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(Arthur Versluis) Restoring Paradise Western Esot
(Arthur Versluis) Restoring Paradise Western Esot
Paradise
Western Esotericism, Literature,
Art, and Consciousness
Arthur Versluis
Restoring
Paradise
SUNY series in
Restoring
P a r a d i s e
Western Esotericism, Literature,
Art, and Consciousness
Arthur Versluis
S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Yo r k P re s s
Published by
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, ALBANY
2004 Arthur Versluis
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic,
electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise
without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
2004
2004045292
10
In memory of
poet and scholar
Kathleen Raine
Contents
Preface
ix
Acknowledgments
xi
What is Esoteric?
Initiatory Transmission and Western Esotericism
The Esoteric Imagination
1
Origins
17
Historical Currents
Divine Service: Chivalry and the Troubadours
Books within Books: Jewish Kabbalism
The Transfiguration of Earth: Alchemical Literature
The Divine Science: Theosophic, Pansophic,
Rosicrucian, and Masonic Literature
35
viii
CONTENTS
Modern Implications
87
159
Index
169
P re f a c e
ix
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgments to Brian Keeble, the estate of Cecil Collins and the
Tate Gallery for citations and images, including the adapted cover illustration,
The Music of Dawn from The Vision of the Fool and Other Works, (Ipswich:
Golgonooza, 1994) and Meditations, Poems, Pages from a Sketchbook (Ipswich:
Golgonooza, 1997); to Christopher Bamford and Lindisfarne Press for the citations from The Noble Traveller: The Life and Writings of O. V. de L. Milosz,
(West Stockbridge: Lindisfarne, 1985); and to Studies in Spirituality, to The
Journal of Consciousness Studies, and to the editors of Gnostica 3, Mlanges offerts Antoine Faivre (Louven: Peeters, 2001), in which earlier versions of parts
of this book first appeared. My thanks to New Directions Publishing for permission to quote from the works of the poet H.D., in particular Tribute to the
Angels (excerpts) by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), from Trilogy, 1945 by Oxford
University Press; copyright renewed 1973 by Norman Holmes Pearson, and
The Walls Do Not Fall (excerpts) by Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), from Trilogy,
1944 by Oxford University Press; copyright renewed 1972 by Norman
Holmes Pearson. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Many thanks also to the various readers and editors of this book during the
course of its production, each of whom helped to make it a better work.
xi
I n t ro d u c t i o n :
I n i t i a t o r y Tr a n s m i s s i o n
and the Imagination
We find ourselves today at the edge of new vistas in scholarship, and one of the
most promising of these is what we may broadly term esoteric literature and art.
A wide range of new approaches to and renvisionments of Western history, religious, artistic, and otherwise, are now appearing, and these in turn may offer
us new ways to understand both our past and our present in surprising ways. Yet
for this to take place, we must begin to go beyond historical research in order to
understand not only who or what esoteric works, figures, or groups have been
overlooked or marginalized, but also, and perhaps even more critically, how esotericism is transmitted in the West. This is a vast and almost totally unexplored
field, and one that has ramifications in many directions, not least of all for the
understanding of art and literature.
In this book, we will focus on a single theme: that of how spiritual initiation
takes place in Western esoteric religious, literary, and artistic traditions from
antiquity to the present. As Steven Katz pointed out in Mysticism and Language
(1992), the study of mysticism, even apophatic mysticism, requires that one
consider the role that language plays in generating, provoking, or conveying
spiritual experiences.1 Here, I extend this question beyond mysticism to include
the full range of what are now termed Western esoteric traditions, of which
(in my definition) the mysticisms of an Eckhart or a Bhme, of The Cloud of
Unknowing and of eighteenth-century alchemical treatises form various sets
and subsets.2
In a model that I outline in two articles on method in the study of esotericism, I argue that esotericism has as its central characteristic gnosis, meaning
experiential insight into the nature of the divine as manifested in the individual
and in the cosmos.3 Gnosis may be divided into two broad categories: cosmological, and metaphysical or transcendent. These are not, however, mutually
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INTRODUCTION
Why? For the first time in several hundred years, many people have realized
that despite all the material comforts made possible by our machinery, their
inner lives have become progressively more barren. Thus many have begun to
cast about for ways to enrich their inner or spiritual lives, and so a welter of new
religious movements and groups has emerged. In many respects, our time resembles the early Christian era, when a panoply of religions, sects, and cults existed side by side, proliferating wildly. To navigate ones way through these
movements, and to understand their patterns and meaning, it is more than useful to recognize whence they have emerged, what their predecessors are.5
But there are other reasons why an examination of the Western esoteric traditions might be especially apropos today. Chief among them is the growing
conviction that positivism is bankrupt. This is without doubt the reason that
there are so many new religious movementscombined with a widespread distrust and even ridicule of Christianity, which increasingly in the West seems to
intellectuals to be moribund except as a social phenomenon. Thus, when we
look at Western societies, we find on the social front, and particularly in the
radical ecology movement, an awareness that modern machinery for all its
power impoverishes both outer and inner nature. At the same time on the religious front, we find a definite prejudice in post-Christian societies against
Christianity in general, which is often seen either as outdated, or as oppressive
and as having spawned the destructiveness of modernity, while at the same time
we find reactionary fundamentalist Christian sectarianism that often only fuels
others disdain for Christianity.
Given the present openness of many people to criticism of modernity, and to
alternative forms of spirituality, we readily can see why the time is ripe for a
revaluation of the Western esoteric traditions in light of our contemporary situation. By looking more closely at the origin, nature, and continuity of the
Western esoteric traditions, therefore, we will not only be uncovering littleknown aspects of bygone days, but in fact be discovering fundamental keys to
understanding both the European esoteric inheritance, and ways beyond the impasse at which we find ourselves today. Western esotericism is, of course, a vast
field, and there are many treasures to be found there.
Yet beyond the pleasure of discovery we will find something else: for the
more we study the field of Western esotericism, the more we come to see certain underlying patterns. And underlying these is, in my view, a single primary
and overarching metaphor that we will be able to trace throughout the Western
traditions in all their variety, a metaphor that illuminates not only all the various disciplines and traditions, but even sheds light on the very nature of being
human. For as we will see, the Western esoteric traditions, despite their often almost bewildering variety, are fundamentally about reading: about reading nature, about reading the stars, about reading as discovering esoteric knowledge
of ourselves and of the cosmos.
R E S T O R I N G PA R A D I S E
This theme of reading, in other words, is much deeper than it might at first
appear, and will require much elaboration. But we can at least begin by considering how reading is largely regarded today as nothing more than the accumulation of information through decoding writingindeed, we have developed
machines that read, itself a metaphor for our time. By contrast, reading in the
Western esoteric traditions has to do not merely with accumulating data, but
with consciousness itself. Reading here is defined in the broadest possible way,
as penetrating into the hidden mysteries of all that we see. What is more, reading in this context extends beyond ratiocinative knowledge limited to a split between the reading subject and the object to be studied: instead, reading here
guides one toward gnosis, or spiritual knowledge.
The word gnosis, Greek in origin, refers to spiritual knowledge, but not necessarily knowledge in the sense in which we use the term today. Knowledge
in contemporary usage is essentially data, that is, the accumulation of facts
based in an apparently insurmountable division between self and other: I accumulate facts about what is not-I. Unexamined here, however, is the nature
of the I and the not-I in question. For the Western esoteric traditions approach such questions from a totally different view: for them, the I is recognized to be not stable but fluid, and thus there are no permanent divisions
between I and the cosmos. The I need not remain at the mercy of its own
selfishness, but can be transmuted, progressively realizing its fundamental
identity with plants and animals, minerals and stars, and ultimately with the divine. Thus we can see that spiritual knowledge is of a different order than contemporary secular or scientific knowledge, for it is grounded not in separation
but in union.
The mystery of reading is, of course, also about union. When we read a
novel, we enter into anothers world; we feel as someone else feels, imaginatively enter into different lives. Likewise, when we read the works of an Emerson, we are not merely passive observers of a great aphorist, but in some sense
leap the gap between ourselves and the author so as to actively participate in the
writing. And when we read a great poem, we do not remain just a cataloguer of
this or that remarkable confluence of words, but experience the marvel of living metaphor and rhythm for ourselves. In every experience of literature, there
is also a union: we as readers are participating in the mind of the writer through
the miraculous medium of the written word. If there are great writers, so too
there are great readers, and each requires the other.
The view of reading and literature that I have just articulated is far from the
more widespread contemporary assertion that writing and reading are merely
about the exchange of information through signs, yet this view of union is one
that most and perhaps all literary readers and authors will intuitively recognize;
it is at the heart of the Western literary continuum. Why do we travel with
Dantes pilgrim through hell, purgatory, and heaven; why do we travel with
INTRODUCTION
Piers Ploughman among riddles and toward the apocalypse; what is the attraction of Melvilles Ishmael? These works, like so many others, are full of mysterious symbols and intricate encoded wordplays; and when we read them, we
travel ever more deeply into the worldview of the authors, perhaps even experiencing hierophanxic moments of insight during which we suddenly see ourselves and the world around us in a new light.
We make connections; we understand. I am not arguing that such insights
are identical to what one might experience when working in one of the Western
esoteric traditions; but I am arguing that Western literature owes a very great
deal indeed to the Western esoteric traditions, and during the course of this
book we will begin to unveil just how significant is this indebtedness. This experience of union between author and reader I have alluded to is a literary and
secularized form of what we find in Western esotericism. What is more, we will
see that literature (in the broadest sense of this word) is fundamentally about
consciousness, that at their heart the Western esoteric traditions are about reading the worlds and our own secrets, not about accumulating more information,
but about qualitatively different ways of understanding who we are, where we
are from, and where we are going.
When I refer to literature in the broadest sense of this word, I am extending the word beyond its usual implication: the canonical (or noncanonical) series of more or less conventional authors from Homer to Dante and Chaucer to
Milton. Here literature refers also to alchemical treatises and to visionary
narrations, to intensely complex theosophic works such as those of Jacob
Bhme, in short to the full range of esoteric literature. Using the word literature
in this way in no way implies that these works are only literarythat is to say,
that their authors did not take them seriously as alchemical or spiritual treatises.
Rather, it is to suggest that these works exist on a spectrum that also includes
poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, and that all of what we today call literature
owes a very great deal to what I will call here the mysteries of the word.
Although we will begin to unravel the intricacies of these mysteries of the
word later, it will be useful to comment now on what is implied by this term.
It is often commonly supposed that the written word is inherently inferior to
the spoken or oral tradition, a supposition with a long history that goes back at
least to Plato in his Phaedrus. But when we begin looking at the Western esoteric traditions, we find that the written word is often seen not only as a means
of transmitting spiritual understanding, but even as a vehicle for attaining spiritual understanding. This is not to say that the written word is privileged over
the oral tradition, but neither is it to say that the written word is disparaged. As
we look closer at the specific currents of Western esotericism, we will unveil
various facets of what I believe are approaches to spirituality via literature that
inform all of them. The mysteries of the word represented in these various esoteric traditions are historical predecessors to and influences on what we now
R E S T O R I N G PA R A D I S E
INTRODUCTION
ways, so too that choice still exists today. Indeed, as we rediscover the Western
esoteric traditions, particularly in light of their counterparts in the Asian esoteric traditions, it may well be that out of this juncture will come a kind of cultural renaissance. But it is not particularly fruitful to speculate about social
transformation in this field, for Western esotericism entails individual awakening, perhaps symbolized best by the figure of someone reading an esoteric
work from long ago. The reader, alone with an author, alone communing with
the alone through the medium of wordsthis is the figure that will govern our
journey through Western esotericism, literature, and consciousness.
W H AT I S E S O T E R I C ?
The word esoteric is used today in a variety of ways, and so to maintain clarity,
we need to survey some of its meanings as well as to define it for our own purposes here. In Western Europe, esoteric popularly has become almost synonymous with New Age, fundamentally a marketing category for merchandise. One
finds under the rubric esoterik books on topics like pendulum dowsing, crystals, and so forth. And in North America as well, one finds esoteric sometimes
referring to an eclectic or syncretic collection of merchandise drawn from a
wide range of cultures, and even from purportedly extraterrestrial origins. But
the fact remains that there are also figures, works, and groups in Western European and North American history, particularly from the Renaissance and
early modern periods, that are intellectually influential and that are only now
becoming more widely studied in universities. And indeed, the academic study
of esotericism is a developing field that may be succinctly and without derogation termed esoteric studies.
In an effort to define the academic study of esoteric figures or groups and
to separate it from popular definitions, in the latter quarter of the twentieth
century, French scholar Antoine Faivre emphasized the word esotericismas
opposed to esoterismand developed a set of largely cosmological characteristics that he saw as characterizing most Western esoteric individuals and
groups from the Renaissance into the early twentieth century.6 Subsequently,
however, Dutch scholar Wouter Hanegraaff demonstrated that late twentiethcentury New Age movements and individuals (at least the somewhat less intellectually frothy) were frequently indebted to earlier currents of Western
esotericism, thus opening the field up to scholarship on contemporary as well
as much earlier historical figures.
