medium of a vast divine
immanence uniting nature, mind, and spirit in continual processes of crea-
tion, destruction, and regeneration.24
Tommaso Campanella presents us with a late example of a Renaissance
theory of implicit panpsychism. He identifies three primaries: power, wis-
dom, and love as inherent in all things. Power or perhaps better energy is his
first principle – the power to be, to maintain being, to sustain existence.
Wisdom derives from sensation and perception: As all beings are and per-
ceive, they “know” both themselves and other beings. The primary elements
of the world are such knowing beings, with varying degrees of perception
and power, and through combination “the heavens are sentient and the earth
and animals as well.” Further, the world’s multitude of beings reflects the
image of God, and they are related to one another through divine love. This
primary quality of love is fundamental to the joy, power, and awareness of
existence; self-knowledge and, more inclusively, knowledge of others result
in “change in the sentient body” through a sharing of perceptions, manifest as
sympathy and antipathy. The medium of this sharing and communication is
soul, individual and universal, “infused by God.” Knowledge in this context
is a reflective process by which the “higher intellect” is assimilated into that
which it contemplates, such that “the world becomes a conscious image of
God with all its parts endowed with sense perception.” The human being is
thus a microcosm, a witness, who can reflect on the macrocosm as a “perfect
animal with its own body, spirit, and soul.”25
24
Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity and Essays on Magic (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 5–6, 43–45, 91–92, 111–115, 129–130; Kristeller, Eight
Philosophers, 127–144; Bonifazi, The Soul of the World, 1978: 12–15; Copenhaver and
Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, 314–317; Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, 72–76; also see
Ramon Mendoza, The Acentric Universe: Giordano Bruno’s Prelude to Contemporary Cosmology
(Boston: Element Books, 1995), 31, 125–128, passim.
25
John Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997), 89–93; Copenhaver, Hermetica, 318–328; Skrbina, Panpsychism in the
West, 77–81; see also D. P. Walker, Spiritual & Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 224–229.
424 Le e I rwi n
4 Panpsychism in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The shift from religious to scientific discourse in panpsychic thought is
perhaps best illustrated by William Gilbert, who in De Magnete (1600)
described the force of magnetic attraction as “a power of self-movement
which seems to betoken a soul.” The inventor of the term “electricity,”
Gilbert described “electrical bodies” as having a light and spiritual effluvia
that caused attraction and repulsion. The earth itself was a magnetic body,
whose effluvia or “animate force” expressed World Soul. Hence, if all
planetary bodies have magnetic fields, they must also “have souls or
minds” that they can communicate to other objects, thus magnetizing
them. Anthanasius Kircher drew on Gilbert in his three-volume work on
magnetism Magnes, sive De Arte Magnetica (1641) and also described mag-
netism as an elementary soul force that was a “secret power of nature”
expressing an aspect of the indwelling presence of God.26 Johannes Kepler
wrote that each planet was endowed with an animating force or “soul” that
he claimed was magnetic, but whose motions could be calculated with
mathematical precision. In his work Harmonies of the World (1618), he
further claimed that predictable movements of the planets were the “object
of some mind” and that “there dwells in the sun simple intellect or nous . . .
the source of every harmony.” However, some years later he concluded
that the cause of planetary motion was some “corporeal force,” that is, a
mechanical cause.27 Thus in Kepler, we can map the rise of measurable
mechanics as a causal explanation for motion and life, instead of soul and
mind. From this point forward, panpsychism becomes increasingly aligned
with esoteric doctrines in the face of growing mechanistic and material
explanations of causality.
Cambridge Platonists and esotericists such as Henry More and Ralph
Cudworth, both dedicated Protestants, defended a view of nature and matter
as a “vital, formative (plastic) ground” of Spirit. Cudworth wrote, “we
constantly oppose the generation of souls . . . out of dead and senseless matter
and assert all souls to be substantial as matter itself.” Thus, the “spirit of
nature” was a divine power pervading the physical world and sowing
“spermatical or vital” seeds, thus giving rise to all natural forms. These
“seminal forms” (like Stoic logoi spermatikoi) pervade all of “plastic nature”
and act from within to shape matter into variable forms – beings, plants,
animals, humans – as a “whole corporeal universe . . . together in one
26
27
Pa npsych ism 425
harmony.”28 According to Henry More, the vital conjunction of spirit with

matter (or soul with body) was through a shared “vital congruity” that
blurred their differences and made each receptive to the other. Soul pervades
the entire universe, within all matter, and working through the plastic vitality
of nature, it shapes each thing according to the “predispositions and occasions
of [its] parts.” This soul (or spirit of nature) was the “vicarious power of God”
as a shaping power inherent to matter-nature, a power that permeated the
entire body of each and every created being. This immanent “spirit of
nature” could not be accounted for by mechanical explanations or measur-
able and observable effects; rather, it reflected a purposeful, spiritual universe
“above fortuitous mechanisms.”29
From this period forward, multiple esotericists developed panpsychic
themes in which nature retains a vital, symbolic role as representing an
inherent spiritual capacity whose secrets must be uncovered through expli-
cit training. In a general sense, “spiritual alchemy” was conceived in terms
of a coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) in which nature and
spirit are conjoined through complex, integrative processes of intellectual
and visual symbolism. In the context of an implicit panpsychism, the
alchemical Hieros Gamos (sacred marriage) expresses a symbolism of “enso-
uled nature” brought to perfection through the stages of alchemical devel-
opment. This conjunction reflects the union of physical life with vital
consciousness “at every level” and symbolizes the goal of the alchemical
opus. As stated in one alchemical text, Mother Nature, the most perfect of
all God’s creations, “moves the bodies above and transmutes the elements
below.” The alchemist exclaims, “nothing can live without soul and all that
exists flows forth from thee [Mother Nature] by virtue of the power of
God.”30 Isaac Newton, a practicing alchemist who believed in the imma-
nence of divinity within nature, extolled the Universal Ruler who “gov-
erns all things” and who is “everywhere present” substantially, in whom all
things were contained and moved, “but in a manner not at all corporeal,
utterly unknown to us.” In another context, he wrote, “we cannot say that
nature is not alive.” Thus, divinized, living nature held alchemical secrets
28
Bonifazi, The Soul of the World, 54–65.
29
Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, 85–87; Bonifazi The Soul of the World, 65–67.
30
Unknown author, “A Demonstration of Nature,” in The Hermetic Museum Restored and
Enlarged, ed. Arthur Waite (Newburyport: Samuel Weiser, 1999), 133; Karen-Claire Voss,
“Spiritual Alchemy: Interpreting Representative Texts and Images,” in Gnosis and
Hermeticism: From Antiquity to Modern Times, ed. Roelof van den Broek and Wouter
Hanegraaff (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 147–181.
426 Le e I rwi n
that Newton sought to uncover, as expressed in his extensive alchemical

writings.31
The German theosopher and alchemist Friedrich Christoph Oetinger was
another explicit panpsychist. Oetinger’s concept of infinite space as the
sensorium dei (awareness of divinity) was linked to the concept of the first
light of creation as “electrical fire” drawn out of chaos by God for creation.
This electrical fire (also referred to as spiritus mundi or with reference to
Paracelsus, as Archeus) penetrates all matter as a transformative or “plastic”
(gestaltend) principle and brings all things to life. As a God-created animating
force, electrical fire is a creative, generative power constantly giving birth
“within the womb of Nature” to innovation and new forms. As a potentially
evolutionary principle, the work of electrical fire was divine self-revelation,
the highest expression of which was corporeality and incarnation, “the end of
all the ways of God.” In referring to the electrical fire, Oetinger wrote, “One
may well say that the earth is the mother of the subtlest and rarest essences,
and that life lies quiescently in every body . . . life is never separable from
matter, at the very birth of the atoms, life or spiritual elements were incor-
porated.” In human beings, he writes, “the psychic is electrical, the intellec-
tual supersedes the electrical and yet is so compatible with it that none can
define the frontier between them.”32 Franz Anton Mesmer also combined
electrical theory with the idea of animal magnetism (animal from anima, soul)
to describe the “rarefied fluid” that circulated through nature.33
5 Panpsychism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

F. W. J. Schelling in his Naturphilosophie emphasized a single underlying force
that expressed a panpsychic outlook through the “absolute identity” of spirit
and nature. The natural processes of electricity, magnetism, and chemical
reaction were “secondary potencies” that acted on the “first potency” of
inorganic matter to produce a “third potency” in the form of organic beings
who manifested sensitivity in the form of attraction and repulsion. In the
human being, these interactive potencies produced self-awareness that was
then able to reflect on the entire process. The tension or opposition between
spirit and matter was thus reconciled through a graded evolution of stages by
31
Isaac Newton, “Commentary on the Emerald Tablet” in The Alchemical Reader: From Hermes
Trismegistus to Isaac Newton, ed. Stanton Linden (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 247; Bonifazi, The Soul of the World, 45–49; Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, 93–94.
32
Oetinger as quoted in Bonifazi, The Soul of the World, 87–95.
33
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (London:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 174–180.
Pa npsych ism 427
which the latent potency of spirit became manifested in conscious, self-aware

beings. Nature functioned through a dynamic process by which absolute
Spirit was able to objectify itself in a “higher physics” that was trans-mechanical
and gave an ontological affirmation to spiritual potential inherent to nature.
Here we can see a panpsychic attitude or, more exactly, an implicit panenthe-
ism that emphasizes emergent evolution. Purposeful nature, stimulated by
spirit, demonstrated a “continuous striving toward organization,” and “spirit,
understood as the principle of life, is called soul” – a formless influence of
incessant creative activity within nature. As a Christian, Schelling wrote, “the
conviction of a genuine unity of God and Nature is the veritable point at
which human science is fulfilled.”34
In Nanna: On the Soul Life of Plants (1848), Gustav Fechner wrote of his “day
light view” of the world as nature utterly alive and conscious, matter outwardly
and spirit inwardly. Spirit and soul were inseparable from matter and nature.
For Fechner, souls were inherent to every aspect of nature, with simpler souls
below humans and more complex above humans in the planet, the sun, the
solar system, and the cosmos overall. Each soul contributed to the complexity
and diversity of the whole of nature forming a perfect unity, an ensouled
cosmos. He contrasted this view to the “night view” of materialism in which
humans were a product of blind forces in a universe of utter darkness. Arguing
by analogy, Fechner believed that where there was life, as in human beings,
there was also soul. Human consciousness only contributed to the existing
consciousness of every plant and animal to create a collective earth conscious-
ness, or earth-soul, that in turn contributed to the living consciousness of the
conjoined planets, sun, and moons. Between earth and sun, a special relation-
ship existed through an exchange of light-energy that connected all organic
beings in a unitary consciousness. In this “intercourse of light,” each organic
being contributed its unique quality of awareness to the whole. In turn, this
created an “earth system” superior to humanity that maintains the harmony
and balance of nature. All organic beings have a degree of inwardness, distinct
by species, location, and habitat. God is the unifying matrix of this shared
awareness; soul development is a guiding influence in an increasing scale of
complexity for each aspect of nature (a cell, a plant, an animal) in “a state of
becoming that gives direction to the entire process.”35
34
Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994), 82–83, 272–273; Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, 115; The Soul of the World,
167–174.
35
William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Glouchester: The Book Depository, 2007 [1909]), 53–71;
Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West, 122–126; Bonifazi, The Soul of the World, 152–158. William
James also expressed pluralistic panpsychic beliefs.
428 Le e I rwi n
In the twentieth century, panpsychism has become a fully explicit concept

in the writings of many esotericists influenced by philosophical thought – for
example, Alfred P. Sinnett, P. D. Ouspensky, Eileen Garrett, Jane Roberts,
and others. At the same time, writers in philosophy and science have also
articulated explicit theories of panpsychism – among them Josiah Royce,
Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Teilhard de Chardin, Gregory
Bateson, and others. Many magical societies embraced a pantheistic attitude
as they assimilated neo-pagan beliefs about nature.36 The world as embody-
ing a living, divine presence whose members are conscious and uniquely
developed through a multitude of cultural sub-collectives is certainly a
fundamental idea in esotericism. The panpsychic perspective on nature as
ensouled reflects innumerable morphologies whose contributions to the
whole of esotericism only enrich and deepen the potential “convergence
of paradigms” that so often contributes to the multilayered nature of esoteric
studies.37
36
Panpsychism in neo-pagan thought is pervasive. See Graham Harvey, Contemporary
Paganism: Listening People, Speaking Earth (New York: New York University Press, 1997),
90, 175–176; Denis Carpenter, “Emergent Nature Spirituality: An Examination of the
Major Spiritual Contours of the Contemporary Pagan Worldview” in Magical Religion and
Modern Witchcraft, ed. James R. Lewis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996),
50–53.
37
The “convergence of paradigms” comes from Peter Russell, From Science to God: A
Physicist’s Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness (Novato: New World Library, 2003),
36–38, 116–117.
36
SEXUALITY
Hugh B. Urban
1 Introduction
Sexuality has long held a central place of both symbolic and practical
significance in the history of Western esotericism. Indeed, male-female
sexual differentiation and the act of sexual union are among the most
pervasive, recurring, and multivalent themes running through esoteric tradi-
tions from early Gnosticism and Hermeticism down to contemporary occult
and magical groups.
The reasons for this frequent association between sexuality and esoteri-
cism are not far to seek. If esotericism refers literally to what is hidden, or
known only to an intimate few, then sexuality is not surprisingly one of its
most common metaphors. Indeed, we might say that, “in some real sense,
sex is the secret par excellence.”1 And if esotericism involves a complex
dialectic of concealment and revelation of secret knowledge, then it finds
a close analogue in eroticism, which also involves a subtle dialectic of
concealing and revealing. As Elliot Wolfson observes in his study of sexual
imagery in Kabbalah, “eroticism and esotericism converge at the point of
divergence . . . eroticism ostensibly exposes the concealed and esotericism
conceals the exposed.”2
Similarly, the union of male and female bodies in sexual intercourse is also
a common metaphor (and at times a physical vehicle) for the ideal of divine
union, for intercourse between the physical and spiritual realms, and for a
state of divine androgyny. If sex (from Latin sexus) is literally what “divides”
or “separates” male from female bodies, then the act of sexual union can serve
1
Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds., Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the
History of Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2008), xi.
2
Elliot Wolfson, “Murmuring Secrets: Eroticism and Esotericism in Medieval Kabbalah,” in
Hanegraaff and Kripal, eds., Hidden Intercourse, 65.
429
430 Hugh B. Urban
as a powerful symbol, or even ritual technique, for the experience of spiritual

