Western Esotericism (History)

This concludes a two-part paper that discusses three major aspects of modern Western esotericism: esotericism as a form of thought, esotericism as gnosis, and esotericism as discourse. Freemasonry is seen as a significant and influential aspect of esoteric traditions in reviews of writings by scholars of modern Western Esotericism.

Scopo di queste pagine è fissare alcune premesse generali per una rilettura storica globale della psicosintesi. Per farlo è necessario adottare uno sguardo multifocale, in grado di evocare il contesto immediato e remoto dell’opera di Assagioli. La premessa è che la psicosintesi è spesso oggetto di malintesi e non detti, ascrivibili in buona parte al métissage operato dal pensiero di Assagioli, un pensiero sorretto da molte fonti e irradiante in varie direzioni. Assagioli era, come noto, un poliglotta e un attraversatore di mondi; alcuni di questi territori sono ancora poco mappati, storicamente compresi, e su di essi gravano preconcetti che non consentono di cogliere né l’originalità della psicosintesi, né tutta la portata della sua “funzione storica”. Qui vorrei provare a sondare alcune dimensioni di questa complessità. Per farlo seguirò il filo rosso delle psicotecniche di Assagioli, le cui origini sono (curiosamente) in parte poco note.

Pirofilo, un grande Adepto dei nostri tempi Difficile, se non impossibile, lasciare testimonianza adeguata di Pirofilo. Si potrebbero riempire pagine di parole nel tentativo di farlo. Ma sarebbe comunque riduttivo. Ad intraprendere il lungo viaggio nel solco della Tradizione sono pochi. Di questi pochi, pochissimi riescono ad arrivare fino a trovarsi di fronte all'abisso insondabile. Per giungere sino a quel punto occorre aver compiuto la Grande Opera di trasmutazione, aver separato lo spesso dal sottile, separato ciò che è sparso. Di quei pochissimi che sono arrivati fino a quel punto, solo agli Eletti è dato di attraversarlo, senza più ausili ne strumenti. Giunti dall'altra parte, coloro che raggiungono l'Illuminazione sono sostanzialmente vincolati al Dovere del Silenzio. Il che non gli ha mai impedito di essere sempre pronto e disponibili a seguire benevolmente gli altri ricercatori, gli altri Viandanti e Cavalieri che hanno intrapreso la Via. L'insegnamento maieutico, rigoroso e mai dogmatico, lo ha sempre offerto a chiunque lo chiedesse. Potremmo dilungarci a descrivere le sue rare doti intellettuali, la finezza sofisticata di una mente lucida, vigile, acuta come un laser e al contempo di spaziare a 360 gradi sempre oltre l'orizzonte. Ma resteremmo limitati sul piano profano. L'essere riconosciuto come Adepto Illuminato implica la trascendenza della profanità, ma addentrarsi nelle dimensioni siderali, oltre i vincoli ed il dominio della dualità profana non è possibile con le parole. La dove Pirofilo era di casa solo il Silenzio. Silenzio sempre indicato come obiettivo supremo del cammino. Resta la testimonianza, viva e vitale, di coloro che hanno avuto il privilegio di essergli vicini, che hanno avuto modo di sperimentare direttamente l'essenza pulsante della Luce che emanava. Unico ed irripetibile, di vari ordini di grandezza superiore a tutti i personaggi più o meno noti del nostro tempo. Spesso incompreso, generava sistematicamente un profondo rispetto, altrettanto spesso misto al disagio che scaturiva dalla purezza cristallina delle ispirazioni che mettevano a nudo inconfessabili ipocrisie ed ignavie. Dire che vive potrebbe apparire banale e di circostanza, ma non è così: per molti di noise siamo come siamo, se si è riusciti a progredire nel percorsola comunione con Pirofilo è un fatto indelebile. Per coloro che non hanno avuto la possibilità di conoscerlo, un piccolo frammento da una delle sue Opere, testimonianza ed eredità per il prossimo millennio.

More than any other object of historical and anthropological study, Islamicate occult science cuts to the quick of what it means to be modern, to be Western, to be scientific. Yet nowhere else are 19th-century colonialist metaphysics and materialist cosmology more firmly entrenched. The piecemeal, truncated study of “Magic in Islam” to date has thus of-ten been pursued in service of either scientistic or religionist agendas, whereby magic can only ever be failed science or apolitical religion, and Islam can never be the West; Islamic Magic as simply Western and often imperial Science-and-Religion is thereby utterly disappeared from historiographical purview. And even those Islamicist historians of science and historians of religion who eschew ideology in favor of rigorously empirical philology, the majority, have tended to favor outsider, polemical discourses over insider, practitioner ones, and “classical” sources over “postclassical,” resulting in bizarre historiographical distortions and the disenchanting sanitization of Islamicate societies past and present. This manifesto therefore proposes a way out of this dire epistemological and ethical bind. To re-store Islamic Magic to its rightful place in Western intellectual and cultural history, especially history of science, we must take far more seriously the panpsychist cosmology on which it is predicated, and realize that our own reflexive materialism commits us willynilly to a colonialist agenda that is, ironically, both antireligious and antiscientific.