But the question remains: how does one define esoteric in a satisfactory way?
If one employs the largely cosmological characteristics proposed by Faivre, one
de facto excludes many authors or groups whose works might be categorized
under the heading mysticism or gnosticexcept if they display an interest in,
R E S T O R I N G PA R A D I S E
I N I T I AT O R Y T R A N S M I S S I O N
AND WESTERN ESOTERICISM
In order to delve into the field of Western esotericism in relation to language
and consciousness, we also will need to consider the nature of initiation. This
word carries a range of meanings, so we must begin by considering it. Literally,
of course, the word means beginning, and this significance continues
throughout its other meanings as well. The initiate is one who has entered into
a tradition or group. But beyond this, the word initiation takes on a variety of
implications. In anthropology, the word generally is used for adolescents who
undergo a tribal ritual and thereby enter into the community of adults. This is
the sense in which the word is used by, for instance, Jean La Fontaine in Initiation, where he writes that the subject of his book is rituals of initiation in the
common sense of the term; that is, rituals of admission into secret societies . . .
as well as those [rituals] which mark the passage between childhood and maturity.7 But he hastens to add that initiation cannot be defined simply as ritual
INTRODUCTION
admissions to groups, secret or not, because there are other elements generally
involved. Among these are acquisition of powers through secret or special
knowledge, and the crossing of a ritual boundary into special status defined by
that knowledge. La Fontaine offers as examples of initiation several tribal
groups and Freemasonry, and offers a largely sociological analysis of them.
Yet there are other elements of initiation not dealt with in La Fontaines anthopological perspective that we must also consider. Mircea Eliade, in Symbolism of the Initiatory Death, draws our attention to initiation as a religious
phenomenon, arguing that initiation entails a liquidation of ones past and historical identity, and a rentry into an immaculate, open existence, untainted by
Time.8 Initiation, from a religious perspective, is a rebirth, a transition to a new
or renewed mode of existence, a regeneration. This regeneration may take the
form of transitional suffering in actuality, or it may entail symbolic suffering or
entry into darkness and symbolic death, but in either case the initiate goes
through a probationary period and then is born again into timelessness or immortality. This religious dimension of initiation is less commonly dealt with in
contemporary social anthropology, but it is in fact closely tied with another
aspect, that of lineage.
Indeed, when we look at some religious traditions, we find that there is
clearly an initiatory transmission of lineage carefully maintained. Examples of
this can be found in Sufism, for instance, where the shaikh or master is the
pupil of an earlier shaikh, whose line can thus be traced back historically to its
founder as well as to the revelation of Muhammed. A similar concept of lineage
can be found in Zen Buddhism, where in order to become a master or teacher,
one must undergo considerable training, eventually receiving inka, or official
recognition and entry into the historical lineage that goes back not only to the
founder of that Zen lineage but to Shakyamuni Buddha himself. The concept
here is that the historical lineage serves to convey the original and timeless spiritual insight of its originator; so the archaic symbolism of initiatory death and
rebirth to which Eliade referred is transposed into the context of spiritual training, the verification and acknowledgement of the master, and entry into the
company of the masters, at least for a few. Lineage, in other words, is historical transmission that can be traced from master to disciple who becomes master, who in turn has disciples, who in turn . . .
Yet when we turn to Western European esoteric traditions, we find comparatively little of this pattern of historical transmission. The notable exception is
Jewish Kabbalah, where there are in fact historical lineages of Kabbalistic masters; but when we turn to Christianity, or even to what may loosely be classified
under Hermeticism (including alchemical and magical currents), we find
somewhat less emphasis on such historical lines of transmission. And in fact
the history of European Christianity reveals an unusual kind of bifurcation: on
the one hand, we find a recurring tendency toward scriptural literalism and an
10
R E S T O R I N G PA R A D I S E
INTRODUCTION
11
soluble by the rational mind and to propel the practitioner toward kensho (insight) or satori (awakening). The pupil is confronted with a koan by the master, eventually solves it with a spiritual realization, and then moves to another
koan in a more or less standardized series. The depiction of the koan tradition
as irrational has long been criticized, however; in his Shobogenzo, Dogen
(12001253) heaped scorn on the idea of koan as irrational, and recent scholarship confirms that the koan traditions in Zen Buddhism are far more sophisticated than popular depictions of them might have it.
In a provocative article entitled Koan and Kensho in the Rinzai Zen Curriculum, Victor Sogen Hori argues that it is mistaken to hold that koans are a
means for ascending out of thought and language into a state of pure consciousness. This is fundamentally a Rousseauian notion of the individual as
originally pure but polluted by society and language, joined to a view of Zen
Buddhism as a way of escaping the pollution of society and language back to
an original pureness beyond language. Hori insists instead on what he terms a
realizational model of understanding Zen koans. From this viewpoint,
kensho is not a state of noncognitive consciousness awaiting the monk on
the other side of the limits of rationality. In the context of the Rinzai koan
curriculum, kensho is the realization of nonduality within ordinary conventional experience. If kensho is to be described as a breakthrough, then
it is a breakthrough not out of, but into conventional consciousness . . . If
kensho is the realization of nonduality, then it itself cannot be separate
and distinct from ordinary dualistic experience.10
Hori goes on to make the following final point. At one time, we may have
thought that freedom lay in ascent beyond gravity, but once we escaped the
earths gravitational field, we discovered that we float helpless and uncontrolled without gravity. Freedom in fact lies in gravity, not beyond it. Hori
concludes: Just as there is no free flying above the reach of gravity, there is
no Zen enlightenment beyond thought and language in a realm of pure consciousness. Instead of blaming thought and language for defiling a primordial
consciousness, one should recognize that only in thought and language can
enlightenment be realized.11
This is, I believe, a profoundly important point not only insofar as Zen Buddhist koan study is concerned, but also as regards Western esoteric traditions.
Esoteric literature and artof which koans are in fact an examplemay be
seen as both pointing toward and as an expression of cosmological or metaphysical gnosis. Esoteric knowledge is expressed through literature and art,
through language and image, but this is by no means to say that therefore there
is no such thing as nonconceptual or transcendent knowledge unmediated by
language or image. It has become more or less commonplace for specialists in
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R E S T O R I N G PA R A D I S E
mysticism to attempt to legislate mystical or gnostic knowledge out of existence by claiming that the gnostic is merely entering or deploying another form
of conceptual language, the implication being that there is no such thing as
gnosis. But that is not at all what I am arguing herefar from it.
Rather, I am arguing that in Western esoteric traditions, literature and art
play a very special kind of initiatory role. This role may be seen in some respects as analogous to that of the Zen Buddhist koan. Like the koan, an alchemical treatise stands as an enigmatic representation of a transmutative
process, and the work of the practitioner is to enter into and realize for himself the truths that it contains. The koan derives its name from a judicial term,
and in fact represents a test for the neophyte: one has to realize the nondual
truth that it represents and have this confirmed by a masters judgment. The
same is true of the alchemical or gnostic treatise: the neophyte must work
with and through it, frustrating though this may be, until he has penetrated to
its authentic meaning.
What makes Western esotericism different above all, I believe, is the pervasive lack of initiatory lineages and thus of the immediate reproof or approval of
a living teacher. In the absence of a well-recognized line of historical masters,
the weight of initiatory transmission is transposed to literary and artistic works,
and thus also to the individual. This is not to say that the West had or, for that
matter, has no one capable of discerning a right understanding from a wrong
one, nor to say that there are no examples of initiatory lineages at all like those
of Zen Buddhism. Rather, I am arguing that in the West, esoteric literature and
art can function rather like the koan in Zen Buddhism, as means of initiation,
and that this is in fact the primary means of initiatory transmission in the
Westthrough word and image.
T H E E S O T E R I C I M A G I N AT I O N
The word imagination of course derives from image, but what is the nature of
the images perceived by the imaginative faculty? Are images merely phantasms
of ones own mind, or are they manifestations of some other reality beyond oneself? Or, as I will propose here, is there a third interpretation that lies somewhere between these two? Such questions are important because the
imaginative faculty is so vital to creating and to understanding literary and
artistic works, particularly those that clearly are esoteric in nature.
If we believe that the imagination is more or less exclusively individualistic,
as in individual daydreams, then we cannot really speak of literature or the arts
as being the vehicle of an initiatory or transmutative process. But in fact we
know from our own experience as readers that literature is a means by which
we participate in an intermediate world or mesocosm created by an author. By
INTRODUCTION
13
its very nature, literature demands an audience who participates in creating the
characters, the images, the action by the act of reading or viewing. Imaginative
participation is fundamental to art, literary or otherwise.
Esoteric works draw upon this fundamental participation or sharing between
the creator and the audience in order to entice, guide, or provoke the reader toward a gnostic shift in consciousness, toward perceiving the world in a fundamentally new way. This process takes place through the imaginative faculty,
using the term in a broad sense to mean the readers or audiences openness to
the esoteric work. Imagination, in other words, refers to the sympathetic capacity of the reader or audience to participate in a work and to be transmuted by
it, an initiatory process that takes place through words and image, or through
what we may also call the induced vision of art.
Obviously, not all literature or art is esoteric or initiatory, even though all
calls for imaginative participation on the part of the reader or audience. What
differentiates the esoteric work from others is the evident intent of the author
that the work is esoteric and initiatory. For example, it is clear from its beginning that John Pordages Letter on the Philosophic Stone (ca. 1675) is intended for a reader who has passed a certain milestone in alchemical practice
and now seeks further guidance; it is not for a general readership, but intended
as a guide for the individual practitioner, and employs parabolic language and
images to that end.
A literary or artistic work is esoteric not only when it conveys certain hidden
meanings to an audience, but also and even more because it entails a mutual intent on the part of the creator and the works audience. Pordages letter is not accidentally or unconsciously esotericit is quite deliberately so. We might even
go so far as to suggest that an expressed or implied intent on the part of an esoteric works creator is a defining characteristic of such works: it forms a kind
of ritual initiatory boundary. This work is circumscribed; it is for the few; and
those who enter into it do so in order to undergo the process that it embodies.
This is the spirit in which an esoteric work is created and read or experienced.
Although we could describe an esoteric work as a journey or the account of
a journey, this would be in fact metaphoric for a process of transmutation. The
reader or audience does not travel outwardly but inwardly, and hence the
metaphoric journey might better be termed a sojourn, an entry into and residence in a visionary realm hidden from ratiocinative knowledge. One has to
enter into and dwell in the imaginative realm the creator generates (or reveals)
through the work, and doing so is an initiatory process through which the
reader or audience develops cosmological or metaphysical insights.12
As a result, one cannot read esoteric works in the same way that one reads or
perceives exoteric art without doing them an injustice. For instance, if one were
to attempt to read John Pordages treatise Sophia as symptomatic of delusions
on his part, this very perspective would make it impossible from the outset to
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R E S T O R I N G PA R A D I S E
enter into the work and imaginatively undergo the process of awakening to the
hidden realm that he is describing. This is a pervasive problem today because
literary theoretical conventions tend to be hostile toward the very imaginative
sympathy without which the reader is divorced from the work and cannot enter
it but can only analyze it from without.
We can thus posit three kinds of readers of esoteric works:
1. Closed readersthose who come to a work with predetermined theses that
disallow their imaginative entry;
2. Sympathetic readers, who enter into a work imaginatively; and
3. Initiates, who see the work as mirroring a process that they seek to undergo
in themselves.
I am arguing here that readers must belong to at least the second of these two
categories in order to genuinely begin to study and understand esoteric works.
This does not mean that one jettisons reason and becomes a true believer, only
that one has to make the effort to understand an esoteric work as much as possible sympathetically from an imaginative entry into its realm. When Jacob
Bhme wrote that his writings were not for those hostile to them (who would
be better off not looking at them at all) he meant that the works are indeed esoteric, and nothing less; to understand them, one must enter into them openly
and on their own terms, not ones own.
This leads us inevitably to the question with which we began, of whether that
which is imagined or revealed in an esoteric work possesses any existence of its
own. From a contemporary rationalist perspective one might answer no, but
this would be a purely exoteric answer that objectified the esoteric work of literature or art, thus sealing it off from oneself as merely an object to be manipulated by the intellect and revealing oneself as a closed reader. Yet if we answer
yes, we may well then be positing the realm of the imagination itself as something objectified that exists outside oneself, and this too presents problems, analogous to that of the Zen student who seeks an objectified, graspable solution to
a koan. But there is a third perspective, which is what I am proposing here.
For one does not have to conceive of imagination as a purely individual generative capacity; imagination could also be seen as a faculty of perception and
transmutation. When one reads an esoteric work like John Pordages treatise on
Sophia, one is in fact entering imaginatively into the process Pordage is describing, a process explicitly closed to the exoteric reader. Pordage writes that
in the Sophianic process of imaginative vision, Sophia (divine Wisdom) herself
tells him (the gnostic) that I am come to make in you yourself this new invisible creation, inwardly in you and not constructed outside you. The gnostic, in
other words, has awakened in him by divine Wisdom the creative power that
brings external existence into being, but here a new magical earth is brought
INTRODUCTION
15
into being in him out of the Ungrund.13 This new paradisal earth is in the gnostic; it is generated through the creative power of Sophia and perceived through
the gnostic imagination.