reintegration. Finally, because esoteric traditions are by definition largely
secret, surrounded by layers of concealment and obfuscation, they have also
been frequent targets for charges of sexual licentiousness, obscene perversion,
and all manner of transgressive rites. Indeed, from the early gnostics down to
the medieval heresies, Freemasons, and contemporary occult movements,
one of the most frequent (and often fantastic) charges leveled at esoteric
traditions is that they are involved in some form of perverse, demonic, or
sacrilegious sexual activity.
Since the literature on sexuality and esotericism is vast, in this essay I will
focus on just a few of the more representative traditions, exploring three
main periods in the history of Western esotericism from roughly the second
or third century onward: first, late antique and medieval esoteric traditions
such as Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and Kabbalah; second, esoteric currents of
the Renaissance and Enlightenment, such as magic, alchemy, and the works
of Emanuel Swedenborg; and finally, the modern forms of sexual magic that
emerged in America and Europe from the mid-nineteenth century onward,
with figures such as Paschal Beverly Randolph and Aleister Crowley. To
conclude, I will suggest that these long associations between sexuality and
esotericism have continued into the twenty-first century, giving birth to a
whole new age of spiritual sexuality – though today often in ironically
“exotericized” forms for a mass popular audience.
2 “When the Two Are Made One”: Sexual Themes

in Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and Kabbalah
The symbolism of sexual union is one of the oldest tropes in Western esoteric
literature, appearing throughout early Hermetic, Christian, and Jewish tradi-
tions alike to express the ineffable nature of the divine, the transmission of
secret knowledge, and the experience of mystical union. One of the most
explicit examples of this use of sexual imagery is found in the Coptic version
of the hermetic text Asclepius, which describes sexual union as a “wonderful
representation” of the transmission of the holy mysteries. Indeed, sexual
union here seems to be a metaphor for esotericism itself and for the nature
of hidden, ineffable and secret knowledge: To the uninitiated, it seems
disgraceful and shameful; to those who know, it is the most profound
experience of divine union itself:
For when the semen reaches its climax, it leaps forth. In that moment the
female receives the strength of the male; the male for his part receives the
Sexuality 431
strength of the female, while the semen does this. Therefore the mystery of
intercourse is performed in secret, in order that the two sexes might not
disgrace themselves in front of many who do not experience that reality. . .
if it happens in the presence of those who do not understand the reality [it
is] laughable and unbelievable. And, moreover, they are holy mysteries, of
both words and deeds, because not only are they not heard, but also they are
not seen.3
Sexual images of the divine and of spiritual union also appear throughout
the large and amorphous body of early Christian literature known as
Gnosticism. According to the key Valentinian gnostic text the Gospel of
Philip, the return of the soul to its true spiritual home is described as a kind
of spiritual wedding, the mystery of the “bridal chamber.” Death, Philip tells
us, came into the world through the separation of Eve from Adam in
Paradise; therefore, Christ has come to heal this division by reuniting the
divided soul with its spiritual counterpart and so give it eternal life. However,
as April DeConick has argued, the Valentinians saw the sexual act as more
than simply symbolic. At the same time, they revered sexual union as the
sacred moment in which the Spirit of God joins with the souls of the parents
to produce a child. Thus, the Valentinians also appear to have developed
contemplative sexual practices designed to “conceive children whose souls
would contain an elect or morally-included ‘seed’ of the Spirit.”4
Some of the most complex and profound sexual imagery appears in the
Jewish mystical tradition and in the rich body of esoteric texts that comprise the
Kabbalah. Kabbalistic literature uses erotic symbolism in a variety of ways, for
example, to describe the relationship between the Torah and her lover, the
kabbalist, and to describe the relations between different aspects of the divine
realm itself. According to most kabbalistic traditions, there is a series of ten
divine emanations or potencies (sefirot) that radiate from the divine abyss in a
succession of male-female pairs. Often the sefirot are imagined in the form of a
divine (male) body or anthropos, complete with its own penis. Much of
kabbalistic spiritual practice is aimed at rejoining the male and female aspects
of the divine body manifest as the sefirot. And because human beings on earth
are a mirror of the divine realm above, physical sexual union between husband
and wife can also serve as a technique to rejoin the sefirot and so assist in the
3
The Nag Hammadi Library in English, trans. James R. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1977), 300–301. See Roelof van den Broek, “Sexuality and Sexual Symbolism in
Hermetic and Gnostic Thought and Practice,” in Hanegraaff and Kripal, eds., Hidden
Intercourse, 1–21.
4
April DeConick, “Conceiving Spirits: The Mystery of Valentinian Sex,” in Hanegraaff and
Kripal, eds., Hidden Intercourse, 23.
432 Hugh B. Urban
unification of the male and female aspects of God. In the words of the classic
thirteenth-century text the Zohar, this union of man and wife in turn symbo-
lizes the union of God with his bride, the community of Israel itself:
When there is male and female, and he is sanctified in the supernal
holiness . . . when a man is in the union of male and female, and he
intends to be sanctified . . . then he is complete and called one without
any blemish. Therefore a man should gladden his wife at that time, to
invite her to be of one will with him. . . . When the two are found as one,
then they are one in soul and body.5
These texts make it clear, however, that this union is anything but a matter of
sexual license or hedonism. On the contrary, this union is not so much
antinomian as “hypernomian,” as the husband and wife must prepare them-
selves by strict celibacy for six days “for the Torah’s sake, and on Sabbath
nights have their conjugal union.”6
3 Eros, Magic, and Conjugial Love in the Renaissance

and Enlightenment
Many of these older currents of Hermeticism, Gnosis, and Kabbalah were
rediscovered and revived during the European Renaissance, giving birth to a
rich new esoteric synthesis. Some of the most important speculations on
esoteric sexuality appear in the works of Italian philosophers and magicians
such as Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). As
Ficino wrote in his classic treatise on Love, the forces of Eros and Magic are
inextricably intertwined, for both work by the principle of attraction, the
drawing together of similar things, which is the very force that holds both the
human and body and the entire universe itself together:
The whole power of Magic is founded on Eros. The way Magic works is to
bring things together through their inherent similarity. . . . [I]n our body,
the brain, the lungs, the heart, the liver, and other organs interact, favor
each other, intercommunicate and feel reciprocal pain. From this relation-
ship is born Eros, which is common to them all; from this Eros is born their
mutual rapprochement, wherein resides true Magic.7
5
Zohar III, 81a-b, quoted in Elliot Wolfson, Circle in the Square (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1995), 96. See Moshe Idel, “Sexual Metaphors and Praxis in the Kabbalah,”
in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Charles Kramer (New York: Oxford
6
Zohar III, 274.
7
Ficino, De Amore VI, 87. See also D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to
Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1968).
Sexuality 433
If Eros is the attractive power that holds all things together, from the stars in
the heavens to a blade of grass on earth, then magic is the art of understanding
and manipulating the attractive relationship between parts of the world. The
magus is one who is able to know and control the attractive force flowing
through the cosmos, just as a lover binds and creates a magic “web” around
his beloved.
After Renaissance magic and Kabbalah, probably the most important
source of esoteric sexual imagery is found in the alchemical tradition. The
Western alchemical tradition can probably be traced back to the third
century BCE, although it underwent a major rediscovery and revival in
Europe after the twelfth century. By the time of the Renaissance, alchemy
had evolved into a rich and highly symbolic tradition, an art aimed not just at
the transformation of physical substances but at a kind of spiritual transforma-
tion and divine union. Among the most important figures in this spiritual
alchemy was the surgeon, chemist, and pioneer of modern medicine
Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus
(1493–1541). Drawing on the magical ideas of Renaissance Hermeticism
and the new scientific knowledge of the sixteenth century, Paracelsus saw in
alchemy not simply a physical process aimed at transforming base metals
(such as lead into gold) or even simply a chemical process aimed at achieving
the elixir of life but also an esoteric process occurring within the alchemist
himself. According to Paracelsus, the goal of the alchemical process, the
Philosopher’s Stone, is created through the union and transformation of
Sulphur and Salt, here compared to Sol and Luna, the cosmic male and
female principles. However, to be united they must be joined with a third
thing, Mercury, which unites them as spirit completes soul and body. The
process is compared to the union of man and woman, who are united by
sperm to create a child:
There are two matters of the Stone, Sol and Luna, formed together in a
proper marriage. . . . [A]s we see that the man or the woman, without the
seed of both, cannot generate, in the same way our man, Sol and his wife,
Luna, cannot conceive . . . without the seed and sperm of both. Hence the
philosophers gathered that a third thing was necessary, namely, the ani-
mated seed of both. . . . Such a sperm is Mercury, which by the conjunction
of both bodies, Sol and Luna, receives their nature into self in union.8
The result of this alchemical marriage is nothing less than the birth of the new
spiritual being, the hermaphroditic Adam. This perfect man contains his own
8
Paracelsus, The Aurora of the Philosophers, trans. Arthur Edward Waite, in The Hermetic and
Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), v.1, 65–66.
434 Hugh B. Urban
female principle hidden within himself, just as Adam originally contained

Eve within himself in Paradise: “They called it their Adam, who carries his
own invisible Eve hidden in his body, from that moment in which they were
united by the power of the Supreme God. . . . The matter of the
Philosopher’s Stone is none other than a fiery and perfect Mercury extracted
by Nature and Art; that is the . . . true hermaphroditic Adam.”9
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these various streams of
erotic magic, Kabbalah, and alchemy had begun to flow together and
comingle in the midst of the European Enlightenment. One of the most
important forefathers of modern sexual magic – and arguably one of the most
influential figures in the rise of modern spiritualism and new religious move-
ments – was the Swedish philosopher, politician, scientist, and mystic
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). A key part of Swedenborg’s work is
devoted to the nature of love in both its spiritual and physical expressions.
Indeed, Swedenborg developed a kind of “sexual theology,”10 centered on
the concept of “conjugial love,” or the profound spiritual union between
man and woman in their innermost selves. Conjugial love, as he defines it, is
in fact “the inmost of all loves, and such that partner sees partner in mind
(animus) and mind (mens), so that each partner has the other in himself or
herself . . . and they thus cohabit in their inmosts.”11 This inner conjugial
union, in turn, re-creates the primordial unity of the human being (homo) as a
total being that contains both male and female within itself: “For the male
and female man were so created that from two they may become as one man,
or one flesh; and when they become one, then taken together they are a man
(homo) in his fullness.”12 The key point, however, is that this union is not
limited purely to the spiritual plane. Rather, as in the kabbalistic tradition,
physical love can also serve as a ladder to this higher state of conjugial love,
and, in turn, the spiritual power of conjugial love will then flow back toward
and sanctify physical union: “Carnal love can be holy because it is the first step
on the ladder to true love of God. The ‘love of the Sex’ may first be
‘corporeal’ but ‘as man was born to become spiritual’ it also becomes
spiritual.”13 Swedenborg’s ideal of conjugial love would have a tremendous
9
Paracelsus, The Aurora, v.1, 65–66.
10
Robert Rix, “William Blake and the Radical Swedenborgians,” Esoterica 5 (2003), 115. See
Marsha Keith Schuchard, “Why Mrs. Blake Cried: Swedenborg, Blake, and the Sexual Basis
of Religious Vision,” Esoterica 2 (2000), 45–93.
11
Emanuel Swedenborg, The Spiritual Diary, trans. George Bush and James Buss (London:
James Speirs, 1889), #4408. See Emanuel Swedenborg, The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to
Conjugial Love (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1938), 70–129.
12
Swedenborg, The Delights of Wisdom, 43.
13
Rix, “William Blake,” 117.
Sexuality 435
impact on most later esoteric traditions in the West from the eighteenth
century onward, inspiring mystical poets such as William Blake, as well as the
Spiritualist movements in America and England in the nineteenth century,
which continued his vision of spiritual development through physical union.
4 Sex Power Is God Power: The Rise of Sexual Magic

in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
While the general association between sexuality and esotericism has a long
history, in the West the practice of sexual magic as a specific, detailed
technique appears to be a relatively recent invention. While there are traces
of erotic magic in medieval Kabbalah and Renaissance alchemy, the more
developed art of magia sexualis is largely a product of the modern era,
beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. There are many important figures
who could be mentioned here – ranging from the Italian Traditionalist Julius
Evola, to the Russian Satanist Maria de Naglowska, and esoteric orders such
as the Fraternitas Saturni and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. I will
focus here primarily on two of the most important, influential, and yet
under-studied sexual magicians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Arguably the most important figure in the development of modern sexual
magic was the enigmatic Spiritualist and Rosicrucian Paschal Beverly
Randolph (1825–1875). Born the son of a wealthy Virginia landowner and
a slave from Madagascar, Randolph was raised a poor, self-taught, free black
in New York City. Orphaned at age seven, he ran away from his foster
parents as a teenager to travel the world. Eventually Randolph emerged as a
leading figure in nineteenth-century Spiritualism, the most famous scryer of
his day, as well as an outspoken abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights.
Today, however, Randolph is best known as America’s foremost exponent
of magical eroticism or “affectional alchemy.” In sexual love, Randolph saw
nothing less than “the greatest hope for the regeneration of the world, the
key to personal fulfillment as well as a social transformation and the basis of a
non-repressive civilization.”14 In the course of his travels through the areas of
Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Randolph claimed to have met a group of fakirs
(who may have been members of the unorthodox mystical order, the
Nusa’iri) and to have been initiated into the mysteries of sexual magic.
14
Franklin Rosemont, Foreword to John Patrick Deveney, Paschal Beverly Randolph: A
Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996), xv.
436 Hugh B. Urban
Whatever his original inspiration, Randolph began to teach a form of