David W. Wood. Book Review of Rudolf Steiner, The Fourth Dimension. Sacred Geometry, Alchemy, and Mathematics (trans. Catherine E. Creeger, Anthroposophic Press, 2001).
Review originally published in the Newsletter of the Science Group of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, September 2002, pp. 2-3: https://sciencegroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/sgnl902.pdf

This work proposes to show that the Major Arcana of the Visconti-Sforza Tarot is a symbolic representation of “Maa’sah Merkavah” or “Workings of the Chariot.”  The twenty-two painted cards that comprise the Major Arcana are associated with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. As such, on the one hand, the sacred letters are a Periodic Table of the elements of Creation and on the other, a practical artistry that uses these elements to find remedies for redemption of the human soul.

According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan’s advice to eat of the forbidden fruit. The notion of woman as the Devil’s accomplice is prominent throughout the history of Christianity. During the nineteenth century, rebellious females performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Hereby, Lucifer was reconceptualised as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priests.

This study delineates how such Satanic feminism is expressed in a number of nineteenth-century esoteric works, literary texts, autobiographies, pamphlets and journals, newspaper articles, paintings, sculptures and even artefacts of consumer culture such as jewellery.

In the material, four motifs in particular are prominent: 1) interpretations of Eve’s role in the fall of man as something positive, 2) the witch as a proto-feminist figure, 3) the demon lover as an emancipator, 4) a feminised Satan contrasted with an oppressive male God. A fifth and less central motif is conceptions of Lilith, according to Jewish lore the unruly first wife of Adam, as the first feminist.

The analysis focuses on interfaces between esotericism and the political realm, as well as the interdependence of literature and the occult. New light is thus shed on neglected aspects of the intellectual history of feminism, Satanism and revisionary mythmaking. The study is informed by theories concerning counter-readings, counter-discourses and counter-myths, and in particular highlights the complex interplay of such phenomena and the hegemonic discourses that demonised feminism. A key theme in this context is the limits and paradoxes of inversion as a subversive strategy.

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La concezione del mondo dell’artista, calato in una realtà a lui aliena per diverso spessore qualitativo, emerge dai testi ed evidenzia il percorso della Quarta Via di Gurdjieff.
Questo saggio intende proporre una riflessione sull’indissolubile connubio tra cammino artistico e cammino iniziatico, tra creazione artistica e creazione di sé, evidenziando come i due percorsi, arricchendosi a vicenda, si potenziano proprio in virtù della loro alchimia.

"One of the central questions in the study of modern Western Esotericism concerns the continued appeal of magic; how did magic survive “the disenchantment of the world”? An appealing explanation has been that the emergence of “occultist magic”, based on the writings of Eliphas Lévi (1810–1875) and the teachings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (est. 1888) in particular, resulted in a “psychologisation” of magic. By interpreting magical practices as psychological techniques, and the trafficking with esoteric entities as manipulation of internal, psychological states rather than externally real spiritual beings it has become possible for well-educated, upper middle class moderners to retain both their belief in magic and their rational integrity.
By presenting a case study of one of the most influential modern occultists, Aleister Crowley (1875– 1947), this article seeks to demonstrate that “the psychologisation thesis” is not entirely tenable. Special notice will be given to Crowley’s magical system, presented as “Scientific Illuminism”, and the role and appeal of science in that system. Contrary to the psychologisation thesis, which it will be argued represents a sort of “psychological escapism”, Crowley did not seek to insulate his magical beliefs from his rational beliefs by withdrawing them to the realm of psychology and internal states; instead, influenced by the ideals of scientific naturalism, he sought to devise a naturalistic method by which magical practice could be rationally criticised, tested and refined. In short, it will be argued that Crowley’s system represent a move towards the naturalisation rather than the psychologisation of magic.
In addition to presenting a close reading of some of Crowley’s ideas on the relation between science and magic, a historical contextualisation will be provided, in which special notice will be given to Crowley’s relation to prominent intellectual currents with interest in this issue, including the Society for Psychical Research, Sir James Frazer, and naturalist philosophers and psychologists, from T. H. Huxley to Henry Maudsley.
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We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out." -Robert McCammon I remember when I was six years old and I saw my first magic film. It was a cinematic adaptation of a Russian fairy tale about Ruslan and Ludmila. I was absorbed by the screen and transported into an enchanted forest inhabited by tree sprites, fire spirits, mermaids with painted skin and green hair, talking birds and dancing bears. I was there alongside the princess Ludmila, when she was abducted by a sorcerer-dwarf with an enormous white beard, when she fought off his army of elvish-blue guards with silk pillows, and when she escaped into a forest of white reef corals, and made her way across a bridge of floating ice. I didn't understand much about epic battles between good and evil, but I knew that I didn't like the sorcerer-dwarf and that I felt immediately drawn to the wise, old magician who lived in the forest and could communicate with the animals and resurrect the fallen hero with the elixir of life.