In other words, what the gnostic imagination perceives is what the creative
power of Wisdom within it creates. The paradisal earth that Sophia creates is
not external to the gnostic, but neither is it wholly internal as a creation of the
gnostic. This intermediate or mesocosmic state is precisely what allows
Pordages treatise to be initiatory for the reader: his work is a guide to his own
gnostic experience, but it opens the same possibility up to the reader because
the paradisal or magical earth can also be created in the reader who undergoes
the same process of awakening. It is not so much a matter of visualization by an
individual, but rather a matter of perceiving (being open to) an inner creative
process. This process belongs neither solely to the individual gnostic nor solely
to an outside power, but resides in a continuum between the two.
This continuum is what makes possible not only Pordages gnostic experience of inner creation and a visionary paradisal earth, but also the co-experience of the reader who participates in this process by reading the treatise. What
is more, one can extend this analogically to all creative efforts, inasmuch as the
author or artist is allowing an imaginative process to take place within, exteriorizing it through a work of art in which others can participate, and in that work
projecting a mesocosmic creative realm in which we can recognize aspects of
ourselves anew. The realm of the imagination, then, is by its very nature one of
co-creation, taking place in a continuum in which divine power works and in
which the reader or audience can participate vicariously at least.
Thus imagination belongs neither to oneself nor to divine power alone, since
in either case there would be no co-creator or perceiver. Imagination takes place
in a continuum of co-creation belonging to the gnostic who perceives, to the divine power within that creates, and to the audience or initiate who vicariously
participates in or witnesses the work and so has awakened the possibilities that
the work represents. At work is a spontaneous inner generation of images for
the gnostic, but these images exist in a mesocosmic realm between the gnostic
and the divine; they represent divine manifestation in the gnostic faculty of
imagination so that the gnostic can perceive and be guided toward what they
represent and, if those images and that gnostic process are then also manifested
in a work of art, then that work also belongs to this continuum and guides others into the same process of imaginative awakening. This, in sum, is an initiatory process manifested through literature and art.
Origins
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ORIGINS
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who insisted that there was an orthodox gnosis and that it is the crown of
faith. There have been many gnostics since who have also insisted that they remain orthodox, however much their literalist opponents think differently. Likewise, there were some gnostics who were not far from historicist Christianity,
and whose primary emphasis was on morality, asceticism, and spiritual illumination. Who was rejected as heretical, and who else was accepted as orthodox,
often seems more like an accident of history than an inevitability.
But there remains a spectrum in antiquity nonetheless, and it is the esoteric
side of it that interests us here, for in it we find the predecessors of all the later
Western esoteric traditions. It is particularly useful to consider Gnostic spiritual
traditions in light of what we have said regarding language. For instance, some
Gnostic groups laid great emphasis on the inner meanings of language, and
were reputed to use certain letters as intonations similar to mantras in Hinduism and Buddhism. Their repetition and intonation of certain letter combinations were ridiculed by literally minded Christians, but make a great deal more
sense when one considers that language in this context is not merely a matter of
transferring data, but of communication, and communion, that is, of communing with the power that the letters correspond to. And we in fact find such
strings of apparently nonsensical letters, chiefly vowels, in some of the Gnostic
treatises of the Nag Hammadi library.
This use of language is fundamentally different from what we ordinarily expect: whereas usual comunication is horizontal, here it is vertical, a means not
for one equal to convey information to another, but for a person to experience
an organizing principle of creation itself. We may recall the first line of the
Book of John: In the beginning was the Word, or In the beginning was the
Logos. Logos here refers to that which precedes and transcends manifestation, the seeds of all things, corresponding in some respects to the Platonic archetypes. These vibratory seeds human beings may contact or activate through
spiritual practice and in this way be in touch with the powers that inform creation itself; but such an approach is not for everyone. In general, it is reserved
for those who are capable of it, who are worthy of it, and who will not use its
power for selfish purposes.
We find a similar approach to language visible in Jewish esotericism in the
doctrine of the Shemhamphorash, or sacred Names of God: by vibrating the
names of God in the permutations of the sacred letters and by knowing their
proper, true pronunciation, one is in touch with inconceivable power. Such doctrines of the hidden names of God, in turn allied with similar numericalalphabetical mysticism involving the angels, are prevalent in Jewish esotericism
during precisely the same time that Christian Gnosticism was flourishing, and in
fact close scrutiny of this time suggests that Jewish and Christian esotericisms
are so intermingled as to be virtually inseparable. Scholem remarks that Merkabah mysticism of the third and fourth centuries drew upon Greek language, just
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as Greek Christian mysticism drew upon Hebrew or Aramaic terms.1 And indeed
there is an ancient tradition that the Torah contains so much power in its letters
that it could destroy the world, so the letters were altered; but if the letters were
properly restored, inconceivable power would be set loose.
All of this is to suggest that there was in antiquity in Jewish and Christian
esoteric circles a very widespread gnosis of language which was grounded in
writing, and to which we may refer as a gnosis of the word, which undoubtedly
drew upon and incorporated elements of the Greek mystery traditions even as
they differed from the Greeks in their emphasis upon writing down the mysteries and then writing down commentaries upon the previous writings. This gnosis of the word represents a fixing of the mysteries, as does the creation of
images, and its aim is twofold at least: microcosmically, its purpose is to restore
the individual to a paradisal or transcendent state; and macrocosmically, it is to
restore the cosmos itself to its paradisal condition. The letters, as principles of
creation itself, are a means to creations redemption; and in this regard man
may be said to complete the work of God by being co-creator or co-redemptor.
Letters and numbers, then, are means in this process of individual and cosmic redemptionand so too are images. Both Jewish and Christian gnostic esoteric groups tended to think and express themselves mythologically, through
images, and so we find numerous images from antiquity like lion-headed serpents, basilisks, and so forth. Such images are often found on amulets or talismans and are generally regarded as being magical elements in Gnosticism.
But given the gnosis of the word that we have been discussing, we can see how
these images fit rather well into the tradition: they represent again a means of
invoking and fixing the underlying powers or principles of creation itself;
such images represent divine aspects, and in fact are by no means absent from
the larger Christian tradition. We may remember the four animals that symbolize the four Gospels, and so forth, all of which is entirely accepted within the
orthodox tradition; and we may recall that Dionysius the Areopagite devoted
some effort to discussing how the divine may best be symbolized by unexpected and even grotesque images that keep us from mistaking a beautiful
image for the thing itself.2
Both the gnosis of the word and the gnosis of the image are extensions of
the monotheism of the book, and contain within them the seeds of the perennial struggle in all three forms of monotheism between those who take the
word literally and those who advocate gnosis. Both word and image reveal and
fix the divine, thereby making this conflict inevitable. But monotheism is a
rubric under which all manner of possibilities exist; and even if monotheism
often turns toward a fundamentalist literalism, one finds that from the very
beginning of our era the very same elements conduce also to a wide spectrum
of gnoses and hence to angelic polytheism and to nontheistic gnosis in which
the very concept of God is transcended, paradoxically conveyed often through
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T H E F I E L D O F T H E I M A G I N AT I O N
It is commonplace today to think of the imagination as a means of escapism
the word is roughly equivalent to daydreaming or to fantasy, and is generally
associated with the more or less random play of images. However, when we
survey the Western esoteric traditions, what we find is something quite different, which Henry Corbin called the active imagination. Active imagination
refers to the meeting of an individual and transcendent beings on an intermediate field that belongs completely neither to the transcendent nor to the mundane world. But such a term suggests that imagination is otherwise passive, and
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I do not believe this to be true. Rather, I believe that literature, mythology, and
visionary experience all emerge on a spectrum in the field of imagination.
But in order to understand the nature of this field of imagination, we will
begin by looking at visionary experiences during the first few centuries of the
present era, beginning with the Revelation to John. It is true that the Book of
Revelation recounts a visionary experience of John while he was exiled on the
island of Patmos, off the Greek coast. However, the Revelation definitely has a
literary form as well. It begins with some introductory remarks and salutations
to the seven churches, and introduces the experience with virtually no biography whatever, only Johns remark that he heard a great voice, turned, and the
auditory part of the vision began. Thereafter came a series of specific messages
to the individual churches, and only then, in the fourth chapter, came the following: After this I looked, and behold, a door was opened in heaven; and the
first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me . . . And
immediately I was in the spirit, and behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one
sat on the throne. These remarks begin the actual visionary sequence.
The visionary sequence in the Book of Revelation is, of course, quite well
known, and there is relatively little point here in elaborating its intricate numerical and visual symbolism, but it is worthwhile to remark on several aspects of it
in relation to Western esotericism more generally. Above all, there is the fact that
it is a direct individual revelation: John sees and hears Christ himself; he sees the
twenty-four elders, and numerous striking images including the beasts with eyes
before and behind them; and he interacts with them. His is not a passive vision
in which events only happen before him: in the fifth chapter, when he weeps, an
elder tells him to weep not; and in the tenth chapter, he is told to eat, and does eat,
a little book sweet as honey. Then, when he eats the book, an angel gives him a
rod by which he is to measure the temple of God and those that worship therein,
after which come the most prophetic and well known parts of the revelation.
The revelation of John takes place in an interworld, a mesocosm, or field of
the imagination, where John meets, questions, and is questioned by the angels or
divine powers, and where the earthly past, present, and future are visible, but take
place in their own time. At one point, John remarks that there was silence in
heaven for about half an hour (8:1), apparently visionary time. There are, in other
words, different kinds of time simultaneously here: there is the duration of the vision, and there is historical time spread out and glimpsed in symbols. Yet interestingly, there is no conclusion to the visionary sequence: we are never told that
John returned to ordinary consciousness. Although the vision has a beginning, in
this respect it does not appear to have an end: it is as though, once introduced to
this sequence, John does not entirely return from it except to say I, John, saw and
heard these things; the book concludes with the admonitions of Christ himself.
In addition to its being a direct spiritual experience, several other elements of
the Book of Revelation have remained particularly important in subsequent
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Western esotericism. One, of course, is the prophetic element: more than one
group has identified itself with the woman in the wilderness in the twelfth
chapter; and more than one group has seen itself as living during the end times.
Another such element is the number and letter symbolism, which has inspired
countless commentaries or explanations. Christs repeated assertion that I am the
Alpha and the Omega, as well as the repetition of geometric and numerical symbolism such as the sevens, twelves, and one hundred forty-fours, all remind us of
the prior traditions, found in Judaism, Christian Gnosticism, and Hermetism, of
letters and numbers revealing the secret powers of the divine. Taken together,
these elements lend themselves very much to an esoteric interpretation: the symbols and numbers represent a secret knowledge known by the few symbolically
designated as the woman in the wilderness, during these the end times.
But for our purposes, the most symbolically resonant image of all is that of
the book. In the tenth chapter, we will recall, John is given a little book to eat,
which he does, and finds it bitter in his belly, but sweet as honey on his lips.
John eats the little book: it becomes part of him, symbolizing his union with the
esoteric center of spiritual life. The entire revelation is an unveiling of gnosis, a
gnostic encounter with elders, angels, and Christ whose symbolic heart is the
written word, and by eating the book, John is united with its knowledge. This
image is amplified by the presence of book imagery throughout the entire
work, especially in the Book of Life wherein is written the names of those who
belong to the Lamb (13.9). Additionally, there are other books, which are
opened during the Last Judgment in order to see the lives of those being judged
(20.12). And then there is, of course, the very book that we are reading, the
Book of Revelation of St. John himselffor he is told to write by a voice from
heaven (14.13), and we are given warnings at his accounts end that no one
should add to or subtract from what is written in his book (22:18).
By reading the Book of Revelation that John subsequently writes after eating the little book, we are eating his little bookwe belong to a direct lineage
or current, and are in a sense initiates. The Revelation of John has an oneiric
quality; it is like a collective dream in which we participate simply by reading.
And it has immense power for this reason: by entering into its world of references, the way we see the cosmos itself changes. Every aspect of life is altered,
becoming symbolically charged. After the various accounts of Christs life and
death in the Gospels, we suddenly are given in the Revelation this overwhelming and astonishing visionary sequence that brings us completely outside the
sphere of mundane human life, revealing the hidden forces beyond history and
what happens to all humanity.
The Revelation, in other words, possesses a special luminosity of symbolism
that we may call hieroeidetic, symbolism charged with initiatory knowledge.
The word eidetikos in Greek refers to a particular kind of knowledge associated
with shape or form, and although the word eidolon early in the modern era
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Christianity itself, for although the Revelation is the most well known, it is
certainly not the only one.