sexual magic that would have a profound impact on later Western esoteri-
cism. For Randolph, the sexual instinct is the most fundamental power in the
universe, the natural attraction between positive and negative forces that
flows through and sustains all things. Borrowing the language of magnetic
attraction, Randolph sees the male and female as complementary electro-
magnetic forces: On the material plane, the male genitals are positive and the
female genitals negative; on the mental plane, the female mind is positive and
male mind negative. Hence, the two have an innate attraction that is both
physical and spiritual.
Because sexual attraction is the most fundamental force in nature, the
experience of orgasm is the most important moment in human existence and
the key to magical power. As the moment when new life is infused from the
spiritual realm into the material, it is the crucial instant when the soul is
opened up to the spiritual energies of the cosmos. Anything that one truly
wills at that moment can be accomplished as a magical act:
The moment when a man discharges his seed – his essential self – into a . . .
womb is the most solemn, energetic and powerful moment he can ever
know on earth. . . . At the moment his seminal glands open, his nostrils
expand, and while the seed is going forth from his soul to her womb, he
breathes one of two atmospheres, either fetid damnation from the border
spaces or Divine Energy from the heavens. Whatsoever he shall truly will
and internally pray for . . . that moment the prayer’s response comes
down.15
The tremendous power contained in sexual union can be used for a wide
range of both spiritual and materials ends. Randolph lists an array of such uses
of sexual magic, which include “increasing the brain and body power of an
unborn child”; “influencing one’s wife or husband and magnetically con-
trolling them”; “regaining youthful energy”; “Supreme white magic of will,
affection or Love”; “furtherance of financial interests, schemes, lotteries,
etc.”; and ultimately, “the attainment of the loftiest insights possible to the
earthly soul.”16
Randolph’s technique of sexual magic, however, was far from a matter of
mere sensual self-indulgence. On the contrary, he insisted that sexual magic
should be performed only by married couples and safeguarded by moral and
physical sanctions. Quite progressive for his time, Randolph also suggested
15
P. B. Randolph, The Mysteries of Eulis, manuscript reproduced in Deveney, Paschal Beverly
Randolph, 339–340.
16
Randolph, The Mysteries of Eulis, 337.
Sexuality 437
that the female’s pleasure was as important as the male’s and that sexual magic
could only be effective if both partners experienced a simultaneous orgasm.
Finally and perhaps most important, Randolph’s sexual magic was also tied to
a goal of progressive social reform, ideally leading the way to a new, non-
repressive civilization. For Randolph, the leading cause of social ills is the
abuse of marital and sexual relations, and, therefore, the key to a more
egalitarian, liberated society lay in the mutually beneficial power of Love
and Affectional Alchemy. In Randolph’s words, “it is in every man’s power
to make his wife love him, and in every wife’s to make her husband worship
God through her . . . if my rules were followed, the social millennium would
be at hand.”17
Randolph’s system of sexual magic was enormously influential, giving
birth to a wide array of occult movements throughout America, England,
and Europe. Many of Randolph’s teachings were transmitted to Europe
through esoteric orders such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor,
begun by Max Theon and Peter Davidson sometime in the late 1880s. And
they later mingled with Eastern-influenced esoteric groups such as the Ordo
Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), founded in the 1890s by Theodor Reuss and Carl
Kellner, which made sexual magic the central and most powerful secret of its
ritual practice. Indeed, for the OTO, “the KEY which opens up all Masonic
and Hermetic secrets” is none other than “the teaching of sexual magic, and
this teaching explains, without exception, all the secrets of Nature, all the
symbolism of FREEMASONRY and all systems of religion.”18
However, arguably the most important sexual magician after Randolph
was the controversial occultist and self-proclaimed “Great Beast 666,”
Aleister Crowley (1875–1947). Reviled by the popular press as the “king of
depravity, arch-traitor and drug-fiend,” Crowley is today one of the most
influential figures in the revival of modern occultism, magic, and neo-pagan
witchcraft. Born in 1875, the son of a minister in the highly puritanical
Plymouth Brethren sect, Crowley embodied some of the deepest tensions
within British Victorian culture as a whole. A child raised in strict Christian
morality, he would later gravitate to the magical arts and to extremes of
sexual transgression. Crowley’s first great revelation occurred in Egypt in
1904, when he claimed to have come into contact with his Guardian Angel
and to have received the Book of the Law or Liber Legis. The key to Crowley’s
17
Randolph, The Mysteries of Eulis, 107; Randolph, The Immortality of Love: Unveiling the Secret
Arcanum of Affectional Alchemy (Quakertown, PA: Beverly Hall Corp., 1978 [1874]), e, 169.
18
Theodor Reuss, “Mysteria Mystica Maxima,” Jubilaeums-Ausgabe der Oriflamme (1912), 21.
See Hugh B. Urban, Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), chaps. 2 and 4.
438 Hugh B. Urban
new law is the principle of Thelema, derived from the Greek meaning “Will,”
and his central maxim: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” In
place of servile submission to some imaginary God in the sky, the law of
Thelema is the full affirmation of the individual will and of the individual self
as the “centre of the cosmos.”19
Central to Crowley’s new law of Thelema – and also the primary reason
for the scandalous reputation that surrounds him – is his practice of sexual
magic. For Crowley (as for his contemporaries such as Freud), sex is the most
powerful force in human nature and the fullest expression of the will. But it
has been stupidly repressed by social and religious institutions, thus giving
birth to all manner of social and psychological ills. In fact, the “sexual instinct
is ennobling,” and most social evils are largely “produced by suppressions”
and by “the feeling that sex is shameful and the sense of sin.”20
Crowley’s sexual magic itself is a complex melding of both Eastern and
Western traditions. In fact, Crowley was one of the most important figures in
the transmission of Yoga and the sexual techniques of Hindu Tantra to the
West – though in a somewhat garbled form and with significant
transformations.21 But he also combined his knowledge of yoga and Tantra
with the tradition of Western esoteric sexuality, as transmitted by Randolph
and his followers in groups such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and
the Ordo Templi Orientis. Beginning in 1910, Crowley became closely
involved with the O.T.O. and soon emerged as its most infamous leader.
According to Crowley, sexual magic is the most powerful and most secret
form of ritual magic, for it unleashes the raw power of human creativity,
which has the potential to bring into being anything one desires: “If this
secret, which is a scientific secret, were perfectly understood . . . there would
be nothing which the human imagination can conceive that could not be
realized. If it were desired to have an element of atomic weight six times that
of uranium, that element could be produced.”22
In striking contrast to both Randolph and the early O.T.O., however,
Crowley emphasized forms of sexuality that were considered quite “deviant”
by late Victorian moral standards. In contrast to Randolph’s insistence on
19
Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1969), 873, 939. See Crowley, The Law Is for All: The Authorized Popular
Commentary on Liber AL sub figura CCII, the Book of the Law (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon,
1996); Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2000).
20
Crowley, The Confessions, 874–875.
21
Hugh B. Urban, “Unleashing the Beast: Aleister Crowley, Tantra and Sex Magic in Late
Victorian England,” Esoterica 5 (2003), 138–192.
22
Crowley, The Confessions, 767.
Sexuality 439
heterosexual marriage and strict moral codes, Crowley made use of sexual
techniques that were explicitly transgressive as the ultimate keys to magical
power. Crowley’s revised O.T.O. system of initiations included a series of
eleven grades, the eight and eleventh of which involved autoerotic and
homosexual intercourse – acts considered both antisocial and self-destructive
by the standards of late Victorian morality. Indeed, during his most trans-
gressive period of magical practice while at his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily in
the 1920s, Crowley engaged in all manner of radical magical techniques,
including bestiality, animal sacrifice, and consumption of blood and excre-
ment, exploiting both sexual and moral transgression as a profound source of
magical power.23 Whereas Randolph had hoped to free the power of sexual
love to create a more harmonious, egalitarian society, Crowley hoped to
unleash the power of sexual transgression to tear down the repressive
Victorian Christian world in which he was raised and create a wholly new
one in its place, based solely on the law of Thelema: “Crowley came to
believe that he was a new magical messiah – the Lord of the New Aeon –
whose doctrine would supersede . . . other outmoded religions which had
constructed barriers to spiritual freedom. For him the basis of this freedom
was sexuality.”24
5 Conclusions: The “Exotericization” of Sexual Magic

in the Twenty-First Century
In the wake of Randolph’s sexual magic and Crowley’s explicitly transgres-
sive practices, a wide range of new forms of esoteric sexuality began to
flourish in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. If Randolph
had let the “genie” of sexual mysticism out of the bottle, bringing ancient
ideas of esoteric sexuality to nineteenth-century America, Crowley broad-
cast the most transgressive forms of sexual magic to a twentieth-century
audience of spiritual consumers. Despite his infamous reputation, Crowley
in particular was to have a tremendous impact on virtually all later forms of
magic, neo-paganism, and Satanism from the mid-twentieth century
onward. We can see direct links, for example, between Crowley’s sexual
magic and the Great Rite performed by Gerald Gardner and the early
23
See Hugh B. Urban, “The Power of the Impure: Transgression, Violence and Secrecy in
Bengali Shakta Tantra and Modern Western Magic,” Numen 50:3 (2003), 269–308; Sutin,
Do What Thou Wilt, 265, 288.
24
Nevill Drury, The History of Magic in the Modern Age (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000), 95.
See Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies, Which Is Also Falsely Called Breaks (New York:
Samuel Weiser, 1952), 100.
440 Hugh B. Urban
Wiccan covens in mid-twentieth-century England (which included both a

symbolic union of male and female and a literal practice of ritual
intercourse).25 We can also see Crowley’s influence in the sexual magic
performed by Anton Szandor LaVey and the early Church of Satan in the
1960s and 1970s. Even today, Crowley’s influence can be seen in more
radical movements, such as Chaos Magic, which employ an array of esoteric
and often explicitly transgressive sexual practices among other magical
techniques.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, the mystical and occult dimensions
of sexuality had ceased to be particularly “esoteric.” On the contrary, they
had begun to appear quite openly on the shelves of bookstores and on
countless websites proliferating in cyberspace. Virtually all of these combine
a loose mixture of Crowley-style sexual magic with a garbled version of
Hindu Tantra, usually with a dash of Kama Sutra and The Joy of Sex thrown in
for good measure. Today we find hundreds of books bearing titles such as
Modern Sex Magick: Secrets of Erotic Spirituality and Sex Magic, Tantra and Tarot;
indeed, the more erotically challenged among us can now even consult the
Complete Idiot’s Guide to Tantric Sex. Meanwhile, a mere click of the mouse
can bring us “A Sex Magic Primer,” the “Church of Tantra,” and “Kama
Sutra Sex Magic.” Ironically, the once elusive secret of sexuality, the source
of so many accusations and so much esoteric symbolism, has now become
quite exoteric and widely available to a new audience of spiritual consumers.
25
Urban, Magia Sexualis, 163–180. See Janet and Stewart Farrar, A Witches’ Bible: The Complete
Witches’ Handbook (Custer, WA: Phoenix, 1966), 32–33; Doreen Valiente, Witchcraft for
Tomorrow (Blaine, WA: Phoenix, 1978), 137–139.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
General Works Treating Western Mysticism

Carmody, Denise Lardner and John Tully Carmody. Mysticism: Holiness East and West.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Happold, F. C. Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology. (Rev. ed.) London: Penguin, 1991.
Harmless, S. J., William. Mystics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. (Orig. pub. 1902.) New York:
Penguin Classics, 1982.
McGinn, Bernard. The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. 5 vols.
New York: Crossroad, 1991–2012.
Otto, Rudolf. Mysticism East and West. Trans. Bertha L. Bracey and Richenda C. Payne.
New York: Meridian Books, 1957.
Stace, W. T. Mysticism and Philosophy. (Orig. pub. 1960.) Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1987.
Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness.
London: Methuen, 1911.
Weeks, Andrew. German Mysticism from Hildegard of Bingen to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1993.
Wehr, Gerhard. Esoterisches Christentum (Aspekte, Impulse, Konsequenzen). Stuttgart:
E. Klett, 1975.
Zaehner, R. C. Mysticism: Sacred and Profane. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.
General Works Treating Western Esotericism

Amadou, Robert. L’Occultisme: Esquisse d’un monde vivant. (Expanded ed.) Paris:
Chanteloup, 1987.
Broek, Roelof van den and Antoine Faivre (eds.). Gnosis and Hermeticism: From
Antiquity to Modern Times. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.
Faivre, Antoine. Access to Western Esotericism. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1994.
441
442 Suggestions for Further Reading
Western Esotericism: A Concise History. Albany: State University of New York Press,
2010.
Faivre, Antoine and Jacob Needleman (eds.). Modern Esoteric Spirituality. New York:
Crossroad, 1995.
Godwin, Joscelyn. The Golden Thread: The Ageless Wisdom of the Western Mystery
Traditions. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2007.
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. (ed.) in collaboration with Antoine Faivre, Roelof van den Broek,
and Jean-Pierre Brach. Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Leiden: Brill,
2005.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Stuckrad, Kocku von. Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge. 2nd ed.
London: Routledge, 2014.
Versluis, Arthur. Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esoteric Traditions.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1964.
I Antiquity
Ancient Mysteries
Burkert, Walter. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Kerenyi, Carl. Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. Trans. Ralph Mannheim.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1967.
Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. Trans. Ralph Mannheim. Bollingen
Series LXV. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
Meyer, Marvin W. (ed.). The Ancient Mysteries: A Source Book. San Francisco: Harper &
Row, 1987.
Mylonas, George E. Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1961.
Otto, Walter F. “The Meaning of the Eleusinian Mysteries,” in The Mysteries: Papers from
the Eranos Yearbooks. Ed. Joseph Campbell. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1955.
Stein, Charles. Persephone Unveiled: Seeing the Goddess and Freeing Your Soul. Berkeley:
North Atlantic Books, 2006.
Ulansey, David. The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology & Salvation in the Ancient
World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Wasson, Gordon R., Albert Hoffman, and Carl A. P. Ruck. The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling
the Secrets of the Mysteries. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2008.
West, M. L. The Orphic Poems. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Suggestions for F urther Reading 443
Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism

Bamford, Christopher (ed.). Homage to Pythagoras: Rediscovering Sacred Science. Hudson,
NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1994.
Burkert, Walter. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1972.
Gorman, Peter. Pythagoras: A Life. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
Guthrie, Kenneth Sylvan. The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library. Ed. David Fideler.
Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1987.
Iamblichus (attrib.). The Theology of Arithmetic: On the Mystical, Mathematical, and
Cosmological Symbolism of the First Ten Numbers. Trans. Robin Waterfield. Grand
Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1988.
Riedweg, Christoph. Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence. Trans. Steven Rendall.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Strohmeier, John and Peter Westbrook. Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of
Pythagoras. Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 1999.
Parmenides and Empedocles

Cherniss, Harold. Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Detienne, Marcel and Jean Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society.
Trans. Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Gallop, David. Parmenides of Elea. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Kingsley, Peter. Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995.
In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Press, 1999.
Reality. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Press, 2003.
Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Marciano, M. Laura Gemelli. “Images and Experience: At the Roots of
Parmenides’Aletheia.” Ancient Philosophy 28 (2008): 21–48.
Mourelatos, Alexander P. D. The Route of Parmenides. Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing,
2007.
Vernant, Jean Pierre. Myth and Thought among the Greeks. Trans. Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort.
Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1988.
Mortals and Immortals. Ed. Froma I. Zeitlin. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991.
Plato, Plotinus, and Neoplatonism