The Tamil Śaiva yogi Sri Sabhapati Swami (b. 1828) has had a substantial impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Asian and Western occult movements, yet with a few exceptions he has been overlooked by authors writing on modern yoga. His writings survive in multiple languages, including English as well as highly Sanskritised dialects of Tamil, Hindustani, and Bengali, and also include elaborate visual diagrams. This chapter first summarises Sabhapati’s relevance to the field of Yoga Studies. It then offers an overview of Sabhapati’s life based on North American and European archival sources as well as new textual and ethnographic sources from the author’s field work in Tamil Nadu. Finally, the chapter analyses the cross-fertilisation of Sabhapati’s teachings in the Theosophical Society and Aleister Crowley’s (1875–1947) Thelema.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a 19th century English society engaged in the creation of a systematic form of western esotericism. Its founders created a synthesis of previous strands of esotericism and spiritual thought that had existed in Europe. One aspect of this synthesis was the creation of a new vision of the soul. This soul went beyond a simple mixing of elements from earlier traditions and provided an integral portion of the spiritual vision that gave an overall purpose to the spiritual practices of the Golden Dawn. A discussion of the nature and structure of this soul, its key influences, and unique aspects gives clarity to some of the spiritual goals and vision of the Golden Dawn as a system of spiritual practice. This demonstrates a system of thought unique to the end of the nineteenth century that places it with other spiritual traditions of the world.

The idea that there has been some kind of “esoteric” National Socialism has spread far and wide, particularly since the 1960s, becoming a significant topos in contemporary religious and political discourse. Not only the mainstream and academic press, but far-right and neo-Nazi circles maintain that there has been an “esoteric SS” still operating under the sign of the so-called “Black Sun,” combatting the “forces of evil.” The symbol of the Black Sun has become particularly popular since the 1990s, and other central topoi of “esoteric neo-Nazism” have become recognizable in popular culture today. This article will re-construct the genealogy of esoteric neo-Nazism and investigate the question of the alleged “esoteric” qualities of National Socialism. It will be shown that the “esoteric” content of National Socialism is to be regarded as a later, postwar invention without a historical foundation in the Third Reich.

The pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica (hereafter PsAH) are a group of texts surviving in Arabic that claim to record conversations between Aristotle and Alexander the Great. In these conversations, Aristotle instructs Alexander about the cosmos, the comingto-be of everything in it, and astral magic-more precisely, talismanry, rituals for attracting the spiritual and planetary forces of the cosmos, the creation of amulets, and extensive astrological rules. The purpose of the instruction is to support Alexander's military career and personal life. Aristotle claims to have received this knowledge from Hermes Trismegistus. There are very few studies dedicated to these fascinating and influential texts; therefore, this article offers a preliminary study of the PsAH that introduces the texts and their contexts systematically.

Despite the centrality of the concept of God in Christian theology and Western philosophy for over two millennia, little attention has been given the concept of God in twentieth-century occultism in general, and in the writings of Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) in particular.

This article traces the idea of neo-Gnosticism in a series of occult and new religious movements from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Specifically, the article examines the links between two controversial groups that both described themselves as modern forms of Gnosticism: first, the European esoteric group, the Ordo Templi Orientis, and second, the American new religion, the Church of Scientology. Founded by Theodor Reuss in Germany in the 1890s, the O.T.O. described itself as a form of "Gnostic Neo-Christian Templar" religion, with sexual magic as its primary ritual secret. Its most infamous leader, British occultist Aleister Crowley, also developed a full scale "Gnostic Mass" for the group. Many elements of the O.T.O. and Crowley's work were later picked up by none other than L. Ron Hubbard, the eclectic founder of Scientology, who also called his new church a "Gnostic religion," since it is the "knowing of knowing" (scientia + logos). To conclude, I will discuss the ways in which these Gnostic and occult elements within Scientology later became a source of embarrassment for the church and were eventually either obscured or denied altogether-in effect, obfuscated by still further layers of secrecy and concealment.

In the spring of 1946 L. Ron Hubbard and John W. Parsons performed a series of magical rituals with the aim of incarnating the Thelemic goddess Babalon in a human being. Hubbard’s cooperation with Parsons, known as the Babalon Working, remains one of the most controversial events in Hubbard’s pre-Scientology days. This article sets out to describe the content of the magical rituals, as well as their purpose. It is argued that in
order to fully understand these events, it is necessary to approach the Babalon Working from the study of Western esotericism in general, and the study of Enochian magic in particular.

A few years before the beginning of the Second World War, the rapprochement between socialism and western esotericism  would  be  outlined  in  France.  This  effort,  produced around the Collège de Sociologie as a reaction to Fascism, aimed to reactivate ideas and efforts that can be traced back to the French Revolution. The resulting meta-narrative,  constructed  by  various  intellectuals  around  Georges  Bataille,  including  Walter  Benjamin  and Pierre Klossowski, sought to establish its origins in Valentianism and, later, in Roman theology. The aim was to create an intellectual alternative to Marxism through the  ideas  of  Fourier,  Blanqui,  Sade,  and  Nietzsche  inventing  a  construct  that  would  decisively  influence Post-structuralism in the 1960s.KEYWORDSPALAVRAS-CHAVEMarxismo; História da historiografia; Walter BenjaminMarxism; History of Historiography; Walter BenjaminRenato Amado Peixotohttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-2342-4215