And so we are drawn inexorably back to the nature of the book itself and the
act of reading. There are numerous ways one can approach a work as extravagant in symbolism, as wild as the book of Revelation, ranging from external to
internal, or from exoteric to esoteric. The most external or exoteric is to regard
it as an object of study, without relevance to oneself; a more intermediate or
mesoteric approach is to see it as prophetic and revealing truths about our own
world and lives; and an esoteric approach is to see it as paradigmatic and inspiring of ones own revelation, to make it ones own. In other words, reading
about anothers vision may inspire one to experience a vision of ones own; the
act of reading gives birth to the act of writing.
Esoteric bears the meaning of inward, of participation, and reading is
uniquely suited to create inward participation because in reading our habitual
boundaries between self and other can disappear. We can identify with fictional
or poetic characters; we can enter into a new world of symbols and meaning.
Esoteric literature, or put better, the literature of the Western esoteric traditions,
is a particularly intense form of this inner participation or identification and
union. But all literature takes place in the charged field of the imagination: it
is simply a matter of how charged, how hieroeidetic a work is. For just as one
may consider a work as charged as the book of Revelation from outside, objectifying it, or one may enter into itjust as there is a range of approaches to
such a workso too there is a range of such works. Some literature is not so
charged or hieroeidetic, and exists more for entertainment.
What is it that makes a work hieroeidetically charged? Proximity to the invisible, to the transcendent. There is an element of danger inherent in such
proximitythose who come too close to the gods or angels may go mad or
blind. The analogy of electricity, of being charged, has a certain value here: a
symbol or image, a constellation of letters and numbers, possesses a psychic or
symbolic charge that allures us; we are drawn toward it, fascinated by its mysterious beauty. And though we risk being burned, we return again and again
over the centuries because we recognize in this mystery something more alive,
more electric, more vital than the mundane world of consumerism and the
humdrum tedium of life without the invisible. We return to the field of the
imagination because this is where we come to know what it means to be alive.
ORIGINS
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ter, Ariadne, and a thread that led him out. The symbolism here is profound, and
certainly reflects the ancient Mithraic mystery symbolism of the bull, the
labyrinth of the world, and escape-rebirth. But perhaps we may adapt this symbolism to our own purposes, for when we consider the subject of gnosis, we too
find ourselves in a labyrinth, and require some thread to guide us out. This
thread is the topic of gnosis itself, for by exploring it, we will be far better prepared to understand the often bewildering variety of Western esoteric traditions.
The word gnosis, because it is singular, implies that there is but one kind of
gnosis, or spiritual knowledge. However, when we consider the range of religious literature, even that labeled gnostic, we seem to find a bewildering
spectrum of gnoses. We might divide this spectrum into cosmological gnosis
(insight into the hidden patterns in the cosmos), eschatological gnosis (insight
into what transcends history and the cosmos), and metaphysical gnosis (insight
into the divine), even though all of these may be seen as aspects of a single gnosis. And concerning metaphysical gnosis, or direct insight into the nature of the
divine itself, we find two primary approaches that we may call visionary and
unitive gnosis, corresponding to the via positiva and the via negativa discussed
by Dionysius the Areopagite. The via positiva, or visionary approach, goes
through images and the field of the imagination; the via negativa, or unitive
approach, is the falling away of all images.
It has become more or less commonplace, following Dionysius himself, to
see the via negativa as superior to the via positiva. Dionysius writes that sacred
revelation often proceeds through sacred images in which like represents like,
while also using forms that are dissimilar, and even entirely inadequate and
ridiculous (Cel. Hier. 140c). But he goes on to remark that a second way, of
going beyond images entirely in the via negativa, is more appropriate, for as
the secret and sacred tradition has instructed, God is in no way like the things
that have being, and we have no knowledge at all of his incomprehensible and
ineffable transcendence (Cel. Hier. 141a). What Dionysius observes here is
extremely important, in particular his insistence on a secret and sacred tradition
that the Divine completely transcends the realm of being.
Dionysiuss observationthat God in no way resembles the things that
have beingcombats a tendency that, as we have already noted, is common
to the traditions of the Book: taking writing literally. Literalism corresponds
to what in Judaism was called idolatry: it reduces the Divine to human concepts that can be manipulated. This tendency may also be called objectification, and is a common function of language more generally. For language by
its nature can separate us from what we are discussing: we objectify the Divine just as we objectify all that surrounds us, including nature and other people. But this process of objectification inherently separates us from what we
see in this way: the very word God becomes a barrier to experiencing what
that word means.
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In other words, gnostic knowledge is fundamentally different from ratiocinative knowledge, and the language to express gnosis must reflect this difference. Ratiocinative (from ratio, measure between things) knowledge belongs to
the realm of division into subject and object: I discuss that. Such is the basis
for modern science, and ratiocinative knowledge can be widely disseminated as
information or data. By contrast, gnosis belongs to a secret or intimate tradition
and cannot be widely disseminated as information because it does not belong to
the realm of information and division at all, but instead to what transcends division. The scientific or ratiocinative path moves toward ever greater data about
what is external; the gnostic path moves toward ever greater intimacy with what
transcends both internal and external. Gnosis, then, is not at all a matter of I
discussing that, but of going beyond the very division between I and that.
The question, of course, is how one moves toward gnostic knowledge, and
the answers to this question in the West comprise the Western esoteric traditions. The essential division offered by Dionysius the Areopagite between the
via positiva and the via negativa helps us begin to discuss these answers in a
schematic way, not because these two ways are at all opposed to each other, but
because they illuminate each other. Indeed, they correspond rather closely to
what we see in the Tibetan Buddhist Vajrayana tradition, where visualization
and a plethora of imagery express their own transcendence. The Prajnaparamita Sutra, with its verses on sheer transcendence of all that is sensory,
does not invalidate but expresses the ultimate meaning of the countless Buddhist images often in the very hall where it is chanted. Likewise, in the Western
esoteric traditions, one finds a vast range of imagery and means, but these are
generally seen within the traditions as an expression of what transcends them.
The problem here, and in language itself, is that it is all too easy to regard
words or images as if they were the thing itself, to fix or congeal the inconceivable. This is a particularly likely problem when there is no widespread emphasis on the transcendent, as there is within Buddhism, or any continuous
lineage of masters or teachers who could guide seekers or initiates. The Western esoteric traditions have largely remained catch-as-catch-can, defined perhaps best by the precarious relationship between an author and a reader through
the medium of the book. And the Gnostic Basilides evidently recognized this,
for in one of the only fragments attributed to him, he writes of the ineffable
transcendent nothing, and notes that what is called by a name is not absolutely
ineffable, but it is not, for the truly ineffable is not ineffable, but above every
name which is named [Eph. 1.21] . . . Names are inadequate . . . Instead, by understanding without speech one must receive the properties of the things
named (Hipp. Ref. VII.viii). Actual direct experience of the transcendent is far
more important than simply knowing the words.
Basilides held that he belonged to a secret lineage that ran from Jesus to
Matthias to himself, and primary in their revelation was nothingness, or
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sound that in turn manifests others, so that ultimately the enormous sea produced by a single letter is in fact infinite. This linguistic mysticism was represented in Gnostic practice by a secret initiation that consisted in the whispering
of holy words of power into the ear of one who had been tested, or who was
faithful and near death (Ref. VI.xxxvi). This name was composed of four syllables, the first of which had four letters, and the entire name had thirty letters.
One who pronounced the name was in fact pronouncing the powers that had
brought the cosmos itself into being, for each letter was also an angel and a
forming power.
All of this suggests that there was in Christian Gnosticism, just as there was
in Jewish Merkabah mysticism and in the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition, a developed metalanguage that both reflects and leads toward its own transcendence. Such a metalanguage is implicit both in the human being and in the
cosmos as a whole, so to penetrate into the deepest mysteries of human language is to penetrate into the metalanguage that gives birth to the cosmos itself.
From these observations we can begin to see something of the hidden significances of the mysticism of the word and the book. For to read the metalanguage
of the cosmos is truly to read the Book of Lifea figure for the hidden energies or powers that inform life both in the cosmos and in ourselves. Indeed, to
become privy to these mysteries is to penetrate beyond ordinary humanity and
to become divinized oneself.
Here we begin to see how the via negativa and the via positiva represent, not
opposite or even complementary ways, but different aspects of the same way, the
path from ordinary rational consciousness divided into subject and object, toward
transcendent degrees of consciousness of ever greater communion between subject and object. The gnostic visionary path is not separate from the way of negationrather, sacred images, words, and numbers emerge in, embody, and reveal
transcendence. As we read these images, we participate in what they represent;
we become intimate with them; apparent boundaries between subject and object
dissolve; and we enter into a realm where negation and affirmation are both recognized to be at once valid and invalid ways of expressing what transcends them
both. This is the realm sometimes glimpsed in literature, in dreams, and in religious experiences; it is the realm of living ideas or energies.
Throughout early Christian gnostic writings, we find plays on naming and
namelessness, always emerging out of this relationship between the expressed
and the inexpressible, between this world and the invisible realm of energies.
For instance, in the Gospel of Philip, we read that whereas in this world the
union is one of husband with wife, in the aeon the form of the union is different, although we refer to them by the same names.3 In other words, there is
earthly marriage, and there is another kind of marriage that takes place in the
invisible, or aeon, which is of a totally different order, and its light never sets.
One must receive the light in the bridal chamber before death, or one will
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not receive it after deathand one who receives that light is perfected and cannot be detained, but is free in life and in death. These figures or images of marriage and light are ways of expressing the inexpressible gnosis.
This inexpressible gnosis is the marriage or union of subject and object.
The Gospel of Philip goes on: And again when he leaves the world he has already received the truth in the images. The world has become the aeon, for the
aeon is fullness for him. This is the way it is: it is revealed to him alone, not hidden in the darkness and the night, but hidden in a perfect day and a holy light.4
In other words, when one dies, one has already experienced the mysteries for
oneself by reading and receiving the truth in the imagesnot only the images
of sacred words or symbols, but also the actual energies that these images embody or represent. Thus the world has become the aeonin other words, the
invisible and the visible are no longer divided for the initiate. The cosmos is no
longer opaque, a collection of objects from which one remains separate, but
rather, one can read the invisible in the visible, can see the energies ordinarily
veiled from humanity by its fallen, divided consciousness; for such a one the
world is transparent. The nameless and the named are not divided.
CONCLUSIONS
Although the Western esoteric traditions unquestionably have their origins in the
early centuries of the present era, I do not mean to suggest that there is a direct
current of influence running from relatively obscure works like the Gospel of
Philip or the lost writings of Basilides into medieval and modern times. Rather,
even though such writings somehow may have made their way into this or that
monastic library, my argument here is not about lines of influence so much as
about modalities, characteristic ways of understanding, gnostic paradigms, what
I call the red thread of gnosis that leads us out of the labyrinth. What are the
characteristics of this red thread as we trace it through history?
Naturally, the first of these is its inexpressibility: it remains always transcendent, elusive, the unnameable. This is as true for the canonically accepted
authors such as Clement of Alexandria or Dionysius the Areopagite as it is for
Valentinus or Basilides. But the inexpressible is so only by contrast with the expressible; unnameability emerges always out of the presence of names. The way
of negation is not the opposite of affirmation, but its inseparable companion.
And here we see emerging the second characteristic: the mystery of names. For
whether the gnostics belong to the Jewish Merkabah or the Christian Gnostic,
and perhaps to a lesser extent to the Hermetic or the Neoplatonic tradition, one
finds a gnosis of the divine names. Here naming refers, not to arbitrary designations, but to inherent characteristics of what is named, to actual energies that
the name itself embodies, evokes, indeed, is.
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tapestry meant not only to point toward the gnostic experience, but also to convey it. To read such a work properly is to ingest it, to become it, as John ingests
the little book in Revelation. Its mysteries of names, numbers, letters, words,
and images, taken together, are meant to permeate and transmute ones consciousness so that the invisible is no longer divided from the visible, so that one
no longer exists only in a rational separate consciousness in an objectified
world, but instead participates in the energies and powers that give rise to and
inform the cosmos, and indeed even begins to approach the highest mystery,
that of the inexpressible from which all of these gnoses derive and to which
they inevitably lead.
Thus we can see the outlines of the mysteries of the word and the book that
in turn give rise to the Western esoteric traditions. We can see that despite the
bewildering variety of traditions that existed in the first centuries of this era,
these gnostic characteristics remain visible, in one form or another, in the complex admixtures of Jewish, Christian, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and other currents that mingled to create the works we have been considering. And when we
look for these fundamental characteristics, we find that divisions between
heretical and orthodox, Jewish and Christian and Greek, often do not hold at
all. The esotericist or gnostic in antiquity, just as in the subsequent Western esoteric traditions, remains a heterodox figure drawing upon whatever myths,
words, images, and traditions best express his understanding. By following the
courses of Western esotericism, we will seek to trace the essential characteristics of each current and see whether or not at heart Western esotericism as a
whole exists on the border between religious and literary experience, whether,
from antiquity to the present, it remains a tradition of the mysteries of the book.