Aubry, Gwenaëlle. Plotin. Traité 53 (I, 1). Introduction, traduction, commentaire et notes. Paris:
Vrin, 2004.
Dieu sans la puissance. Dunamis et energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin. Paris: Vrin, 2006.
“L’impératif mystique: notes sur le détachement de soi chez Plotin et Maître Eckhart,”
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Brisson, Luc. How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology.
Trans. Catherine Tihanyi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Dodds, Eric Robertson. The Greeks and the Irrational. Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1951.
Hadot, Pierre. Plotin. Traité 38 (VI, 7), Introduction, traduction, commentaire et notes.
Paris: Cerf, 1987.
Plotin. Traité 9 (VI, 9), Introduction, traduction, commentaire et notes. Paris: Cerf,
1994.
Philosophy as a Way of Life. Ed. Donald I. Davidson. Trans. Michael Chase. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 1995.
Etudes de philosophie ancienne. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998.
Plotinus, or the Simplicity of Vision. Trans. Michael Chase. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998.
Plotin, Porphyre. Etudes néoplatoniciennes. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999.
“Shamanism and Greek Philosophy,” in The Concept of Shamanism: Uses and Abuses. Ed.
Henri-Paul Francfort and Roberte Hamayon. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 2001.
What Is Ancient Philosophy? Trans. Michael Chase. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
2004.
Hermetism and Gnosticism

Broek, Roelof van den. “Hermes Trismegistus I: Antiquity,” “Hermetic Literature
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Gnostic Religion in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Copenhaver, Brian. Hermetica. The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a
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Filoramo, Giovanni. A History of Gnosticism. Trans. Anthony Alcock. Cambridge, MA:
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Fowden, Garth. The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind.
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Kasser, Rodolfe and Gregor Wurst (eds.). The Gospel of Judas, Critical Edition. Washington,
DC: National Geographic Society, 2007.
Lucentini, P., I. Parri, and V. Perrone Compagni (eds.). Hermetism from Late Antiquity to
Humanism. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003.
Mahé J.-P. Hermès en Haute-Égypte. Les textes hermétiques de Nag Hammadi et leurs parallèles
grecs et latins, 2 vols. (Bibliothèque Copte de Nag Hammadi, Section « Textes », 3 and
7). Québec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1978–1982 (in vol. 1 NHC VI, 6:
L’Ogdoade et l’Ennéade, and NHC VI, 7: Prière d’action des grâces; in vol 2 NHC VI, 8,
8a: Le fragment du Discours Parfait, Les Définitions hermétiques arméniennes).
Meyer, Marvin W. (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The International Edition. San
Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007.
Nock, A. D. and A.-J. Festugière (eds.). Corpus Hermeticum. 4 vols. Paris: Les Belles
Lettres, 1945–1954.
Robinson, James M. (ed.). The Coptic Gnostic Library. 5 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1975–1996.
Rudolph, Kurt. Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism. San Francisco: Harper, 1987.
Early Jewish Mysticism

Alexander, Philip S. Mystical Texts: Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice and Related Manuscripts.
London: T&T Clark, 2006.
Arbel, Vita Daphna. Beholders of Divine Secrets: Mysticism and Myth in the Hekhalot and
Merkavah Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.
Dan, Joseph. The Ancient Jewish Mysticism. Tel Aviv: MOD Books, 1993.
Davila, James R. Descenders to the Chariot: The People Behind the Hekhalot Literature. Leiden:
Brill, 2001.
DeConick, April D. “What Is Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism?” in Paradise Now:
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Society of Biblical Literature, 2006.
Elior, Rachel. The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism. Oxford: Littman
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Halperin, David J. The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision.
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Himmelfarb, Martha. Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses. New York:
Oxford University Press. 1993.
Lesses, Rebecca M. Ritual Practices to Gain Power: Angels, Incantations, and Revelation in
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Rowland, Christopher, and Christopher Morray-Jones. The Mystery of God: Early Jewish
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Wolfson, Elliot R. Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish
Mysticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Early Christian Mysticism

Cohn-Sherbok, Dan, and Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok. Jewish and Christian Mysticism: An
Introduction. New York: Continuum, 1994.
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II The Middle Ages
Sufism
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Kabbalah
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Medieval Christian Mysticism

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Eriugena, John Scotus. Periphyseon: On the Division of Nature. Trans. Myra I. Uhlfelder.
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976.
Gerson, Jean. Early Works. Trans. Brian Patrick McGuire. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press,
1998.
Jantzen, Grace. Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
McGinn, Bernard. The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. Op. cit.
(ed.). The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism. New York: Random House, 2006.
Nicholas of Cusa. Selected Spiritual Writings. Trans. H. Lawrence Bond. Mahwah, NJ:
Paulist Press, 1997.
Sells, Michael. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge:
Hildegard of Bingen and Women’s Mysticism

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human
Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Elisabeth of Schönau. The Complete Works. Trans. Anne L. Clark. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 2000.
Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love. Trans. Margaret Winkworth. Mahwah, NJ:
Hadewijch. The Complete Works. Trans. Columba Hart. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980.
Hildegard of Bingen. Scivias. Trans. Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 1990.
Symphonia. Trans. Barbara Newman. 2nd ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Book of Divine Works. Trans. Priscilla Throop. Charlotte, VT: MedievalMS, 2009.
Hollywood, Amy. The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and
Meister Eckhart. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
Jantzen, Grace M. Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge
Newman, Barbara. St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987.
From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Women and Literature.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.
(ed.). Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998.
Porete, Marguerite. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Trans. Ellen L. Babinsky. Mahwah, NJ:
III The Renaissance and Early Modernity
Renaissance Hermetism
Broek, Roelof van den, and C. van Heertum (eds.). From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme:
Gnosis, Hermetism and the Christian Tradition. Amsterdam: In de Pelikan, 2000.
Faivre, Antoine and F. Tristan (eds.). Présence d’Hermès Trismégiste (Cahiers de
l’Hermétisme). Paris: Albin Michel, 1988.
Faivre, Antoine. The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus. Grand Rapids:
Phanes Press, 1995. Rev. and expanded ed.: I volti di Ermete. Rome: Atanor, 2001.
Gentile, S. and C. Gilly (eds.). Marsilio Ficino and the Return of Hermes Trismegisto (bilingual
English and Italian). Florence: Biblioteca Mediciana Laurenciana, and Amsterdam:
Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica, 1999.
Gilly, C. and C. van Heertum (eds.). Magic, Alchemy and Science 15th–18th Centuries: The
Influence of Hermes Trismegistus, 2 vols. (bilingual English and Italian). Florence:
Centro di della Edifimi, 2002.
Godwin, J. The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
Hanegraaff, Wouter J. and R. M. Bouthoorn. Ludovico Lazarelli (1447–1500). The Hermetic
Writings and Related Documents (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol.
281). Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005.
Merkel, Ingrid and Allen G. Debus (eds.). Hermeticism and the Renaissance. Intellectual
History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe. London and Missisauga, ONT:
Associated University Presses, 1988.
Shumaker, Wayne. The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Pattern.
Berkeley: University of California Press 1972.
Walker, D. P. The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the 15th to the 18th
Century. London: Duckworth, 1972.
Westman, R. S. and J. E. McGuire. Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution. Los Angeles:
William A. Clark Memorial Library, 1977.
Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1964.
Christian Kabbalah
Beitchman, Philip. Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1998.
Benz, Ernst. Christian Kabbalah: Neglected Child of Theology. Trans. Kenneth W. Wesche.
St. Paul: Grailstone Press, 2004.
Blau, Joseph Leon. The Christian Interpretation of the Cabala in the Renaissance. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1944.
Coudert, Allison P. The Impact of the Kabbalah in the Seventeenth Century: The Life and
Thought of Francis Mercury van Helmont (1614–1698). Leiden: Brill, 1999.
Dan, Joseph (ed.). The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books & Their Christian
Interpreters. Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 1997.
Farmer, Steven A. Syncretism in the West: Pico’s 900 Theses (1486): The Evolution of
Traditional Religious and Philosophical Systems. Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance
Texts & Studies, 1998.
Popkin, R. H. and G. M. Weiner (eds.). Jewish Christians and Christian Jews. Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.
Reuchlin, Johann. On the Art of the Kabbalah. Trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm (ed.). Christliche Kabbala. Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke
Verlag, 2003.
Secret, François. Les Kabbalistes Chrétiens de la Renaissance. Paris: Dunod, 1964.
Paracelsianism
Ball, Philip. The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science.
London: William Heinemann, 2006.
Debus, Allen. The English Paracelsians. New York: F. Watts, 1965.
The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries. (Orig. pub. 1977.) Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002.
Dilg, Peter and Harmut Rudolph. Neue Beiträge zur Paracelsus-Forschung. Stuttgart:
Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart, 1995.
Goldammer, Kurt. Paracelsus: Natur und Offenbarung. Hannover-Kirchrode: Oppermann,
1953.
Goldammer, Kurt and Rosemarie Dilg-Frank (eds.). Kreatur und Cosmos: internationale
Beiträge zur Paracelsusforschung. Stuttgart/New York: Fischer, 1981.
Grell, Ole Peter (ed.). Paracelsus: The Man, His Reputation. Leiden: Brill, 1998.
Kühlmann, Wilhelm and Joachim Telle (eds.). Der Frühparacelsismus. Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer Verlag, 2001(Erster Teil), 2004 (Zweiter Teil), 2013 (Dritter Theil).
Moran, Bruce T. Andreas Libavius and the Transformation of Alchemy: Separating Chemical
Cultures with Polemical Fire. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications,
2007.
Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the
Renaissance. Basel: S. Karger, 1958.
Scholtz, Gerhild and Charles Gunnoe Jr. (eds.). Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, and
Astrology in Early Modern Europe. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2003.
Schott, Heinz and Ilana Zinguer (eds.). Paracelsus und seine internationale Rezeption in der
frühen Neuzeit. Leiden: Brill, 1998.
Telle, Joachim (ed.). Parerga Paracelsica. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991.
Webster, Charles. Paracelsus: Medicine, Magic and Mission at the End of Time. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2008.
Weeks, Andrew. Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Reformation.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.
Valentin Weigel (1533–1588) German Religious Dissenter, Speculative Theorist, and Advocate
of Tolerance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.
(ed.). Paracelsus: Essential Theoretical Writings. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Zimmermann, Volker (ed.). Paracelsus: Das Werk – die Rezeption. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 1995.
Rosicrucianism
Edighoffer, Roland. Les Rose-Croix et la Crise de la Conscience européenne au XVIIe siècle.
Paris: Editions Dervy, 1998.
Geffarth, Renko D. Religion und arcane Hierarchie: Der Orden der Gold- und Rosenkreuzer als
Geheime Kirche im 18. Jahrhundert. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
Gilly, Carlos. Adam Haslmayr: Der erste Verkünder der Manifeste der Rosenkreuzer.
Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 1995.
McIntosh, Christopher. The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric
Order. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1998.
Tilton, Hereward. The Quest for the Phoenix: Spiritual Alchemy and Rosicrucianism in the
Work of Count Michael Maier (1569–1622). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003.
Vanloo, Robert. Les Rose-Croix du Nouveau Monde, aux sources du rosicrucianisme moderne.
Paris: Claire Vigne, 1996.
Jacob Boehme and Christian Theosophy

Boehme, Jacob. Sämtliche Schriften. 11 vols. Ed. Will-Erich Peuckert and August Faust.
Stuttgart: Fromanns Verlag, 1955–1961.
Aurora (Morgen Röte im Auffgang, 1612). Trans. Andrew Weeks et al. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Mysterium Magnum. Trans. John Sparrow. London, 1654. Ed. C. J. Barker. 2 vols.
London: John M. Watkins, 1924.
Six Theosophic Points and Other Writings. Trans. John Rolleston Earle. Introduction by
Nicholas Berdyaev. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958.
Faivre, Antoine. Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition. Trans. Christine Rhone. Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2000.
Hessayon, Ariel and Sarah Apetrei (eds.). An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of
Thought and Reception. London: Routledge, 2013.
Nicolescu, Basarab. Science, Meaning, and Evolution: The Cosmology of Jacob Boehme. New
York: Parabola Books, 1991.
Versluis, Arthur. Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition. Albany: State
Walsh, David. The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment: A Study of Jacob Boehme.
Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1983.
Waterfield, Robin (ed.). Jacob Boehme. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2001. (Selections
and commentary.)
Weeks, Andrew. Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher
and Mystic. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.
Freemasonry
Bogdan, Henrik and Jan A. M. Snoek (eds.). Handbook of Freemasonry. Leiden: Brill, 2014.
Carr, Harry (ed.). The Early French Exposures. London: The Quatuor Coronati Lodge,
1971.
Hamill, John. The Craft: A History of English Freemasonry, Wellingborough: Crucible,
1986. Second ed.: The History of English Freemasonry, 1994.
Hasselmann, Kristiane. Die Rituale der Freimaurer. Zur Konstitution eines bürgerlichen Habitus
im England des 18. Jahrhunderts. Transcript. Bielefeld, 2009.
Lefebvre-Filleau, Jean-Paul. La franc-maçonnerie française: Une naissance tumultueuse
(1720–1750). Caen: Maître Jacques, 2000.
Prescott, Andrew. “The Old Charges Revisited.” Transactions of the Lodge of Research 2429
(2005), 25–38.
Snoek, Joannes A. M. Initiations. A Methodological Approach to the Application of Classification
and Definition Theory in the Study of Rituals. Pijnacker: Dutch Efficiency Bureau, 1987.
“De allusieve methode / The Allusive Method / La méthode allusive.” Acta Macionica 9
(1999), 47–70.
“A Manuscript Version of Hérault’s Ritual” in Ésotérisme, Gnoses & Imaginaire
Symbolique: Mélanges offerts à Antoine Faivre (Gnostica 3). Ed. Richard Caron et al.
Leuven: Peeters, 2001.
“The Earliest Development of Masonic Degrees and Rituals: Hamill versus Stevenson”
in The Social Impact of Freemasonry on the Modern Western World (The Canonbury
Papers 1). Ed. M. D. J. Scanlan. London: CMRC, 2002.
“Printing Masonic Secrets – Oral and Written Transmission of the Masonic Tradition”
in Alströmersymposiet 2003. Fördragsdokumentation. Ed. Henrik Bogdan. Göteborg:
Frimureriska Forskningsgruppen i Göteborg, 2003.
“Researching Freemasonry: Where Are We?” Journal for Research into Freemasonry and
Fraternalism 1:2 (2010), 225–246.
Initiating Women in Freemasonry. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Stevenson, David. The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710. Cambridge:
Swedenborg and Swedenborgianism

Block, Marguerite Beck. The New Church in the New World: A Study of Swedenborgianism in
America. New York: Henry Holt, 1932.
Rose, Jonathan, S. et al. (eds.). Emanuel Swedenborg: Essays for the New Century Edition on
His Life, Work, and Impact. West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2005.
Sigstedt, Cyriel O. The Swedenborg Epic: The Life and Works of Emanuel Swedenborg.
London: Swedenborg Society, 1981.
Swedenborg, Emanuel. The Letters and Memorials of Emanuel Swedenborg. Vols. 1 & 2. Trans.
and ed. Alfred Acton. Bryn Athyn, PA: Swedenborg Scientific Association, 1948, 1955.
Synnestvedt, Dan (ed.). The World Transformed: Swedenborg and the Last Judgment.
Bryn Athyn, PA: Bryn Athyn College Press, 2011.
Tofel, Rudolph L. (trans. and ed.). Documents concerning the Life and Character of
Emanuel Swedenborg. Vols. 1–3. London: Swedenborg Society, 1875, 1890.
Warren, Samuel M. A Compendium of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. West
Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 2009.
Williams-Hogan, Jane. “A New Church in a Disenchanted World: A Study in the
Formation and Development of the General Conference of the New Church in
Great Britain.” Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1985.
“Emanuel Swedenborg,” in Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism.
“Swedenborgianism,” in Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in America. Vol. 3.
Ed. Eugene V. Gallagher and Michael Ashcraft. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
2006, 1–25.
Mesmer and Animal Magnetism

Crabtree, Adam. From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Darnton, Robert. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1968
Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic
Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
Gauld, Alan. A History of Hypnotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Mesmer, Franz Anton. Mesmerism, a Translation of the Original Medical and Scientific Writings
of F. A. Mesmer, M.D. Trans. George Bloch. Los Altos, CA: William Kaufman, 1980.
Pattie, Frank. Mesmer and Animal Magnetism: A Chapter in the History of Medicine.
Hamilton, NY: Edmonston Publishing Inc., 1994.
Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998.
IV The Nineteenth Century and Beyond
Spiritualism
Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
Chéroux, Clémént and Andreas Fischer (eds.). The Perfect Medium: Photography and the
Occult. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Cox, Robert S. Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.
Edmonds, John W. and George T. Dexter. Spiritualism. 2 vols. New York: Partridge and
Britain, 1855.
Hardinge, Emma. Modern American Spiritualism. New York: Published by the author,
1870. (Also published under the name Emma Hardinge Britten.)
Hare, Robert. Experimental Investigations of the Spirit Manifestations: Demonstrating the
Existence of Spirits and Their Communion with Mortals. New York: Partridge and
Brittan, 1856.
Hatch, Cora L. V. Discourses on Religion, Morals, Philosophy, and Metaphysics. New York:
B. F. Hatch, 1858.
Mumler, William H. The Personal Experiences of William H. Mumler in Spirit Photography.
Boston: Colby and Rich, 1875.
Swedenborg, Emanuel. Love in Marriage: A Translation of Emanuel Swedenborg’s “The
Sensible Joy in Married Love; and the Foolish Pleasures of Illicit Love.” Trans. David
F. Gladish. New York: Swedenborg Foundation, Inc., 1992
H. P. Blavatsky and Theosophy

Barker, A. Trevor (ed.). The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett. London, 1923, Pasadena,
CA: Theosophical University Press, 1975; chronological edition, Adyar, India:
Theosophical Publishing House, 1998.
Blavatsky, H. P. The Key to Theosophy. London, 1889. Facsimile reprint, Los Angeles:
Theosophy Co., 1987.
The Voice of the Silence: Being Chosen Fragments from the Book of the Golden Precepts.
London, 1889. Peking, China: Chinese Buddhist Research Society, 1927.
Blavatsky Collected Writings. 15 vols. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House,
1966–1985.
Isis Unveiled: A Master-key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology. 2
vols. New York, 1877. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1976.
The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy. 2 vols. London,
1888, facsimile reprint, Pasadena, CA: Theosophical University Press, 1988.
The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky. Vol. 1. Ed. John Algeo and Adele Algeo. Wheaton, IL:
Quest Books, 2003.
The Secret Doctrine Commentaries: The Unpublished 1889 Instructions. Ed. Michael Gomes.
The Hague: I.S.I.S. Foundation, 2010.
Esoteric Instructions. Ed. Michael Gomes. Chennai, India: Theosophical Publishing
House, 2015.
Campbell, Bruce F. Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980.
Gomes, Michael. The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1987.
Theosophy in the Nineteenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland
Publishing, 1994.
Kuhn, Alvin Boyd. Theosophy: A Revival of Ancient Wisdom. New York: Henry Holt, 1930.
Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy

Barnes, Henry. A Life for the Spirit: Rudolf Steiner in the Crosscurrents of Our Time. Great
Barrington, MA: Steinerbooks, 1997.
Lachman, Gary. Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work. New York: Tarcher,
2007.
Lindenberg, Christoph. Rudolf Steiner: A Biography. Great Barrington, MA: Steiner
Books, 2012.
McDermott, Robert (ed.). The New Essential Steiner: An Introduction to Rudolf Steiner for the
21st Century. Great Barrington, MA: Steinerbooks, 2009.
Steiner, Rudolf. How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation. Trans.
Christopher Bamford. Great Barrington, MA: Steinerbooks, 1994.
Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos. Trans.
Catherine E. Creeger. Great Barrington, MA: Steinerbooks, 1994.
Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom. Trans. Michael Lipson.
Great Barrington, MA: Steinerbooks, 1995.
An Outline of Esoteric Science. Trans. Catherine E. Creeger. Great Barrington, MA:
Steinerbooks, 1997.
The Golden Dawn and the O.T.O.

Crowley, Aleister. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. London: Arcana, 1989.
Godwin, Joscelyn. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1994.
Howe, Ellic. The Magicians of the Golden Dawn: A Documentary History of a Magical Order
1887–1923. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1978.
Howe, Ellic and Helmut Möller. Merlinus Peregrinus: Vom Untergrund des Abendlandes.
Würzburg: Köningshausen and Neumann, 1986.
King, Francis (ed.). The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O. London: C. W. Daniel Co., 1973.
Küntz, Darcy (ed.). The Complete Golden Dawn Cipher Manuscript. Edmonds, WA: Holmes
Publishing Group, 1996.
Naylor, A. R. (ed.). O.T.O. Rituals and Sex Magick. Thame: IHO Books, 1999.
Owen, Alex. The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Pasi, Marco. “Ordo Templi Orientis,” in Hanegraff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western
Esotericism.
Regardie, Israel (ed.). The Golden Dawn. The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and
Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (Orig. ed. 1937–1940.) St. Paul,
MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1989.
Starr, Martin P. The Unknown God: W. T. Smith and the Thelemites. Bollingbrook: Teitan
Press, 2003.
G. I. Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way

Gurdjieff, G. I. Meetings with Remarkable Men. (Orig. pub. 1963.) Trans. A. R. Orage
(rev.). New York: Viking Arkana, 1985.
Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson. (Orig. pub. 1950.) No translator named. New York:
Viking Arkana, 1992.
Life Is Only Real Then, When “I Am.” (Orig. pub. 1975.) No translator named. New
York: Viking Arkana, 1999.
Moore, James. Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth. Boston: Element Books, 1991.
Needleman, Jacob and George Baker (eds.). Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and
His Teaching. New York: Bloomsbury, 1998.
Ouspensky, P. D. In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1949.
The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution. New York: Random House, 1950.
Salzmann, Jeanne de. The Reality of Being. No translator named. Boston: Shambhala, 2010.
Sinclair, Frank R. Without Benefit of Clergy: Some Personal Footnotes to the Gurdjieff Teaching.
2nd ed. Published by the author, 2009.
Webb, James. The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky,
and Their Followers. New York: Putnam, 1980.
C. G. Jung and Jungianism

Bair, Deirde. Jung: A Biography. New York: Little, Brown, 2003.
Edinger, Edward. Ego and Archetype. Boston: Shambhala, 1992.
Jacobi, Jolande. The Psychology of C. G. Jung. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale
Jaffé, Aniela. The Myth of Meaning in the Work of C. G. Jung. Trans. R. F. C. Hull.
Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag, 1984.
Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and ed. Aniela Jaffé. Trans. Richard
and Clara Winston. New York: Random House, 1965.
Gesammelte Werke. 20 vols. Mannheim: Patmos Verlag, 2011. English translation:
Collected Works. 20 vols. Trans. R. F. C. Hull (except Vol. 2, trans. Leopold Stein
and Diana Riviere). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
Jung, C. G. (ed.). Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell Books, 1968.
Kirsch, Thomas B.: The Jungians: A Comparative and Historical Perspective. London:
Routledge, 2001.
Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014.
Samuels, Andrew. Jung and the Post-Jungians. London: Routledge, 2014.
Wehr, Gerhard. Jung: A Biography. Trans. David M. Weeks. Boston: Shambhala, 2001.
Jung and Steiner: The Birth of a New Psychology. Trans. Magdalene Jaeckel. Great Barrington,
MA: Anthroposophic Press, 2002.
René Guénon and Traditionalism

Evola, Julius. The Path of Cinnabar. Trans. Sergio Knipe. London: Arkos, 2010.
Revolt Against the Modern World. Trans. Guido Stucco. Rochester, VT: Inner
Traditions, 1995.
Guénon, René. Orient et Occident. Paris: Payot, 1924.
The Crisis of the Modern World. Trans. Marco Pallis et al. Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis,
2001.
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Trans. Lord Northbourne. Hillsdale,
NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001.
Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines. Trans. Marco Pallis. Hillsdale, NY: Sophia
Perennis, 2004.
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. “Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein
Nasr. Ed. Lewis E. Hahn. Chicago: Open Court, 2001.
Quinn, William W. The Only Tradition. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1996.
Rooth, Graham. Prophet for a Dark Age: A Companion to the Works of René Guénon.
Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2008.
Schuon, Frithjof. The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Trans. Peter Townsend. Wheaton,
IL: Quest Books, 1984.
Understanding Islam: A New Translation with Selected Letters. Trans. Mark Perry and Jean-
Pierre Lafouge. Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2011.
Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of
the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
“European Neo-Sufi Movements in the Interwar Period,” in Islam in Inter-war Europe.
Ed. Nathalie Clayer and Eric Germain. New York: Columbia University Press,
2008.
Wasserstrom, Steven M. Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry
Corbin at Eranos. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Waterfield, Robin. René Guénon and the Future of the West: The Life and Writings of a
20th-century Metaphysician. Napa Valley: Crucible Press, 1987.
Via negativa in the Twentieth Century

Johnston, William. Christian Zen. New York: Harper, 1971.
Christian Mysticism Today. San Francisco: Harper, 1984.
The Mysticism of the Cloud of Unknowing. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000.
Merrell-Wolff, Franklin. Experience and Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1994.
Nishitani, Keiji. Religion and Nothingness. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1982.
Pseudo-Dionysius. The Divine Names and Mystical Theology. Trans. John D. Jones.
Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1999.
Roberts, Bernadette. What Is Self? Austin: M. B. Goens, 1989.
The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center. Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991.
The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1993.
Versluis, Arthur. Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1999.
Contemporary Paganism
Albanese, Catherine. Nature Religion in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1990.
Chase, Christopher. “‘Be Pagan Once Again’: Folk Music, Heritage, and Socio-Sacred
Networks in Contemporary American Paganism.” The Pomegranate: The International
Journal of Pagan Studies 8:2 (2006), 146–160.
Clifton, Chas S. Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America. Lanham,
MD: AltaMira Press, 2006.
Fortune, Dion. The Sea Priestess. (Orig. pub. 1938.)York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser,
1978.
Gardner, Gerald. Witchcraft Today. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1973.
Hallett, Jennifer. “Wandering Dreams and Social Marches: Varieties of Paganism in Late
Victorian and Edwardian England.” The Pomegranate: The International Journal of
Pagan Studies 8:2 (2006), 161–183.
Hobsbawm, Eric. “Introduction,” in The Invention of Tradition. Ed. Eric Hobsbawm and
Terence Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
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INDEX
A∴A∴, 279 Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis

Abaris the Hyperborean, 15, 18, 43 (AMORC), 182–183
Abraham ben David of Posquieres, 99 Andernach, Johannes Guinterius von, 165
Abū Bakr, 85 Anderson, James, 204, 205
Abulafia, Abraham, 99, 144, 152 Anderson, Margaret, 288
Accademia Pitagora, 24 Animal Magnetism, xxi, 223–234, 243, 245,
Adler, Margot, 343 369, 426
Afshar, Askar Khan, 209 Andreae, Johann Valentin, 174, 175, 177
Aglaophemus, 134 Angelology, 153
Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius, 137, 138, 148, Anthroposophy, 170, 260–271, 347
149, 150–151, 152, 163, 275, 400, 412, Antonia, Princess of Württemberg, 154
420–421 Aphrodite, 33
Aguéli, Ivan, 311, 314 Apollo, 18, 36
Ahriman, 266 Apollonius of Tyana, 14
Aitken, Robert, 331 Apophatic theology, see Via negativa
Albanese, Catherine, 340 Apuleius, 134, 400
Albert the Great, 112–113 Aquarian Age, the, 181, 345, 346
Alchemy, xiii, xviii, xix, xxi, xxiv-xxv, xxvi, Aquinas, St. Thomas, 112
xxix, xxxi, xxxii, 23, 133, 141, 149, 157, 158, Arya Samaj, 251
159, 162, 166, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, Archetypes, Jungian, 299
177, 178, 179, 180, 185, 195, 197, 203, 272, Archytas of Tarentum, 17
274, 282, 301–302, 326, 346, 359–371, 374, Aristeas, 43
377, 412, 416, 425, 430, 433, 434, 435, 437 Aristophanes, 99
Alemanno, Yohanan, 99 Aristotle, xxiii, xxv-xxvi, xxvii, 16, 17, 26, 32, 33,
Alexander VI, Pope, 136 47, 84, 113, 140, 141, 157, 165, 267, 364, 418
Al-Alawi, Ahmad, 315 Armentano, Amedeo, 23, 24
Al-Ghazālı̄, 85–86, 87, 92, 93 Arndt, Johann, 167, 185
Almaas, A.H. (A. Hameed Ali), 331 Arnold, Gottfried, 171, 186
Al-Radi, Salama, 313 Arnold of Villanova, 163
Al-Razi, Muhammad ibn Zakariya, 364 Ásatrú, 337
Al-Sādiq, Jaʽfar, 363 Aschner, Bernard, 162
Ambrose of Milan, 410 Ashmole, Elias, 204
Amesius, 56 Association for the Study of Esotericism, xv
Amphion, 415 Astrology, xiii, xviii, xxvii, xxix, xxx, xxxi,
Anatolius, 407 xxxii, xxxv, 19, 49, 50, 137, 150, 180, 229,
Anaximander, 13 274, 344, 345, 346, 349, 372–380
463
464 Index
Atlantis, 255 Boethius, 20, 411, 413