H i s t o r i c a l C u r re n t s
DIVINE SERVICE:
C H I VA L R Y A N D T H E T R O U B A D O U R S
It is, of course, a leap to go from the first centuries of the Christian era to the
Middle Ages, but we must do so in order to trace the Western esoteric traditions. It is true that there were important intervening figures like John Scotus
Eriugena, but here we are sketching the broad outlines of historical currents
drawing on individual works, so much must be left to catalogue elsewhere.
When we consider the emergence of Western esoteric traditions in the modern
era, we cannot help but recognize there the influence of chivalry, and so must
inquire whether the chivalric current had esoteric dimensions like those that we
glimpsed in antiquity in Gnostic and other movements. Here I am not arguing
that the chivalric or troubadour movements were gnostic, only investigating
whether there are elements corresponding to the mysticism of the word that we
saw in antiquity.
That there were profound correspondences between the chivalric and the
troubadour movements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of Europe is incontestable, for both are known to us through literature that reveals fundamentally similar attitudes. The chivalric ideals were conveyed through stories, and
the troubadours tradition was conveyed through poetry or song. Both the
chivalric and the troubadour traditions were centered on service or duty, and entailed a moral code much higher than that of the rest of society. The knight in
swearing fealty to his lord is engaged in a social relationship that can also have
spiritual implications: to act properly as a knight is also to fulfill ones higher
responsibility as a warrior for the divine. The troubadour, in giving honor to his
beloved, sees her (or him, if the poet is a woman) as the divine incarnate.
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Thus there is implicitly a dual quality to much of the writing associated with
each of these traditions. When a story is about a knights remaining true to his
word, it is implicitly also about his relationship to the divine; likewise, a troubadours poem also can be read on at least two levels, as referring to an actual
beloved woman and to the divine. When the troubadour or the knight pledges
troth to a woman, in the background is also his relationship to the invisible, and
thus there inherently are hidden dimensions to such poems or stories. And so
the chivalric and the troubadour traditions are fertile ground for esotericism,
that is to say, for hidden meanings not accessible to outsiders.
But was there any explicitly esoteric content in these traditions? In other
words, we have already seen the explicitly esoteric nature of Gnosticism and
other movements of the first few centuries C.E. Can we find anything approximating this earlier explicitly gnostic esotericism in the chivalric tales or the songs
of the troubadours? The answer, I think, is no. Both of these movements are fundamentally social in nature, particularly the chivalric tradition. There is esotericism visible on occasion in the stories written by individual authors or in
particular cycles, as for instance in the Grail cycles or in Parzival; there is esotericism visible in the songs of the troubadours. But when we look at these movements as a whole, they do not reflect what we see in those Merkabah or Gnostic
or Hermetic traditions explicitly devoted to knowledge of the transcendent.
Instead, the esotericism that we find in the chivalric or troubadour tradition
is allusive and elusive, even surreptitious, relying on implication and multivalent symbols, never explicitly discussing, for example, the souls liberation as
one finds in Gnostic treatises. Undoubtedly much of this allusiveness had to do
with the strictures imposed by the Roman Catholic church. One does find an
outright gnostic esotericism in the writings and sermons of Meister Eckhart and
Johannes Tauler, but these were not part of either the chivalric or troubadour
lines, and indeed even they ran afoul of church censors alert for any signs of
Gnosticisms recurrence.
Of course, the troubadour movement was close to esotericism proper, in that
it remained an individual and somewhat anarchic tradition that one joined by
self-election, and that may have also in some quarters engendered initiatory
groups. One such group was the fedeli damore, or loves faithful, who conveyed their mysteries through poetic references and imagery. But to this day the
precise nature of this or similar societies remains largely closed to us; we can
see in the poetry of the time that there was a mysterious amorous language that
referred both to carnal and divine love at once, but one doubts very much that
this reflects a widespread or organized esoteric tradition. Much more likely
that here, as in so much of Western esotericism to follow, individuals sought
and found as much as they could of such traditions on their own, perhaps occasionally forming themselves into larger groups only again to dissolve under
pressure from the church or from other social circumstances.
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and of how the servants of the Grail fell on their knees before the Grail, where
suddenly they saw it written that a knight would come, and if he asked a Question, then their sorrows would end, but if he were forewarned of the Question
it would turn harmful. He was to ask, of course, why the king sufferedbut
Parzival himself had not done this and thus had already failed.1
There are throughout this tale astrological references with esoteric implications. For instance, we are told explicitly that Anfortass suffering, and that of
all the Grail servers, intensifies with the advent of the high planets, chiefly
Saturn, but also with the changing of the moon, the two nodes of which are
called the dragons head and the dragons tail. This conclusively links the
planets to consciousness, in particular, Saturn to suffering. And near the end of
Eschenbachs story of Parzival, the knight is told by Feirifiz, the spotted knight,
of his good fortune and that he shall ask the Question. Feirifiz outlines why
Parzival shall do so by reference to the seven stars or planets, then naming
them one by one in Arabic.2 The presence in this tale of astrological and other
references to Judaism and Islam as well as to Asia (in the figure of Prester
John) reminds us once again that the Grail tradition, like so many of the Western esoteric currents, exists both within and without specific religious traditions; the Grail tradition is both independent and syncretic, just as is Western
esotericism more generally.
There remains one more aspect of the Grail tradition that we need to discuss further, and that is the exalted position of women. Throughout the tale,
whether it be Trevrizent or Eschenbach himself who advises, we are told to
honor women. The Grail, we will recall, was cared for by twenty-five women
who by serving it are exalted; and at the end of the tale, we are told again to
honor and never denigrate women. And at the books conclusion, we are left
with a curious twist on the mystery of naming, for a knight comes to live with
a princess on the condition that she never ask his name. When inevitably she
does so, he is forced to leavea repetition yet again of the constant theme
throughout Parzival, that of speaking when one ought to (asking the Question,
for instance) and of not speaking when one oughtnt. This theme clearly holds
for both men and women, and there is in this even a complementary relationship: a kingdom can be saved by asking the right question, and lost by asking
the wrong one!
Parzival is, of course, entertaining, but certainly it is safe to say that it also
contains esoteric references central to the tale. Yet this implicit esotericism, although intrinsic to the tale inasmuch as it concerns the mysteries of the holy
Grail and of the inscriptions upon it, never becomes explicit: the tale and the esotericism of the Grail that is its center never stray into otherworldly descriptions of journeys through the cosmos, or still less into discussions of spiritual
illumination. Rather, Parzival, like chivalric literature more generally, remains
this-worldly in emphasis, and indeed it may be that the fusion of this-worldli-
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ness and otherworldliness in the service of ones chivalric duties and of the
Grail is the key to chivalric literature more generally.
For one certainly finds the same theme illustrated in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight. Once again, in Gawain as in Parzival, the explicit story is clearly
one of virtue upheld; Gawain is the story of a virtuous knight on his travels.
But there is an implicit esotericism that emerges in the works center, in the
image of the pentangle, Gawains symbol. This famous passage, like several
others in the poem, is marked with a tiny colored initial, part of a scribal code
of letters that mark critical junctures in the work. And we should remember that
Gawain is alliterative poetry, part of a tradition that, as I have elsewhere shown,
is not simply the repetition of letters and numbers for the way they sound, but
a way of conveying secret or esoteric meanings within a poem outwardly devoted to the telling of a story.3 Thus the passage on the pentangle is nested
within a larger context of number and letter symbolism carried on by way of the
poems repetition of key letters and numbers.
This esoteric symbolism emerges especially in the authors discussion of
the pentangle, where we are told that this sign comes from Solomon himself,
and is associated not only with the five wits or five senses, but with the five
fingers, with the five wounds of Christ, the five joys of the Virgin Mary with
her Child, and, of course, the five virtues, these being liberality, loving kindness, continence, courtesy, and piety. All of these five categories add up to
twenty-five, the number of maidens serving the Grail, and are called together
the endless knot by the Gawain-poet, marking why Gawain is a fine man.
When Gawain, instead of trusting only in this endless knot of the pentangle, trusts instead in the knotted braided belt given him by Morgan le Fay,
he ultimately feels shamed; the first is the true knot, and the second that of
bewitchment and bewilderment.
Yet in the storys conclusion, when Gawain to his shame tells the story of
how he was fooled into wearing that braided belt, Arthur and the Knights of the
Round Table find the story not only funny but so instructive that they all decide
to wear a green girdle like Gawains. Thus the poem ends with the well known
motto Hony soyt qui mal pence, meaning that good comes forth out of evil.
And at this point we might remark on two aspects of this transformation. First,
the poem, like Grail tales more generally, reveals a fall and a redemption: the
characters go through suffering into a renewed union on a higher level. At the
end of Gawain, we see Arthur and the entire court laughing and enjoying
Gawains tale, and even wearing a sign of it themselvesa green one. And this
green marks my second point of observation.
For the color green has a special symbolism that recurs throughout medieval
literature and is especially prominent in Gawain. The Green Knight is a mysterious supernatural figure who puts Gawain to the test; and behind him is the
figure of Morgan le Fay, whose enchantments together with the Green Knight
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symbolize the bewitchments of the world, and the death that inheres in and underlies them. Thus we have a dual symbolism of womenthat is, the licit and
noble relationship symbolized by Guinevere, and the illicit, adulterous relationship offered by Morgan le Fay. This same duality inheres in the color green,
which on the one hand is associated with jealousy, yet on the other is associated
with the beauty of Venus. Or again, green is the color of nature, which can seem
so merciless and in which death is inevitable; yet it is also the symbol of new
life, growth, and renewal. Gawain, to be renewed, first must be humbled by the
Green Knight and symbolically die with a snick of his neck.
The symbolism of green here corresponds to that of a more esoteric group
around Rulman Merswin (13021387), a group called the Friends of God
who established a community called LIle Verte, or the Green Isle. The
Friends of God were, like the chivalric orders, not monastic or priestly, yet at
the same time, although a lay group, they set themselves apart from the rest of
society by their spiritual vocation. One finds at the center of the Friends of God
mysterious communications from a Gottesfreund vom oberland, under whose
spiritual guidance the circle proceeded. The Green Isle represents an intermediate realm of spiritual passage, and in fact the gnostic symbolism of green is
quite widespread, being found in Islam associated with Khidr, the hidden divine messenger, and continuing into at least the twentieth century in the novel
The Green Face of Gustav Meyrink. We might remark here that the Gottesfreunde had a Meisterbuch with a gnostic alphabet representing the twentythree aspects of the spiritual path.
But one does not find this kind of overt esotericism among the troubadours
and trouvres. Here even the kind of esotericism we find in the chivalric tales
is muted and filtered into literary forms, become beautiful and haunting lyrics.
One does find esoteric themes, as when the poet Bernart de Ventadorn
(11501180) writes Parlar degram ab cubertz entresans / e, pus nons val
arditz, valgues nos gens! [Let us talk in secret signs, / And since talking directly cant help us, perhaps cunning can.] Or again, there are the lines of the
young Raimbaut dOrange (c. 11501173) playing on namelessness and naming, occasioned by his observation that he cannot find a name for his verses.4
But this secret language is that of lovers, and although one can read such
poems on multiple levels, there is little hint in any of this of open or even
covert discussions of gnosis. Both chivalric and troubadour literary traditions
are allusive enough to accomodate esoteric interpretations, but they are almost
never explicitly esoteric.
Among the most explicitly esoteric of medieval poems more generally is La
Vita Nuova by Dante, which begins by discussing the book of memory, and
then the lines written down in his little book that he entitles The New Life. La
Vita Nuova is full of esoteric implications from its very beginning. Recalling
the emphasis that Eschenbach laid on the astrological timing surrounding the
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Grail, we cannot help but note the complex numerical and astrological symbolism with which Dante begins his poem: Nine times since my birth had the
heaven of light returned to the same point in its revolution when first I laid eyes
on that glorious Lady, she called Beatrice by those who nonetheless fully do not
know her name. The number nine recurs in various ways throughout the poem,
as does the play that we see here on naming.
But there is more that ties this work to the esoteric lines we are tracing
through history. La Vita Nuova, like the great Divine Comedy, is a visionary
poem; Beatrice herself appears to Dante in a crimson dress as if she were an apparition, and exactly nine years later, in the ninth hour of the day, Dante sees
Beatrice again, this time wearing a white dress. So too does Love appear to him
in terrible aspect during the beginning of the nights nine last hours, ruling over
him by virtue of a strong imagination. The strong imagination to which Dante
refers is not just daydreaming, but the faculty of imaginal perception, and is in
the tradition of the Book of Revelation, albeit more literary.
There is, of course, an intervening figure in the tradition, that being
Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius, who lived during the fifth
century, was imprisoned and preparing to die when he wrote his Consolation as
a summary of his understanding. In De consolatione, Boethius meets while in
prison the divine figure of Philosophia, who wishes to restore him to spiritual
health by awakening his celestial memory and recalling him to his proper state
of mind. Boethius goes on a journey of celestial memory that takes him to his
true origin beyond the sphere of the stars. And of course, all of this corresponds
closely to what we see in Dantes Vita Nuova, where Dante is upbraided by the
divine figure of Beatrice, calls upon the book of memory, and at the poems
end sends a sigh upward beyond the farthest sphere, where a new perception
shows it a Lady of light.
Dante ends this strange work, full of images, poems, and his commentary,
with a final vision about which he will not now write. This is, of course, an allusion to the coming extraordinary visionary journey of the Divine Comedy,
but it is also bringing Vita Nuova to the closure of silence. The poetic work
emerges out of a pregnant silence in order to unfold Dantes vision of celestial
memory with glittering poetic images of his divine Beatrice, thrice-blessed
Lady, and it turns back to that silence again at the end. Within the works visionary interworld we enter into an archetypal realm of celestial numbers reverberating in time, and of beautiful images shimmering in space; and here, as
in the Divine Comedy, we end by passing beyond space, time, and words and
ideas into the empyrean.
Thus Dantes greatest works, Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy, though
certainly showing the influence of the troubadour tradition, go far beyond it to
include all manner of esoteric implications, and to fuse the traditions literary,
philosophical, and religious inheritance into visionary narratives that in fact
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depict unfolding gnostic revelation. But this corresponds to what we have seen
of the Western esoteric traditions from their beginnings in antiquitythey represent unique fusions of previous currents that, in a new ambience produce
new revelations that often seem to appear ex nihilo, but in fact represent continuations not of specific lineages so much as currents or approaches to transcendence. The two medieval currents we have been discussing herethe
chivalric and the troubadour traditionsmeet in two final figures whose work
we must consider hereGeoffrey Chaucer (ca. 13431400) and Ramon Lull
(12321316).
Chaucer, known as a primary literary figure in English history, also incorporated esoteric elements into his poetry and prose. This is not to say that
Chaucer was an esotericist in the sense of a Kabbalist or a Gnostic, but rather
to recognize that esoteric elements flow in the mainstream of Western literature
itself. Like Dante, Chaucer drew on Boethius in his own work, yet he went further, for Chaucer also translated Boethiuss Consolation of Philosophy from
Latin to English. One finds traces of this influence in a number of Chaucers
poems, including Troilus and Cressida as well as The Knights Tale. Here, however, we will concentrate on The Knights Tale because it illustrates some of our
primary esoteric themes.
In the third part of The Knights Tale, Chaucer elaborates on the noble theatre of Theseus. This theatre was circular and a mile in circumference,
marked east and west by gates of marble, and built by masters of geometrie or
ars-metrike, and by kervere of ymages. The eastern gate was dedicated to
Venus, with an oratory, a nude Venus depicted with a golden garland and a
cokkow sittynge on hir hand, with festes, instrumentz, caroles, daunces
around her. The western gate dedicated to Mars displayed a forest full of
knotty, knarry, bareyne trees olde, with a temple of Mars wrought al of
burned steel, gastly for to see. In that portreiture, it was depeynted in the
sterres above / Who shal be slayn or elles deed for lov. Thus this tale, which
tells the story of how the knight Palamon and the lady Emelye were ultimately
wedded, is also a tale full of mythological and astrological references to the
planets. These references form a memory theater of images that govern the lists
or battles taking place within their purview. The celestial images rule over the
terrestrial actions within the circle of life, the theater of art.
We see in Chaucers tale, here, and occasionally elsewhere in his work, what
we might call literary reflections or manifestations of esoteric traditions. Certainly there are no explicit and even relatively few implicit esoteric allusions;
Chaucer was not that kind of poet. Earthy, interested in depicting his sometimes
bawdy characters and tales, Chaucer was not an esotericist. But all the same, we
find here too signs of the themes that have occupied our chivalric and troubadour poets, above all, the themes of divine images that recall celestial memory,
and of divine service, especially of the knight for his lady. And these are evoked
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Sufism, but are also familiar to us from our examination of the Western esoteric
traditions more generally, as well as from the Grail tradition in particular. Spiritual knowledge is also celestial memory or remembrance.
But there is one theme above all others which we have been tracing that
emerges clearly here, and that is the book. For in a delightful appendix consisting of questions posed to the Lover, we find the following: They asked the
Lover, What is the world? He answered, It is a book for those who can read
in which is revealed my Beloved. They asked him, Is your Beloved in the
world then? He answered, Yes, just as the writer is in his book. And in what
does this book consist? In my Beloved, since my Beloved contains all, and
therefore the world is in my Beloved, rather than my Beloved in the world.5
The world is a book for those who can read: this is a constant refrain within
the Western esoteric traditions from antiquity to the present. The cosmos represents the divine writing, and so the relationship between humanity and the
divine is that of a reader and a writer. Of course, as the readers of Lulls book,
we are also participating in this relationship, meant to reflect that of humanity
to the divine.
However, there is a profanation of this true reading and writing, which
emerges from a lust for knowledge and presumption. In this falsified knowledge, some insult the Name of God with curses and incantations, invoking evil
spirits as good angels, investing them with the names of God and of good angels, and profaning holy things with figures, and images, and by writings. And
through presumption, all errors are implanted in the world. But the Lover corrects this through the remembrance of truth, by seeing the Sign of God in the
east, west, north and south, engraved in precious jewels and worn on him in
order to always remind him. Here we find a clear condemnation, not of figures,
images, and writings in themselves, but of those done with the wrong attitude,
that is, out of arrogance or presumption.
Such a proviso is particularly appropriate for Lulls own work, since there is
absolutely no doubt that Lull himself extensively used figures, images, and
writings, most of all in the exposition of his art. Further, Lull himself was certainly accused of an inordinate and presumptuous lust for knowledge in the
pursuit and teaching of this art, which he claimed to be a universal system of
knowledge that allows one to see into the universal nature of all things and of
the Divine. This extraordinary art, whose influence extended across Europe,
was a means of investigating and coming to understand the true nature of
things, and is founded on a special kind of alphabet. Originally, Lull used more
letters, but for purposes of clarity, he condensed his art into nine letters, each of
which has multiple meanings and is used to create figures and reveal the principles within all that we see.
By means of these letters, Lull created a kind of Christian Kabbalism. His
brief alphabet extends from B to K (excluding J) and includes a range of mean-
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ings. For instance, B signifies, according to Lull in his Ars Brevis, goodness,
difference, whether?, God, justice, and avarice. C signifies greatness, concordance, what?, angel, prudence, and gluttony.6 Thus each letter contains
within it a constellation of meanings that, depending upon how the letters are
combined, can produce an almost infinite series of correlations. Lull himself
combined them using circles, triangles, tables, trees, and numerous other
arrangements, probably the most revealing of which for our purposes is the socalled A figure from the Ars compendiosa inveniendi veritatem, or that from
the Ars brevis.
The A figure is so designated because it contains in its center a letter A,
which is the unspoken origin of and connection between all the other letters
arranged in a circle around it. When we consider the prominence of the letter
A in numerous esoteric traditions ranging all the way from Buddhist tantrism to
Gnosticism to Bhmean Christian theosophy, it becomes difficult to believe
that the placement of the A here could fail to have esoteric origins and meaning.
Around the A in these figures is a geometric series of lines linking many of the
letters in intricate correlations, and in the outer circle are the primary qualities
asociated with each of the letters, for example, BBonitas, EPotestas, I
Veritas, and so forth. In the full art, found in the Ars compendiosa, for instance,
the number of letters and qualities makes their range enormous; and even the
Ars brevis represents a daunting set of combinations.
The Lullian art, to which we can here offer only the briefest of introductions,
has vast implications, and can be applied not only to philosphy and theology,
but to the physical world and indeed to virtually every aspect of life. For this
reason, it was naturally applied to astrology and to alchemy, and although Lull
himself explictly denied the transmutation of metals, a host of Lullian-based alchemical treatises emerged in the wake of his works. And although Lulls
thought has been explored relatively recently as a system of logic, it includes
and transcends logic, for in essence the Lullian art most resembles Kabbalism,
not least in its use of the combinations of letters, which are seen in both traditions as transcendent principles the combination of which can ultimately bring
us to and reveal the inner nature of the divine.
Hence in many respects, Lull represents the juncture of almost all the currents we have thus far discussed. Of course his work is unique, emerging as it
did largely in a Spanish ambience perfectly suited to the meeting not only of the
primary currents of medieval Christian esotericismincluding the chivalric
and troubadourbut also of Islamic and Jewish esotericism. At the same time,
it also represents a synthesis of the primary currents we have been discussing,
above all the view of literature as a vehicle for the transmutation of consciousness. The Lullian art is a means of working with letters and words as a way of
entering into transcendent consciousness of the inner metaphysical principles
informing and transcending the human and natural realms.
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We also see this perspective visible in a muted way in chivalric and troubadour literature, whose influence also extends well beyond their disappearance
as living social movements. In these traditions, poetry and stories go beyond
entertainment, for here literature possesses powerful cultural and spiritual dimensions. And as literature, the chivalric, troubadour, and Lullian traditions
lived on far past their apparent demises: all of them fed into the emergence of
the Western esoteric traditions that began to flower in the seventeenth century.
Chivalry influenced future esotericism by providing a code of conduct that as it
became individualized or fed into smaller initiatory groups took on esoteric
force even as it lost power as a system of social organization.
Thus the transposed spiritual chivalry, the spiritual love poetry of the troubadours, and the alphabetical mysticism of Lull and others later appear in
Christian theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry. How do these various
currents remerge later in history? Chiefly through the influence of the books,
the words, that the medieval authors created in order to convey their visions.
But there is another element as well that we must recognize: all of these authors
in turn manifest unique combinations of tendencies or currents that prexist
and transcend them, so that even if there were no direct influence of troubadour
poetry on the spiritual love poems of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century German, French, or English gnostic, still there is an affiliation because all exist
within the larger, intricately woven, cross-fertilizing currents of Western esotericism. Before we turn to the emergence of Western esoteric traditions at the
cusp of the modern era, however, we must first look at another primary current
whose influence can hardly be underestimated: Kabbalism.
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The sephirot mysteries in Bahir are intimately related to the mystical meanings
of numbers and letters. In section 124, for example, the ten fingers of human
hands are said to correspond to the ten sephirot and to the commandments,
which comprise a total of 613 letters, including all twenty-two letters of the alphabet except tet, said to symbolize the abdomen.10 Thus we can see how here
mystical numbers and letters reflect the hidden divine principles of the cosmos,
informing the cultural, spiritual, and natural realms at once, including the
human body.
We also see these alphanumeric mysteries in the Zohar, often said to be the
culmination of the early Kabbalistic period. Although the origins of the Zohar
are somewhat controversial, this controversy itself reveals much about the nature of Kabbalism. There are several major schools of thought on the origin of
this vast and complicated work: some hold that Moses de Leon really did copy
the Zohar from an earlier version by Shimon bar Yohai; but another view, supported by some contemporary testimony, is that Moses de Leon composed the
Zohar himself by way of conjuration of the Writing Name, (that is, writing
the Names of God) and through this power, caught up in the spirit, he wrote the
entire work without any precedent.11 Of course, there is a third possibilitythat
Moses de Leon composed through spiritual imagination, and that in this sense
he really was copying from the transcendent source of the Kabbalistic tradition.
But in any event, it is not at all out of character for the Zohar to have connections to the mysteries of the Writing Name.
Indeed, the Zohar is replete with alphanumeric mysticism. For example, in
one section we read of an alphabetic hymn which contains the mystery of the
twenty-two sacred celestial letters which are decorated with a crown made of
the Patriarchs and the holy heavenly Chariot. Opposite them are the twenty-two
little letters of the lower world.12 And we are treated to a fascinating explanation of why the verse-divisions, the tonal accents, and so forth are absent from
the Scroll of Law: these signs were hidden in the interior of the Divine
Throne, and are the means by which the Written Law fertilized the Oral Law,
as a female is fertilized from the male.13 We might note that here the Written
Law is seen as male, the Oral Law as female or receiver. It is absolutely
clear from this and many other sections of the Zohar that Kabbalistic gnosis is
intimately bound up with the mysteries of the word, and that it regards the written word as being at the center of those mysteries.
But there is another work that helps shed light on what the nature of these alphanumeric mysteries might be. One of the most influential Kabbalistic books
of this period is the Fountain of Wisdom (Mayan ha-Hokhmah), which sixteenth-century Kabbalist Moses Cordovero regarded as being among a handful
of the most important works, and which was central in the founding of Hasidism
as well. The Fountain of Wisdom consists in a discussion of tikkun, a word that
usually means restoration in Hebrew, but here takes on the meaning of com-
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that through them in the eye of imagination we can see the hidden principles
and working of the cosmos itself, not from this side, that of hardened or congealed materiality, but from the other, where all that is seen in the eye of imagination is light and color and energy welling forth from the indefinable Primal
Darkness. What is seen in the eye of imagination is expressed through alphanumeric riddles such as references to four letters that constitute a fire that
consumes fire.19
But underlying the entire work is the gnosis of how light emerges from darkness, and how the Voice emerges from light through speech and breath. Here
Voice refers not to ordinary human speech, but to the inner experience of
how existence emerges from the Primal Ether, of which emergence ordinary
human speech is but a reflection. We are viewing a pure mysticism of the word,
which is to say also a knowledge of how the mind is prior to the emergence of
language and thought, and how words emerge from primordial consciousness
into being. Thus there is a double quality to this mystery: it applies to the emergence of consciousness both within us and in the cosmos.