Atwood, Mary Anne, 179, 369 Bonaventure, 112, 116
Augustine of Hippo, 20, 108–109, 110, 112, Bongo, Pietro, 414
116–117, 409–410, 411 Borges, Jorge Luis, 214, 222
Aurobindo Ghose, 270 Borgonuovo, Arcangelo da, 147, 151
Avicenna, 87, 157, 166, 364 Bostock, R., 167
Azriel of Gerona, 97 Botkin, Gleb, 338
Botticelli, Sandro, 136
Baader, Franz von, 170, 184, 186, 387 Bouthoorn, R.M., 136
Bacon, Francis, xxxiv, 238 Bovelles, Charles de, 413, 415
Bahya ibn Paquda, 97 Boyle, Robert, 366, 368
Bailey, Alice, 257, 305, 345, 354 Brach, Jean-Pierre, xiv, 401
Baldini, Bacchio, 136 Braid, James, 228, 245
Balı̄nūs, 364 Braude, Ann, 238
Balsamo, Joseph, see Cagliostro, Count Breckling, Friedrich, 186
Alessandro di Brethren of Purity, 20
Balzac, Honoré de, 222 Brown, Dan, 348
Barnum, P.T., 244 Brucker, Jacob, 385, 386
Barrett, Francis, 275 Bruno, Giordano, xix, 139–140, 422–423, 432
Barth, Fredrik, 352 Budapest, Zsuzsanna, 343
Basilides, 301, 322, 323, 332 Buddha, see Gautama Buddha
Bateson, Gregory, 428 Buddhism, 178, 251, 253–254, 256, 258, 313,
Baubo, 6 323, 330, 331, 332, 333, 346
Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 386, 389 Burkert, Walter, 5, 14, 15
Becker, Judith, 119 Burr, H.W., 256
Beguines, the, 112, 113, 126–129
Benedict of Nursia, 110 Cagliostro, Count Alessandro di, 231
Bennett, John G., 288 Cahagnet, Louis, 232
Bentham, Jeremy, 177 Calcidius, 20
Berdyaev, Nicholas, 324–325, 330, 331, 332 Cambridge Platonists, the, 152, 185, 424
Bergson, Henri, 272, 428 Cambyses, 14
Bernard of Clairvaux, 110–111, 112, 113, Campanella, Tommaso, 423
116, 117 Campbell, Colin, 351, 352
Bernus, Alexander von, 170 Capella, Martianus, 20, 411
Besant, Annie, 252, 255, 257, 264, 265 Capra, Fritjof, 347
Bezazel, 176 Carcopino, Jérôme, 19
Bible, 19, 66, 95, 96, 100–106, 138, 151, 168, Cardano, Girolamo, 421
173, 201, 202, 211, 213, 214, 215, 240, 241, Casaubon, Isaac, 141
409, 412, 413, 414, 431, 432 Casaubon, Méric, 150
Billot, Guillaume, 232 Castel, William, 216
Biodynamic farming, 266 Catharism, 172, 181, 343
Bischoffwerder, Johann Rudolf von, 178 Cayce, Edgar, 346
Blake, William, xiv, 22, 185, 221, 222, 270, Caxton, William, 134
344, 435 Ceaus¸escu, Nicolai, 319
Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 178, 184, 246, Censorinus, 20, 21
248–259, 265, 304, 387 Certeau, Michel de, 39
Bleuler, Eugen, 297 Chaldean Oracles, 39, 46–47, 48, 384, 400
Bodenstein, Adam von, 162, 163, 164, 165 Champier, Symphorien, 137
Boehme, Jacob, xiv, xvii, xviii, xix, xxviii, Channeling, 347, 349, 350, 353
xxxiv, 141, 153, 154, 170, 172, 177, 184–199, Chaos magic, 283, 440
303, 322, 324, 325, 330, 367, 386, 387 Charles, Prince of Wales, 319
Index 465
Chase, Christopher, 342 Damascius, 20, 44, 46–48, 406

Chödrön, Pema, 331 Dan, Joseph, 145, 155
Christianity, xix, xxvii, 4, 10, 20, 45, 58, 69–79, Dante, 23, 365
107–117, 118–129, 143–155, 168, 172, 182, David-Neel, Alexandra, 258
183, 184–199, 201, 202, 211–222, 239, 264, Davidson, Peter, 437
287, 316, 323, 330, 331, 333, 337, 340, 342, Davidson, William, 164
343, 379, 386, 396, 398, 430 Davis, Andrew Jackson, 245
Christian Kabbalah, 22, 136, 143–155, 177, 185, DeConick, April, 431
202, 275, 412, 414, 416 Dee, John, 140, 149, 275, 415
Christian theosophy, xiii, xvii, xix, 139, 170, Deghaye, Pierre, 192
184–199, 324–325, 385 Demeter, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11
Chrysopoeia, 361–362, 364, 365, 366, 367, Demiurge, the, 57, 171, 391
368, 369 Democritus, 418
Church of All Worlds, 334 Demonology, 153
Church of Satan, 440 Denys the Areopagite, see Pseudo-Dionysius
Cicero, 19, 418, 419 Desaguliers, John Theophilus, 205
Clement VIII, Pope, 140 Descartes, René, 153, 268
Clement of Alexandria, 54, 55, 409 Diocletian, Emperor of Rome, 362
Clichtove, Josse, 413 Dionysus, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 42
Clowes, John, 220 Dioscorides, 165
Coincidence of opposites, xvii, 87, 115, 425 Diotima, 39
Colberg, Ehregott Daniel, 385 Divination, xxxi, xxxii, 19, 275, 339, 345, 346,
Coleman, William Emmette, 256 349, 353
Collective unconscious, the, 298–299 D’Olivet, Fabre, 22–23, 24
Collins, Mabel, 257 Dorn, Gerhard, 162–164, 165, 167
Communism, see Marxism Douglas, Frederick, 242
Confucius, 13, 239 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 222
Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 313, 314 Druidry, 340
Copernicus, Nicholas, 137, 376, 377 Duchesne, Joseph, 166, 167
Corbin, Henry, xxxii, 12, 89, 90 Dugin, Alexander, 319–320, 321
Corpus Hermeticum, see Hermetica Dunlap, S.F., 256
Correspondences, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxviii, xxix, Du Potet de Sennevoy, Baron Jules, 230–231
xxx, xxxi, 376, 379, 394, 406 Du Préau, Gabriel, 138
Cosimo de’ Medici, 134 Durkheim, Emile, 394, 395
Cosmic sympathies, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxviii, xxix,
xxx, xxxi, 379 Eastern School of Theosophy, 253
Coulomb, Alexis, 251 Ebreo, Leone, 99, 151
Coulomb, Emma, 251 Eckhart von Hochheim, xvii, 46, 112–114, 115,
Counter-Enlightenment, 175–178 116, 128, 303, 322, 324, 327, 328, 330, 331
Counter-Reformation, 172–175, 414 Edward VI, King, 140
Creuzer, Georg Friedrich, 24 Ein-Sof, 97–98, 100, 104, 151, 190, 254
Croesus, 8 Elements, see Four elements
Croll, Oswald, xxv, 160, 161 Eleusis, Mysteries of, xv, xvi-xvii, 3–10, 41, 337
Crowley, Aleister, 180, 182, 257, 276, 277, Eliade, Mircea, xxxii, 314, 317
279–283, 430, 437–440 Elijah, 180
Crystal healing, 344 Eliot, T.S., 288
Cthulhu mythos, 283 Elisabeth of Schönau, 124–125
Cudworth, Ralph, 424 Elizabeth I, Queen, 140
Emerald Tablet, 136, 138, 163, 174, 254, 363, 420
D’Auberive, Guillaume, 411 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 222, 257, 270
Dalai Lama, 285 Empedocles, 17, 26–37, 43, 364, 418, 420
466 Index
Encausse, Gérard (Papus), 310 Fortune, Dion, 258, 335

Enlightenment, the, xix, xx, xxii, xxvi, xxvii, Four elements, xxiii, 157, 165, 275, 418
xxviii, xxxiii, 38, 177, 178, 209, 242, 369, 371, Fourth Way, the, 284–296
374, 375, 386, 387, 388, 395, 398, 401, 402, Foix-Candale, François, 139
430, 434 Fowden, Garth, 392
Ennemoser, Joseph, 230 Fox, Kate, 237, 243, 245
Enoch, 180 Fox, Margaret, 237, 243, 245
Enoch ben Yared, 65 Francis of Assisi, 111–112
Enochian magic, 149, 274, 275 Franck, Sebastian, 138, 175
Environmentalism, 340, 342 Franklin, Benjamin, 238, 244
Epimenides, 43 Franz, Marie-Louise von, 302, 307
Epiphanius of Salamis, 54 Fratellanza Terapeutica Magica di Myriam, 24
Eranos Symposia, 305, 306 Fraternitas Saturni, 435
Eriugena, John Scotus, xvii, 109–110, 113, 115, Frazer, James G., 394, 395
116, 322, 323, 411 Freemasonry, xiii, 22, 23, 176, 179, 200–210,
Eros, 39–40, 279, 432–433 272, 273, 278, 310, 311, 312, 315, 317, 340,
Esalen Institute, 347 369, 430, 437
Eschatology, 71, 74, 77, 78, 86, 348, 382 Frei, Gebhard, 303
Eschenmayer, Carl Adolph von, 230 French Revolution, the, 208
Eucher of Lyon, 411 Freud, Sigmund, 234, 246, 297, 298
Euclid, 408, 415 Froben, Johann, 156
Eudes of Morimond, 411 Froebe-Kapteyn, Olga, 305
European Society for the Study of Western
Esotericism, xiv-xv Gabriel, 85
Eurythmy, 265 Galante, Livius, 141
Evans, Warren Felt, 345 Galen of Pergamon, 141, 157, 165, 167
Evans-Wentz, W.Y., 258 Gallus, Thomas, 115
Everard, John, 141 Ganay, Germain de, 138
Evola, Baron Julius, 23, 289, 314, 315, 317–318, Gandhi, Mohandas K., 253
319, 320, 435 Gardner, Gerald, 339, 342, 439
Existentialism, 186 Garrett, Eileen, 428
Gautama Buddha, 13, 239, 266, 295, 296, 326
Faivre, Antoine, xiv, xx-xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, Geber, 141, 364
186, 193, 386 Gematria, xxxi, 18, 146, 408
Farı̄d al-Dı̄n ʿAtṭ ār,
̣ 93 Geomancy, 275
Farr, Florence, 180, 272, 277 Germer, Karl, 282
Farra, Alessandro, 414 Gerson, Jean, 114–115
Fechner, Gustav, 427 Gertrude of Helfta, 125–126, 127
Feminism, 340, 343 Gichtel, Johann Georg, 185
Feraferia, 334, 338, 341 Gikatilla, Joseph, 148, 152
Ferdinand I of Aragon, 135 Gilbert, William, 424
Fichte, J.G., 263 Giorgio, Francesco, 21, 137, 147, 148
Ficino, Marsilio, xix, xxiii, xxiv, xxviii, 21, 22, Giovanni da Correggio, 135
134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 143, 163, 173, 384, Glaucius, 323
412, 420, 432 Gnosis, xvi, xvii, xviii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, xxxv, 55,
Fideler, David, 18 171, 185, 187, 295, 302, 381–392
Figulus, Nigidius, 19 Gnosticism, xix, 49, 54–58, 171, 178, 179, 254,
Findhorn Foundation, 347 278, 300–301, 302, 323, 381, 385, 386, 389,
Fioravanti, Leonardo, 167 390, 391, 392, 429, 430, 431, 432
Fisch, Leah, 237 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xiv, xx, 263,
Fludd, Robert, 165 265, 270, 379
Index 467
Goetia, 400 Hermes Trismegistus, xix, 20, 49–54, 133, 134,

Gohory, Jacques, 163 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 174, 363,
Goldammer, Kurt, 163 376, 381, 382, 383, 401
Golden Dawn, see Hermetic Order of the Hermetic Academy, xv
Golden Dawn Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, 435, 437, 438
Golding, Arthur, 139 Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, xiv, 153,
Gold- und Rosenkreutz, 175–178, 179, 179–180, 272–277, 278
274, 369 Hermetica, xxxiv, 49–54, 84, 133–134, 135, 137,
Gonne, Maud, 272 138, 139, 140, 141, 299, 419–420
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas, xiv Hermeticism, see Hermetism
Gould, Robert Freke, 203 Hermetism, xiii, xix, xxvii, 49–54, 133–142,
Grafton, Anthony, 374 157, 160, 171, 257, 258, 278, 384, 385, 389,
Grahame, Kenneth, 340 391, 420, 429, 430, 432
Grant, Kenneth, 283 Hermotimus, 43
Gregorius XIV, Pope, 140 Herodotus, 13
Gruppo di Ur, 23 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 95
Guénon, René, xxii, xxiii, 23, 308–321, 390 Hesiod, 11, 29, 48
Gurdjieff, G.I., 284–296, 319, 347 Hess, Tobias, 174
Gutierrez, Cathy, xvi Hester, John, 167
Hesychia, 36
Haase, Rudolf, 25 Heumann, August, xxv
Hades, 6 Hierocles of Alexandria, 16
Hadewijch, 126–128 Hildegard of Bingen, xvii, 120–124
Hadot, Pierre, 43, 45 Hillman, James, 306
Halbfass, Wilhelm, 258 Hindmarsh, Robert, 220
Hamvas, Béla, 324 Hinduism, 178, 181, 253, 258, 309, 311, 312,
Hanegraaff, Wouter J., xiv, xvi, xix, xxii, 313, 335, 346, 438, 440
xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, xxx, 136, 142, Hippocrates, 141, 167
345, 354 Hippolytus, 323
Hardenberg, Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr Hiram Abiff, 208–209
von, see Novalis Hirsch, Christoph, 167
Hardinge, Emma, 239 Historicism, xxxii, xxxiii-xxxiv
Hare, Harold, 255 Hitchcock, Ethan Allen, 179
Hare, Robert, 243 Hitler, Adolf, 318
Hare, William, 255 Hobbes, Thomas, 153
Harrison, Anna, 126 Hobsbawm, Eric, 338
Hartmann, Franz, 278, 281 Hodgson, Richard, 251–252, 255
Hartmann, Olga de, 285, 286 Hofman, Melchior, 169
Hartmann, Thomas de, 285, 288 Hohenheim, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus
Haselmayer, Adam, 167–168 Bombastus von, see Paracelsus
Hauer, Jakob Wilhelm, 301 Hollandus, Isaac, 159
Heelas, Paul, 354 Hollywood, Amy, 128
Hegel, G.W.F., xiv, xxxiii, 184, 186, 187, 263, Homeopathy, 266
294, 386 Homer, 29, 36, 48
Heindel, Max, 181 Hoomi, Koot, 255
Hekate, 6 Hoomi, Morya, 255
Hekhalot literature, 59–68 Horoscopes, casting of, 275, 373, 377, 396
Helios, 11 Horniman, Annie, 276, 277
Hephaistos, 10 Horowitz, Shabbetai Sheftel, 103
Herakles, 4 Houdini, Harry, 246
Herman, Philip, 167 Hugh of St. Victor, 110, 411
468 Index
Humanism, 138, 335 Jung, Emma, 298