Medieval Kabbalism, then, is not only cosmological, but also metaphysical.
Its cosmological dimensions we have glimpsed in the intricate doctrines of the
ten Sephirot and in the profound complexities of its alphanumeric gnosis; its
metaphysical dimensions are to be found especially in its use of the term en
sof. En sof literally means infinity, but in early Kabbalism also is connected
to that which thought cannot attain, or absolute transcendence out of which
everything, including thought, emerges. It may be that there is some historical
link with Neoplatonism here, since this absolute transcendence resembles the
Greek akatalepton as well as the later incomprehensibilis of John Scotus Erigena.20 For that matter, one also finds correspondences between the mysticism
of en sof and the teachings of Meister Eckhart.
But none of these correspondences necessarily indicate historical influence.
It is obvious from Kabbalistic works themselves that they do not derive from
scholastic but from direct knowledge, and this is corroborated by the very linguistic mysticism that they express. Although it is possible that medieval Kabbalism owes more than a little to the Gnosticism of antiquity, it is also entirely
possible that in the works of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists, as well as in Erigena and in Eckhart, we have spontaneous investigations into some of the same
mysteries that the Kabbalists investigated. All of these exist, broadly speaking,
within the general currents of Western esoteric traditions, and so it is natural
that common elements reemerge again and again historically, sometimes with
the influence of particular earlier esoteric authors, sometimes without.
Just as in antiquity the Gnostics often laid emphasis on the mysteries of language and consciousness, so too the medieval Kabbalists emphasized this same
linkage. Indeed, as Scholem remarks, for the Kabbalists the world of language
is therefore actually the spiritual world. Only that which lives in any particu-
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lar thing as language is its essential life.21 In fact, for the Kabbalists letters
have a plastic quality: in forming words, they are forming also the actual divine
nature of things, so that to enter into the mysteries of words is to penetrate beyond language as we ordinarily conceive it into the hidden nature of God himself. Here again we have come upon the dual nature of language: there is
exoteric language, which is veiling and limited; and there is esoteric language,
which is unveiling and virtually unlimited in its ramifications.
Particularly in the case of Kabbalistic word and letter combination can we
say that esoteric uses of language are virtually unlimited in effect, for Kabbalism has since at least the time of Rabbi Eleazar of Worms (c. 11651230) and
Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (c. 12401292) employed techniques of linguistic recombination that in turn, if practiced over a period of time, result in
ecstasy and visionary illumination. In the case of R. Eleazar and Abraham Abulafia, the technique entails combining the Tetragrammaton with the letters of
the alphabet in order to bring one to a transcendent state of divine knowledge
or gnosis. According to Abulafia, this technique, which requires isolation, prolonged practice, and special breathing techniques, draws down the supernal
force in order to unite it with you.22 Thus esoteric language is not only a guide
toward gnosis, it is here the actual means to gnosis.
Central to Kabbalism is esoteric language. Isaac of Acre, for instance, distinguished between the mere acquisition of knowledge through ordinary
learning and the direct gnosis by the intellect.23 And his predecessor Isaac the
Blind used the analogy of a great tree, in which inward and subtle essences of
wisdom (hokhmah) exist and move through the tree like sap. We partake of
this wisdom, or sap, by sucking, which is a fundamentally different kind of
knowledge from that gained by ordinary reading; it is a participatory gnosis
in which we directly experience the essence-language of creation itself, moving in and through all that is. Here again we have reading and writing that go
far beyond what we ordinarily regard them ashere esotericism and literature are totally fused.
Such analogies and definitions as that of the tree, or sucking, or for that
matter of celestial reading and writing, do indeed correspond to those of the ancient Gnostics; and like the ancient Gnostics, the Kabbalists too produced a
wild profusion of works expressing variants of a complex and profound cosmology, as well as a metaphysics of absolute transcendence. In Kabbalism, as
in ancient Gnosticism, we find the figure of Sophia, or Wisdom, to be prominent, and indeed even find the teaching in Kabbalah of the higher and lower
Shekhinah, which parallels the teachings of some Gnostic sects regarding a
higher and lower Sophia. There are numerous parallels, but this does not mean
that there was direct influence.
In any event, this profusion of Kabbalistic works and teachings in turn was
to have an immense influence on the subsequent history of Western esoteric
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traditions, and unlike the relationship of Kabbalism to Gnosticism, the relationship of Kabbalism and Christian Cabala is relatively well documented.24
Here it is possible only to allude to the ways Kabbalism flowed into Christianity, especially beginning in the fifteenth century. It is generally held that
the first major influx of Kabbalism into Christianity occurred with Giovanni
Pico della Mirandola (14631494), who in his On the Dignity of Man proposes the harmony of Christianity and Kabbalah, holding that in fact Kabbalah is evidence for Christianity because in it we find discussions of the
Trinity, of the Word, and much else that corresponds to the works of Dionysius the Areopagite.
For our purposes it is noteworthy that Pico insisted on the initiatory nature
of original Christianity championed by Origen and Dionysius the Areopagite:
that Christ gave secret teachings to some of the disciples, teachings that subsequently were continued. Pico holds, in his oration, that Kabbalah corresponds
to these teachings in its initiatory lineage and in its doctrines: to make public
the occult mysteries, the secrets of the supreme Godhead . . . what else were
this than to give a holy thing to dogs and to cast pearls before swine?25 Thus
Kabbalah, according to Pico, furnishes a way to recover the original true nature
of Christianity. This true nature includes the doctrines of the en sof, as well as
that of the emanated Sephirot and, above all, the Names of God by which God
created the cosmos.26 There is in Kabbalah, as in Plato, a divine mathematics
that is not like the jottings of traders.27
And so Pico brings Jewish Kabbalah into the broad stream of Western learning that includes all the classics and has come to be known as the prisca theologia, confirming precisely those elements that we have come to see
characterize the Western esoteric currents as the initiatory sciences of reading
and writing. It is true that Pico only refers to Kabbalah and does not offer detailed exegeses or doctrinal expositions, but what he chooses to touch upon
divine mathematics, initiatory lineages, secret knowledge not divulged to the
hoi polloi, the transcendent Godhead, the hidden Names of God, and reading
and writing as the transmission of esoteric knowledge, when accompanied by
oral transmissionall correspond exactly to the threads we have been tracing
throughout Western history.
Naturally, Pico was far from alone in the endeavor to bring Kabbalah into
Christianityor, put from the viewpoint of the Christian Cabalists themselves,
to show how Christianity is illuminated by Kabbalism. Another important figure is Johannes Reuchlin (14551522), author of De verbo mirifico (1494), and
of the more well-known De arte cabalistica (1517). The first book, whose title
alone brings it into our purview, is arranged as a dialogue between a pagan
philosopher, a Jewish mystic, and a Christian; the pagan is concerned with cosmology, the Jew with Kabbalah and the divine Names, and the Christian with
absolute transcendence. Both books are intensely concerned with the nature of
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language, with its divine origin, and with how it illuminates the path toward the
deification of man.
Reuchlin in turn drew upon Pico and influenced Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
von Nettesheim (14861535), whose work De occulta philosophia (1533) is
among the most influential works on magical esotericism in European history.
Agrippas book is chiefly concerned with magic, but it focuses on magic in a
larger context that further develops the new tradition of Christian Cabala.
Rather like Reuchlin, Agrippa begins by discussing cosmology and the nature
of the world; turns then to numbers and letters and their celestial significances
(with references to the Sephirot); and in the third book discusses the Names of
God and the relation of the magus to God. Agrippas concern with the practice
of magic inaugurates a subsequent long tradition of Christian magical esotericism drawing upon Jewish Kabbalah.
But Kabbalahs influence on Christendom was not limited to magical esotericism alone; indeed, it would seem that during this time Kabbalahs influence
extended from the royal courts to the Vatican. One finds in France Jean
Thenaud (?1542) writing an extensive manuscript entitled Trait de la Cabale
chrtien for Francis I in about 1521; one finds in Italy Paul Rici, author of De
coelesti agricultura (1541), as well as Cardinal Egidio (Gilles) da Viterbo
(14651532), an important figure in the Vatican, whose unpublished work
Scecina (1530) was finally made available in 1959. And, of course, there is
Gillaume Postel (15101581), among whose papers we find references to and
translations of many Hebrew works including the Bahir and the Zohar. Postel
is well known for his devotion to a woman named Mother Johanna, whom he
regarded as the Virgin incarnate.
We could continue to trace the byzantine influences of Kabbalism in the history of Western esotericism here, and if so, we would have to make mention of
figures like John Dee (15271608) and Robert Fludd (15741637), both major
Renaissance authors whose works drew on Kabbalistic themes to create new
Western esoteric syntheses, as well as examine the possible course of Kabbalah
into the works of arguably the most influential esotericist of the past five centuries, Jacob Bhme (15751624). Bhmes works may reveal the traces of
Kabbalism, but if so, here too Kabbalah is transformed in new and specifically
Christian ways. Yet there is not room here for such an extensive study, and since
we will shortly look at Bhmean theosophy in much more detail, it is perhaps
more useful to consider what we have learned.
Without question, Kabbalah had widely penetrated Christianity in Western
Europe by the seventeenth century, but oftentimes its influence was underground and not at all easily traced. What is more, just as Kabbalah itself resembles earlier Gnostic traditions in antiquity, so too within Christianity one
finds more modern movements or views that may or may not be historically
affiliated with Kabbalism. For instance, Thenaud in his sixteenth-century
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T H E T R A N S F I G U R AT I O N O F E A R T H :
A L C H E M I C A L L I T E R AT U R E
Undoubtedly among the most enigmatic traditions of the human inheritance,
Western alchemy remains largely uncharted by modern scholarship, for only a
few intrepid souls have ventured into this territory. To the first-time observer,
alchemical writings seem totally impenetrable, and even with extended study
often yield no certain interpretation. Full of exotic images and peculiar language, European alchemical works resemble bizarre collections of riddles
wrapped in enigmas, and so it is little wonder that many historians of science
have denigrated European alchemy as merely a strange predecessor to modern
chemistry, sort of a mistaken byway people once took before they saw the light
of materialism and rationalism. However, when we look more closely at specific works in the alchemical traditions, we find that they reveal striking new
applications and manifestations of Western esotericism, and a current representing a particular path between religion and literature.
When we look at European alchemical works, with their plethora of brilliant
and resonant images, with their astonishing repertoire of exotic terminology,
we cannot help but notice religious references, especially to the need for humility and for reliance on divine grace. Of course, as we saw earlier, Hermetism
itself occupies a syncretic place in the midst of numerous traditions, not entirely pagan, yet not entirely Christian. So too, alchemy, as the art of Hermes, draws on the particular religious ambience within which it finds itself,
but represents nonetheless a separate path of its own. Indeed, the term alchemy
itself emerges out of the Arabic word al-kimiya, which in turn reflects GrecoEgyptian origins whose precise outlines likely never will be thoroughly traceable. Thus Western alchemy has a peculiar place, peripheral since it is not
wholly Christian, yet in that its adherents claim to realize the gnosis at the heart
of Christianity, hence on the one hand religious, on the other transmitted by
way of literature.
And in fact Western alchemical works are highly literary, operating by
metaphor and allusion and parabolic expression. Because the Western alchemists place vis--vis Christianity was seldom entirely clear, because the
opposition of exotericism to esotericism in Western Europe was often so violent, and also because alchemy is the transmission of mysteries that must be
directly experienced, alchemists took to arcane ways of expressing themselves.
One might compare these means of arcane expression to the Zen Buddhist
koan tradition, itself also highly literary: the koan, like the alchemical expression or riddle, by virtue of its initial incomprehensibility, forces one to wrestle
with it alone, to work it through, to come to terms with it not just by rational
explication, but through meditative concentration and inspiration. Yet both the
koan and the alchemical work emerge within stylized and traditional contexts,
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Yet the treatise itself, despite its elliptical means of expression, is at once literary and practical. On the title page of this little collection we see an alchemists laboratory, with a furnace and various kinds of glass and tools, and it
is clear from what Valentinus himself writes that he devoted himself intensely
to the study of the powers and virtues which God has laid into metals and minerals: and the more I searched the more I found.30 Eventually he found a mineral substance that exhibited many colors, and proved of the greatest efficacy.
With its spiritual essence, he cured a sick fellow monk completely, as a result
of which ultimately the great secret of alchemy was revealed to him, and this
secret the entire subsequent treatise is meant to reveal.