Hume, A.O., 251 Jungianism, xxiv, 182, 297–307, 347
Humphreys, Christmas, 258 Jung-Stilling, Johann, 232
Huser, Johann, 162 Justinian, Emperor of Rome, 20
Husserl, Edmund, 187
Hutton, Ronald, 338–339, 340 Kabbalah (see also Christian Kabbalah), xiii, xvii,
Huxley, Aldous, 308 xix, xxxi, xxxv, 19, 23, 95–106, 134, 137, 159,
Hypnotism, 228 168, 173, 177, 179, 180, 185, 190, 254, 258,
Hyppolytus of Rome, 54 274, 387, 401, 412, 429, 430, 431–432, 433,
434, 435
Iamblichus, 13, 16, 19–20, 22, 39, 44, 47, 48, Kali Yuga, 289, 309
407, 408, 419 Kant, Immanuel, xiv, xx, xxxiii, 38, 41, 115,
Ibn ʿArabı̄, 87, 90, 91, 94 222, 292
Ibn Taymiyya, 88 Kapleau, Philip, 331
Illuminati, the, 178, 208, 229 Karl XII, King, 212
Inanna, 343 Kayser, Hans, 25
Indian National Congress, 251 Keating, Thomas, 324
Inner Traditions Publishing, 390 Keller, Helen, 222
Irenaeus of Lyons, 54, 409 Kellner, Carl, 278, 281, 437
Isaac the Blind, 97, 103, 104 Kempe, Margery, 129
Isidore of Seville, 411 Kennett, Jiyu, 331
Isis, 3, 136 Kepler, Johannes, 21, 379, 424
Isis and Osiris, Mysteries of, 10–11 Kerenyi, Carl, 8
Islam, 10, 83–94, 311, 316, 337 Kerner, Justinus, 232
Khunrath, Heinrich, xxv, 150, 177, 185, 367
Jābir ibn-Hayyān, 363 Kingsford, Anna, 258
James I, King, 167 Kipling, Rudyard, 341
James, Henry, 222 Kircher, Athanasius, 414, 424
James, William, 107, 245, 427 Kirsch, Hilde, 306
Janet, Pierre, 233, 234, 297 Kirsch, James, 306
Jennings, Hargrave, 179, 278 Kirsch, Thomas, 306
Jesus Christ, 56, 57, 58, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, Knapp, Charles, 325
78, 79, 112, 120, 125, 126, 127, 135, 136, 146, Koran, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94
153, 162, 175, 180, 183, 196, 199, 211, 213, Krause, Karl, 417
214, 217, 219, 239, 261, 264, 265, 266, 267, Kremmerz, Giuliano, 24
303, 329, 365, 368, 378, 387, 431 Krishna, 266
Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 288 Krishnamurti, Jiddu, 265
John XXII, Pope, 365 Kristeller, Paul Otto, xiv
John of Patmos, 70 Kugetski, Feliz, 263
John of Rupescissa, 365 Kuhlmann, Quirinius, 186
Johnson, Paul K., 255 Kühlmann, Wilhelm, 158
Johnston, William, 331
Joly, Henry, 43 Lactantius, 52
Jonas, Hans, 391 Laertius, Diogenes, 16
Judaism, 10, 59–68, 95–106, 152, 337, 430 La Framboisier, Nicholas Abraham de, 167
Judge, W.Q., 257 Lao Tse, 13
Julian, Emperor of Rome, 12 Lauret, J., 414
Julian of Norwich, 115 LaVey, Anton Szandor, 440
Julian the Theurgist, 47 Lavoisier, Antoine, 244
Jung, C.G., xxii, xxiv, xxvii, 171, 172, 182, 222, Lazzarelli, Lodovico, 135–136, 137, 138,
297–307, 347, 354, 370, 380, 390, 402–403 139, 384
Index 469
Leadbetter, C.W., 255, 257, 264 Mansfield, Katherine, 288

Leade, Jane, 185 Maritain, Jacques, 311
Le Baillif, Roch, 165 Marxism, 186, 313, 319, 324
Lectorium Rosicrucianum, 181–182 Mary I, Queen, 140
Leene, Jan, 181 Mary, the Virgin, 123, 125, 136, 169, 199, 219,
Leene, Zwier, 181 316, 335
Lefevre d’Etaples, Jacques, 136, 137, 413 Maʿshar, Abū, 376
Leland, Charles Godfrey, 339 Masonry, see Freemasonry
Left-Hand Path, the, 289 Mathematical esotericism, xiii, xxviii, xxix,
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 153 xxxv, 22, 100, 101, 405–416
Leonardo da Pistoia, 134 Mathers, Mina Bergson, 272
Le Paulmier, Pierre, 166 Mathers, Samuel Liddell, 179, 180, 273, 274,
Lévi, Eliphas, 254, 275 276, 277
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 395 Matter, Jacques, 386
Lewis, Harvey Spencer, 182 Matthias, Saint, 323
Libavius, Andreas, 159, 160, 161, 166 Matthioli, Pietro Andrea, 165
Lincoln, Abraham, 250 Mauss, Marcel, 394, 395
Lincoln, Mary Todd, 244 Maximilian I, Emperor, 148
Lings, Martin, 317, 319 Maximus the Confessor, 323, 411
Little, Robert Wentworth, 179 Mayerne, Theodore Turquet de, 166, 167
Living nature, see Cosmic sympathies McClain, Ernest, 18
Locke, John, 366 McDermott, Robert A., xv
Logos, 76, 134, 135, 197, 264, 267 McGinn, Bernard, 111
Loori, John Daido, 331 McMurtry, Grady Louis, 283
Louis XIII, King, 167 Mead, G.R.S., 252
Lovecraft, H.P., 283 Meister Eckhart, see Eckhart von Hochheim
Loyola, St. Ignatius, 300 Merkavah mysticism, 59–68
Lucifer, 198, 266 Merrell-Wolfe, Franklin, 324, 326–327, 329,
Lúkacs, George, 324 330, 331, 332
Lull, Ramon, 143, 165 Merton, Thomas, 331
Luria, Isaac, 96, 152 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 223–225, 228, 229,
Luther, Martin, 378 241–242, 243, 245, 354, 388, 426
Lutheranism, see Protestantism Mesmerism, xiii, 223–234, 241–242, 254,
369, 402
Macaulay, Anne, 18 Metatron, 65
Mackenzie, Kenneth, 180, 273 Metempsychosis, see Reincarnation
Macrobius, 20, 411 Methodological agnosticism, xxxii,
Macrocosm-microcosm correspondence, xvii, xxxiii-xxxiv
xxix, xxx, xxxi, 89, 157, 160, 165, 167, 168, Michael, Archangel, 266
173, 253, 281, 367 Michelet, Jules, 339
Madsen, Catherine, 335 Michell, John, 18
Magic, xiii, xviii, xxi, xxiii, xxv, xxviii, xxix, Middle Platonism, 47, 407
xxx, xxxi, xxxii, xxxv, 43, 63, 144, 145, 153, Millennialism, 345
157, 158, 159, 160, 168, 173, 177, 229–231, Milton, John, 185
272–283, 339, 340, 341, 369, 374, 377, Mithras, 3
393–404, 412, 416, 429, 430, 432, 433, 440 Mithras, Mysteries of, 10
Maharshi, Ramana, 304 Moderatus of Gadès, 407
Mahavira, 13 Modernity, xx, xxiii-xxvii, 107, 172, 309, 312,
Maier, Michael, 165 315, 318, 319, 320, 321, 331, 340, 398, 403
Maimonides, Moses, 97 Moffett, Thomas, 164
Manchester, Peter, 26 Molitor, Franz Josef, xxiii, 154
470 Index
Montaigne, Michel de, 257 Number symbolism, see Mathematical

Mordekhai of Chernobyl, 100 esotericism
More, Henry, 152, 153, 424, 425 Numenius of Apamea, 19
Morganwg, Iolo, 338 Numerology, see Mathematical esotericism
Moses, 19, 87, 95, 96, 102, 135, 136, 137, 176,
219, 296, 387 Occultism, xiii, xxix, xxxi, 23, 24, 158, 160, 223,
Moshe de Leon, 102 229, 230, 246, 272, 273, 274, 275, 277, 283,
Muhammad, the Prophet, 83, 85, 89, 91, 92, 93 314, 354, 359, 360, 369, 374, 375, 387, 389,
Mumler, William, 244 396, 399, 401, 402, 403, 429, 430, 437
Mundus imaginalis, 89, 90 Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph, 153, 426
Murray, Charles, 249 O’Keefe, Georgia, 288
Murray, Margaret, 334, 339 Olcott, Henry Steel, 249, 250, 251, 253, 257
Musaeus, 44 Orage, A.R., 288
Myers, Frederic, 234, 245 Ordo Templi Orientis, 272, 277–283, 437, 438
Mystery rites, 3–12 Origen, 109, 409
Mysticism, nature of, xv, xviii, xxix, 9–10, 27, Orpheus, 3, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47, 134, 139, 144,
38–39, 45–46, 59, 61–62, 68, 69, 414, 415
75, 77, 92, 96, 107, 111, 114–115, 116, 118, Orpheus, Mysteries of, 11–12, 19, 47
322–333, 360 Orphism, 14, 38, 42, 43, 48, 144
Osiris, 3, 180
Nag Hammadi Codex, 50, 55, 56, 302, 390 O.T.O. see, Ordo Templi Orientis
Naglowska, Maria de, 435 Ottheinrich, Elector of the Palatinate, 165
Nahmanides, 102, 105 Otto, Bernd-Christian, 404
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, 316–317, 319 Otto, Rudolf, 107
Necromancy, xxviii, 369 Ouspensky, P.D., 285, 287, 291, 292, 347, 428
Needleman, Jacob, 295, 296
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 258 Pacioli, Luca, 415
Neoplatonism, 19, 39, 42, 43, 44–48, 69, 97, Paganism, xxvii, xxviii, 283, 321, 334–343, 398
113, 148, 160, 169, 170, 171, 173, 178, 240, Panentheism, 335, 417, 420
242, 254, 362, 374, 384, 407, 408, 412, 415, Panpsychism, xxviii, 417–428
419, 421 Pantheism, 335, 417
Neumann, Erich, 306 Panteo, Giovanni Agostino, 149
New Age, the, 122, 247, 338, 344–355, 380, Papus, see Encausse, Gérard
390, 391 Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus
Newman, Barbara, 123, 128 Bombastus von Hohenheim) xix, xxv, xxviii,
Newman, William R., 374 141, 153, 156–170, 172, 173, 175, 185, 194,
Newton, Isaac, xiv, xx, 21–22, 154, 185, 205, 257, 366-367, 421, 426, 433
366, 425–426 Paracelsianism, xxi, xxv, 156–170, 185, 254, 385
Nicoll, Maurice, 288 Parmenides, xvii, xxvii, 8, 26–37, 296
Nicholas of Cusa, 115–116, 413, 415, Patai, Raphael, 151
420, 422 Patrizi, Francesco, 140, 176, 417, 421–422
Nichols, Ross, 342 Paul of Taranto, see Geber
Nicholson, R.A., 83 Paul the Apostle, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78
Nicomachus of Gerasa, 19, 407, 408 Paulini, Fabio, 414
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 178, 306, 314 Payne, George, 205
Noah, 176 Penot, Bernard George, 159
Noll, Heinrich, 141 Perennial philosophy, see Philosophia perennis
Noll, Richard, 306 Perna, Pietro, 163
Nostradamus, 351 Persephone, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 29
Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Peter, Saint, 323
Hardenberg), 186 Peuckert, Will Erich, 162
Index 471
Phanes, 11 Putin, Vladimir, 320

Pherecydes of Syros, 13 Puységur, Marquis de, 225–228, 229, 231,
Philadelphian Society, the, 185 234, 242
Philo of Alexandria, 19, 67, 387, 408 Pythagoras, xxviii, 13–25, 39, 43, 47, 134, 144,
Philolaus of Croton, 17, 134, 406 385, 387, 405, 418, 422
Philosopher’s Stone, 175, 176, 178, 181, 197, Pythagoreanism, 13–25, 38, 43, 48, 148, 150,
326, 360, 362, 365, 367, 369, 433, 434 286, 290, 406, 407, 408, 416, 422
Philosophia perennis, 136–137, 178, 308, 312, 316 Pytheas of Massilia, 15
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, xix, xxviii, 21,
135, 136, 143–145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, Quercetanus, see Mayerne, Theodore
154, 259, 379, 412, 413, 415 Turquet de
Pinturiccio (Bernardino di Betto), 136 Quimby, Phineas Parkhurst, 354
Pistorius, Johannes, 151 Quintilianus, Aristeides, 20
Plato, xvii, xix, xxvi, xxxiii, xxxiv, 15, 16, 17,
18, 20, 21, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 36, 38–44, 45, Race, Victor, 225, 226, 227
47, 134, 136, 143, 171, 266, 294, 381, 383, Raine, Kathleen, 22
384, 385, 387, 400, 412, 418, 419 Ranbir Singh, Maharajah of Kashmir, 255
Platonic orientalism, xix, 382, 383, 384, 386, Randolph, Paschal Beverly, 242, 279, 430,
387, 389, 406–408 435–437, 438, 439
Plessis-Mornay, Philippe du, 139 Rawlinson, Andrew, 331
Plethon, George Gemistus, 384, 400 Recanati, Menahem, 144, 152
Pliny the Elder, xxx-xxxi, 21 Redfield, James, 348
Plotinus, xvii, xix, 19–20, 39, 44–46, 47, 48, 56, Reformation, the, 219, 396
84, 108, 143, 394, 419 Reghini, Arturo, 23, 24
Plutarch, 408 Reiki healing, 344, 349
Polhem, Christopher, 212 Reincarnation, 14
Pontano, Giovanni, 135 Relativism, xxxii
Pordage, John, 185, 322 Religionism, xxxii, xxxiv
Porete, Marguerite, 128 Renaissance, xiii, xiv, xix, xxiii, xxviii, 133–142,
Porphyry, 13, 19–20, 39, 44, 46–48, 56, 184 143, 144, 146, 147, 157, 162, 169, 173, 242,
Poseidon, 10 243, 246, 259, 275, 340, 341, 354, 373, 374,
Post, Amy, 242 384, 385, 387, 400, 401, 402, 403, 411, 412,
Post, Isaac, 242 416, 417, 420–423, 430, 432–434, 435
Pouvourville, Count Albert-Eugène de, 311 Reuchlin, Johann, 145–147, 148, 150, 151, 152,
Pratensis, Johannes, 164 154, 412, 413
Preston, William, 206 Reuss, Theodor, 278, 280, 281, 282, 283, 437
Prichard, Samuel, 206 Rhodius, Ambrosius, 164
Priestley, J.B., 288 Ribit, Jean, 166
Principe, Lawrence, xxiv Richard of St. Victor, 110
Prisca sapientia, 162, 173, 176 Richter, Gregorius, 185
Prisca theologia, 137, 143, 385, 400 Richter, Samuel, 176
Proclus, 11, 20, 44, 48, 113, 406, 407, 408, 419 Ricius, Paulus, 147–148, 151
Protestantism, xix, xxvii, 138, 167, 184, 187, Riolan, Jean, 166
239, 385, 396, 398 Rito Filosofico Italiano, 23
Psellus, Michael, 134 Roberts, Bernadette, 324, 327–330, 331, 332
Pseudo-Arnald of Villanova, 365 Roberts, Jane, 347, 349, 428
Pseudo-Democritus, 361 Rolle, Richard, 115
Pseudo-Dionysius, xvii, 69, 109, 112, 115, 322, Romanticism, 184, 298, 312, 379, 398
323, 325, 326, 328, 330, 331, 332, 411 Rosenkreutz, Christian, 167, 173, 174, 180,
Ptolemy, Claudius, 54, 377, 408 261, 274
Puritanism, 140, 341, 437 Rosenroth, Christian Knorr von, 152, 154
472 Index
Rosicrucian Fellowship, 181, 182 Simon ben Eleazar, 147

Rosicrucianism, xiii, 167, 171–183, 203, 229, Simplicius, 20
257, 273, 277, 385, 435 Sinclair, Henry John (Lord Pentland), 288
Rossel, Hannibal, 140 Sinnett, A.P., 251, 257, 428
Roussel, Gèrard, 413 Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (S.R.I.A.),
Royce, Josiah, 428 179–180, 273, 274
Rūmı̄, 90 Société Spirite, 249
Ruusbroec, John, 114 Society for Psychical Research (S.P.R.), 246,
251, 252
Sabians, the, 20 Socrates, xx, 17, 40, 43, 288
Sacred geometry, see Mathematical Esotericism Sodalizio Pitagorico, 23
Saint-Martin, Louis Claude de, 184 Solomon, 176
Salzmann, Alexandre de, 285 Solon, 8
Salzmann, Jeanne de, 285, 287, 288, 294, 296 Sophia (Wisdom), 57, 193, 194, 197, 198,
Samothrace, Mysteries of, 10–11 199, 260
Sandhanwalia, Thakar Singh, 255 Spangler, David, 347
Saraswati, Swami Dayananda, 251 Sparrow, John, 185
Sarmoung Brotherhood, 285 Spear, John Murray, 244
Satanism, 283, 439, 440 Specht, Otto, 262
Sayer, Anthony, 205 Spengler, Oswald, 312
Schäfer, Peter, 60 Spiritualism, xiii, xvi, xviii, xxv, xxviii, xxix,
Schaw, William, 204 232–234, 237–247, 249, 250, 251, 257,
Schelling, F.W.J., xiv, 186, 263, 426–427 297, 435
Schiller, Friedrich, 379 Spiritus mundi, xxiii
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 186 Starhawk (Miriam Simos), 335, 343
Schlegel, Friedrich, 186 Stein, Charles, xvii
Scholem, Gershom, xvi, 143, 148, 152, 154 Steiner, Rudolf, 170, 181, 257, 260–271, 304
Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich von, 388 Stellatus, Josephus, see Hirsch, Christoph
Schucman, Helen, 350 Stobaeus, 133
Schuon, Frithjof, 314, 315–316, 390 Stoicism, 51, 372, 418–419, 424
Schwenkfeld, Casper, 169 Steuco, Agostino, 137
Scripture, see Bible Strauss, Leo, xiv, xxxiv
Secret, François, xiv Strindberg, August, xiv, 222
Sefirot, 97–98, 100, 103, 104, 105, 144, 151, 152, Stuckrad, Kocku von, xx, xxii
274, 275, 431 Sudhoff, Karl, 162
Sennert, Daniel, 165 Sufism, xvii, 83–94, 285, 286, 310, 312, 313, 315,
Sethians, the, 57 316, 319, 331, 354
Severinus, Petrus, 164 Suhrawardı̄, Shahab al-Din Yahya ibn
Sex magic, see Sexuality Habash, 383
Sexuality, 429–440 Suso, Henry, 114, 329
Shaivism, xvii Sylvius, Franciscus de le Boë, 170
Shakespeare, William, 238 Syrianus, 44
Shamanism, xxviii, 3, 15, 43, 344, 354 Swedenborg, Emanuel, xiv, 154, 211–222, 228,
Shankara, 326 232, 238, 240, 241, 242, 270, 342, 345, 354,
Shaw, Gregory, 408 430, 434–435
Shekhinah, 64, 106
Shumaker, Wayne, 374 Tabula Smaragdina, see Emerald Tablet
Siderocrates, Samuel, 167 Talemarianus, Petrus, 23
Sidney, Sir Philip, 139, 140 Tantra, xvii, 23, 181, 281, 283, 346, 354,
Sievers, Marie von, 265 438, 440
Silberer, Herbert, 370 Taoism, xvii, 23, 311
Index 473
Tardieu, Michel, 20 UFO lore, 283, 345, 346

Tarot, 274, 275, 344, 346, 349, 351 Underhill, Evelyn, 107, 324
Tascher, Paul, 233 Ungrund, 190–191, 194, 198, 199, 322, 325
Tattwas, 275 Unio mystica, 62, 65, 208
Tauler, John, 114, 324
Taylor, Thomas, 22 Valentine, Basil, 159
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 428 Valentinians, the, 55, 57, 58, 76, 431
Telepathy, xxv Valentinus, 56
Telle, Joachim, 158, 162 Van Beyerland, Abraham Willemsz, 141
Templarism, 277 Van Helmont, Frans Mercurius, 153
Tertullian, 409 Van Helmont, Jean Baptiste, 170
Thales, 13, 418 Van Rijckenborgh, Jan, see Leene, Jan
Thelema, 277, 279, 281, 282, 438 Vedanta, xvii, 311, 312, 326, 330, 332
Thénaud, Jean, 150 Vellozo, Dario de Castro, 24
Theodore of Asine, 408 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 41
Theon, Max, 437 Versluis, Arthur, xv, 246
Theon of Smyrna, 19, 407 Via negativa, 69, 97, 322–333
Theosophy (The Theosophical Society), 178, Vickers, Brian, 374
181, 184, 246, 248–259, 264, 265, 273, 278, Vieussens, Raymond, 170
310, 311, 325, 326, 345, 347, 348, 354, Virgil, 23, 414
379–380 Vishnu, 254
Theurgy, 47, 272, 368, 387, 408 Visio dei, 72, 79
Thimus, Albert Freiherr von, 24 Vital, Hayim, 154
Thom, Alexander, 15 Voiculescu, Gelu Voican, 319
Thomas, Keith, 374
Thomasius, Jacob, 385, 386, 388, 390 Waite, Arthur Edward, 180, 277
Thoreau, Henry David, 257 Waldorf School movement, 260, 263, 266
Thoth, 49, 133, 140 Walsh, David, 199
Thurneisser, Leonard, 164 Walsh, Neal Donald, 348
Thutmose III, Pharaoh, 182 Watts, Alan, 331
Tieck, Ludwig, 186 Weber, Max, 398, 402
Tingley, Katherine, 257 Wegman, Ita, 265
Tiryakian, Edward, 248 Weigel, Valentin, 139, 167, 168–169, 185
Titans, the, 42 Westcott, William Wynn, 179, 180, 273, 274
Toland, John, 417 Western Esotericism, mysticism and, xxix-xxxii
Torah, see Bible Western Esotericism, nature of, xiii, xvi,
Toxites, Michael, 162, 163, 164, 167 xviii–xxxii, 142, 171, 320–321, 322, 360,
Traditionalism, 291, 308–321, 390 373–377, 386, 428
Transcendental Meditation, 355 Westman, Robert S., 142
Transmigration of souls, see Reincarnation Whitehead, Alfred North, 428
Travenol, Louis, 207 Whitehouse, Harvey, 337
Travers, P.L., 288 Wicca, 283, 334, 335, 337, 338–340, 341, 342,
Trevelyan, George, 347 343, 440
Trinity, Christian, 108, 112, 113, 122, 139, Wilber, Ken, 331
145, 147, 153, 154, 169, 194, 217 Wilhelm, Richard, 301
Trithemius, Johann, 138 William of Orange, 139
Truth, Sojourner, 242 Wilson, Colin, 296
Turnèbe, Adrien, 139 Wiszubski, Chaim, 145
Tylor, Edward Burnett, 394, 395, 397 Witchcraft, xxxi, 339, 340, 342, 369, 385
Tymme, Thomas, 167 Wolfson, Elliot, 429
474 Index
Wöllner, Johann Christoph von, 178 Yoga, 258, 281, 300, 301, 346, 438
Wood, Ernest, 258 York, Michael, 343
Woodhull, Victoria, 243
Woodman, William Robert, 273 Zarathustra, see Zoroaster
Woodville, Anthony, 134 Zell, Oberon, 341, 342
Wren, Christopher, 205 Zen Buddhism, xvii, 330, 331, 346
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 288 Zeus, 11, 42, 406
Wundt, Wilhelm, 292 Zimmer, Heinrich, 301
Zosimos of Panopolis, 361–363, 365, 420
Yates, Frances, xiv, 142, 177, 347 Zoroaster, 13, 139, 143, 144, 266, 384, 387,
Yeats, W.B., xiv, 180, 222, 252, 272, 277 400, 401
Yeltsin, Boris, 320 Zorzi, Francesco, 414

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What topics are covered in the handbook?

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What is the relationship between mysticism and esotericism according to the text?

TH E CA M B R I D G E H A N D B O O K O F W E S T E R N

Glenn Alexander Magee is Professor and Chairman of the Department of

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

ii the middle ages 81

11 Hildegard of Bingen and Women’s Mysticism 118

iii the renaissance and early modernity 131

iv the nineteenth century and beyond 235

28 Contemporary Paganism 334

v common threads 357

Suggestions for Further Reading 441

1 A New Approach to the Hidden Intellectual History of the West

Gershom Scholem attempted to distinguish between the mystical and the

2 The Nature of Mysticism

volume, written by Charles Stein, introduces readers to what we know of the

3 Approaches to Understanding Esotericism

“constructed.” This is the approach taken by Wouter Hanegraaﬀ in his

On the one hand, Hanegraaﬀ has given us an account of the process by

characteristics of esotericism (which he calls a “form of thought”), that is,

5. “The Praxis of the Concordance.” This involves a tendency on the part of

4 The Nature of Esotericism – A Synthesis of Approaches

Understood in terms of these four features, what we know today as the

magic, and number symbolism (think Pythagoras), spiritualism (think sha-

discovered through the cultivation of supernormal aspects of human sub-

5 The Relation of Mysticism and Esotericism

together as esotericism, by contrast, mainly consist in techniques or practices

much of esotericism, on the other hand, is concerned with changing reality:

A note about organization: The ﬁrst four parts of the volume

Daphna Arbel is Professor of Early Jewish Literature at the University of British

publication is Western Esotericism in Scandinavia (2016, coedited with Henrik

2 The Eleusinian Mysteries

honor and pharmacologically similar to lysergic acid diethylamide.1 An

3 The Secret of the Eleusinian Mysteries

all-embracing divine principle, such as is common in Indian religion and

PYTHAGORAS AND PYTHAGOREANISM

1 Life and Work of Pythagoras

Having gone there on Thales’s recommendation, Pythagoras visited the

For Pythagoras, numbers were the ultimate realities. While exoterically he

and the eugenic breeding of children. He controlled the emotions of his

2 Pythagoreans in the Classical World

Church and the suppression of Freemasonry, he devoted himself to symbo-

PARMENIDES AND EMPEDOCLES

Jessica Elbert Decker and Matthew Mayock*

the philosophical arguments that traditionally occupy center stage. A more

tragedy understandable in light of the philosopher’s dismissal of “mere”

he referred to himself as a daimon, or divinity (B 23.11). It calls for a speciﬁc

4 The Tradition of Parmenides and Empedocles

in the background of their doctrines but serves as a deﬁning thread in the

PLATO, PLOTINUS, AND

also have to ask whether Platonic philosophy is itself homologous to this

Orphism.12 According to Olympiodorus, Plato “everywhere borrows from

and associated with the semi-legendary, semi-historical ﬁgures of the “Seven

present “a bushel of books by Musaeus and Orpheus,” mistaking puriﬁcation

distinguish between diﬀerent kinds of mystics, insofar as the conditions and

4 From Porphyry to Damascius

redaction has been attributed (uncertainly) to Julian the Theurgist.35 One