The practical instructions of the treatise are interwoven with literary passages,
as when we are told to take a quantity of the best and finest gold, and separate it
into its component parts prior to what it was before it became gold. For these
apparently practical instructions become a tale about the planets as characters in
a little drama, with Mars imprisoning Mercury under the control of Vulcan, and
the other planets holding a colloquy to decide what to do. Saturn wants to kill
Mercury, and this Mars has done, while the Moon, a beautiful lady in a long silver robe, pleads the case of her husband, the Sun. Shortly thereafter, learned men
of the country gather to decide the meaning of this enigma, and a venerable man
with white hair and a flowing purple robe tells them cause that which is above to
be below; that which is visible, to be invisible; and that which is palpable, to
become impalpable . . . Here you see the perfection of our Art.31
This combination of practical instructions and more figurative, literary passages also includes a series of images called the twelve keys. The first of the
twelve keys shows a couple, a king and a queen, the king bearing a staff, the
queen a three-flowered plant, while to the kings right we see a leaping wolf,
and to the queens left, a half-naked man with a scythe, over a fire. The commentary here tells us that whoever drinks of this golden fountain, experiences
a renovation of his whole nature, a vanishing of all unhealthy matter.32 The
fourth of the twelve keys shows a skeleton atop a casket or box, on the far left
side a single candle, in the background a dead tree stump, and the text tells us
how at the end of the world, all shall be judged by fire and reduced to ashes,
after which there will be formed a new heaven and a new earth.33 The eighth of
the twelve keys shows a man rising from the grave, while around him are various figures, including two archers shooting at targets, as well as an angel blowing a horn, and a man sowing seeds. The commentary here discusses
putrefaction and resurrection. The twelfth key shows a man with a lion in a laboratory, before him a burning barrel, and the commentary tells us of the uses of
the stone, and how one who possesses it shall possess all in all, performing all
things whatsoever possible under the sun.34
The second of Maiers treatises is Thomas Nortons Ordinal of Alchemy,
which is of quite a different nature from Valentinuss, being bereft of images
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and much more inclined to tell stories. After admonitions about how we must
avoid deceit and self-delusion, Norton tells the story of how he himself was
robbed of all he had, and then of how a certain Thomas Dalton, who possessed
a larger quantity of the Red Powder than any Englishman, was betrayed to King
Edward by an assistant named Delvis who had been sworn to silence. Even
though Dalton had discarded the Red Powder because it had become a source
of grief and anxiety, he was thrown into a dungeon by one of the kings retinue,
a man named Herbert, and tortured for four years. Eventually sentenced to
death and brought before the executioner, Dalton said he was happy to die, and
so was let go. Such, we are told, are the sufferings of those who aspire to a
knowledge of the Art. Only after such warning tales are we told in more
specifics of the nature of the Art, and that all Nortons instructions are useless
except to the wise in light of direct experience.
The briefest and most specific of the three treatises is that entitled the Treatise of Cremer, Benedictine abbot of Westminster. Here we have a full and accurate account of Alchemy without using any obscure technical terms.35 And
indeed, Cremer in this, his last testament, tells us to take three ounces of tartar of good claret, strong and pure, and add to it five ounces of petroleum, two
of living sulphur, two of orange arsenic, three of rabusenum, and two of willow
charcoal. All are to be mixed in the bath of Neptune, in a well-stoppered glass
jar, and prepared in about four days. Thus we can see that Cremers instructions
are in fact quite specific and truly are largely devoid of the literary passages
found in the previous two tracts. His testament is to be copied every sixty years,
so as not to lose legibility over time, and the secret is not to be given out to anyone except the Abbot and Prior of the monastery, and whoever does not observe this my mandate, let his name be blotted out from the Book of Life.36
Here we return to the themes of the Book of Revelationand despite the
more or less prosaic terms of this testament, this treatise of Cremer is clearly
regarded by him as a revelation of a great and powerful mystery that must not
be revealed to the vulgar. There is a long tradition of monasteries as sanctuaries for secret knowledge, and Cremers testament does corroborate it. To publish widely his alchemical testament would be to divulge what should remain
the secret of those presumably capable of bearing its power, and given Cremers
explicit instructions, as opposed to literary and figurative allusions, we can understand why he should impose such conditions. In recent times, of course,
such instructions also are protected by the fact that society as a whole cares
nothing for alchemy or the worldview from which it emerges. But also he is invoking the very language of the Book of Revelation, itself an esoteric text made
exoteric, and protected by precisely the same invocation of the Book of Life.
This invocation of the Book of Life naturally suggests one of our primary
themes in the study of Western esotericism: reading. Here reading can take
place on multiple levels at oncethere is the prosaic reading of instructions, of
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course, but then there is also another kind of reading that we see in the collections of images, epigrams, poems, literary allusions, allegories, and figurative
expressions that so characterize alchemical literature. Confronted with such a
colloquy, what is an aspiring alchemist to do but contemplate such a work, to
carry it within, to enter into it until its images and approach permeate ones
consciousness and become second nature? Such a second nature, consisting
in the imaginative landscape, allows one to see the actual landscape or first
nature in a different way, not merely from the outside and as other, but inwardly and as mysteriously connected to oneself by way of imagination. One
learns to read the inner significance of the book of nature. And of course,
beyond the book of nature is the Book of Life.
We may read, then, not only by looking at words on a page, but also
through the power of the imagination, which Paracelsus in De virtute imaginativa called a sun in the soul of man. Just as the sun draws forth the visible and
growing forms of plants, so too there is an inner world where the imagination
may draw forth hidden things from seed into flower. The cosmos is created
through the divine imagination, and so it is only natural that humanity also participates in this power. Imagination governs the development of things, for the
image of what a flower or plant is exists germinally in the seed, and the plant
grows into its image as best conditions will allow. But here imagination does
not belong to any individualrather, the individual human being may participate in the divine imagination that brings forth nature itself.
According to Paracelsus, everything that exists in the physical cosmos has
what he calls evestra, ethereal counterparts. Through these evestra, one may
know the inner nature of anything, just as we might look at an image reflected
in a mirror or water. There are incalculable numbers of evestra, which exist in
subtle matters of their own kindfor instance, air, water, fire, or earthand
which may know nothing of the human world even though they exist in the
same cosmos, for they occupy different dimensions within it. Of course, not all
evestra are benefic, so one must be cautious in entering into these other dimensions by way of imaginationone is reminded of the proverbial visitor to
the faeries who never returned. But in any event, Paracelsus tells us, these subtle realms and beings may be encountered in the realm of the imagination.
Clearly the imagination plays a role in the processes of alchemy, where we
see literature conveying the transmutation of consciousness that manifests in
the natural world as well. Here the individual mind is not separated from mineral, vegetable, and animal realms, but is joined with them in the imagination,
which perceives and participates in these other subtler dimensions of existence.
Spagyric medicine, one branch of alchemy, consists in the awakening of subtler
dimensions of a given plant, its subtle essence, which in turn may awaken the
corresponding quality in the human being and thereby effect healing. To say,
then, that alchemy takes place in the imagination is not to say that it is imagi-
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nary, but that in this particular worldview, it is entirely real, indeed, more real
than what we see in the physical.
At this juncture we should recognize that alchemical literature can be interpreted along a spectrum ranging from a focus on its spiritual meaning to a
focus on its physical interpretation. Many alchemical works are more susceptible to one interpretation than anotherhence some, like Cremers testament,
emphasize their recipe quality, while others, like Valentinuss, may be interpreted in both ways at once. But during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth
centuries, these two poles became further separated; one finds a new kind of
alchemical literature whose primary implications are almost exclusively spiritual. Of course, even here physical significances of alchemy are implied, but
the new ambience is not so much Hermetic with a tinge of Christianity as it is
totally Christian.
One of the better examples of this particular emphasis in alchemical literature is to be found in a now relatively little-known anonymous work dated 1686
and titled Amor Proximi, geflossen aus dem Oel der gttlichen Barmherzigkeit,
geschrft mit dem Wein der Weisheit, bekrftiget mit dem Salz der gttlich und
natrlichen Wahrheit (Amor Proximi, flowing out of the Oil of Divine Compassion, sharpened with the Wine of Wisdom, empowered with the Salt of divine
and natural Truth). The terms used in its titleoil, wine, and saltare not uncommon in physical alchemy, but here are clearly spiritualized, and this is characteristic of the work as whole. It is as though here alchemy, confronted by the
emerging materialist science of chemistry, moves away from physical alchemy
into the realm of spiritual references alone.
The prefatory remarks to the work refer to the heavenly Wisdom who reveals the two lights of nature and of grace. The true medicine of the body is
the pure light of nature; the true medicine of the soul is the pure light of grace.
But rather than proceeding toward specific instructions, Amor proximi proceeds
instead to refer in passing to the knowledge of the heathens, and to a host of
Biblical references, including Romans 1, Genesis 1:27, II Chronicles 13:5, and
so forth. There is no doubt that the work is engaged in justifying a true theology, philosophy, and medicine together that leads us through Wisdom to God,
just as the true maguss leads us to Christ.37 And thus the true medicine is thus
the heart of Wisdom: out of this heart (or eternal spiritual salt) emerges life, as
a spirit, fire, light air, and mist, which mist transforms itself into a water of life
in the new birth; this Mist-Spirit-Water is Salt or Earth . . . This is the true
Ground of Nature . . . the true medicine and theology.38
It is revealing that the light of nature is said to lead to the whole Machina
mundi (II.74), a distinctly modern image of the cosmos and a term that is in
fact repeated in the work. The term Machina mundi is particularly interesting
here because it is so far from describing the worldview of Amor Proximi as to
be its polar opposite. The mechanistic worldview is all surface, a matter of
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measurement and quantity leading to technology; but here, as a kind of counterpoint, is a perspective that is all depth, and based in the books of Teutonici
philosophi Jacob Bhme (II.77). Whoever wishes to understand practically this
depth-perception must first have a fundamental knowledge of it, we are told,
and so the author leads us through a discussion of the metacosmic nature and
history of humanity.
Here we find no interest in historical explanations; here instead we are being
introduced to the hidden nature, the depths, of existence. Thus, for instance, the
author writes That the earth is dark, but the Sun light, that is the mystery
wherein all lies, and is the ground of the revelation of the eternal Godhead
(II.80). The Sophists want to seek the prima materia among the elements, but
they dont really understand the spiritual nature of these elements, nor whence
they emerge (II.83). Yet those who dont seek Gods knowledge in nature also
remain blind, for here the illuminated brotherhood finds written the holy
Scripture (II.83). And what we are seeking is a single subject in Nature, the
great Universal-Stone wherein the fall and restoration of mankind is clearly to
be seen with the eyes (II.93).
Certainly we do not find in this treatise the kind of alchemical work that we
saw in the previous works; here the terminology of alchemy is spiritualized in
order to discuss the awakening and rebirth of the individual. Fire, Salt, Water,
Oil, these terms have an alchemical provenance, and indeed have spiritual
meanings as well within alchemical work, but here they are transposed to reveal
a particular metacosmic vision. There is a process of spiritual alchemy alluded
to in Amor Proximi, which concerns the transmutation of the planetary qualities
in an individual, and which leads to the individual being a true Theologus, in
whom the Magia is a holy Light or Spirit; a true Astrologus, in whom the Cabala with all its sciences as a holy Fire and Blood is; and a true Medicus, in
whom the philosophy as a holy Salt, Oil, or Water is. And so we find the three
One, and one three . . . in harmony (II.105).
Of course it is possible to see the spiritualized alchemy of Amor Proximi as the
abandonment of more physical alchemy, or perhaps as its translation into Christian allegory. But we could also see this spiritual alchemy as the counterbalancing restoration of alchemys gnostic, inward dimension; for it is conceivable that
physical alchemy could degenerate into nothing more than chemistry. In fact,
such a degeneration is exactly what we find happening during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, and it is not surprising that during the rise of secular science we find alchemical treatises that emphasize the inward, spiritual dimensions
of the work. However, traditional alchemy consists in both inner and outer work
at once, and when either one is absent, what is left soon ceases to be alchemy and
may be absorbed into the dominant religion or may become chemistry.
Yet alchemy, like Hermeticism, easily translates into a dominant religion,
and hence we find a Christian alchemy, just as we find for instance Islamic
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to say that all of his sources were entirely accuratefor instance, some of his
Hebrew seems rather distortedbut he had in mind producing a vast compendium of esoteric knowledge unified within a theosophic understanding, and
in this regard he succeeded. For instance, he begins each of his large sections
with specific discussions of alchemical salt, sulfur, or mercury, and into these
he weaves discussions using planetary and alchemical symbols, Christian scripture, and Kabbalistic references in a theosophic framework.
Typical of von Wellings syncresis is an illustration showing at the top the
Ungrund, a term of Jacob Bhmes for the abyss prior to creation, next to which
is the Kabbalistic term en sof, meaning the transcendent Godhead. Beside
these is a heptangle around which are arrayed the seven planetary symbols, and
beneath which is a series of concentric circles labeled Seraphim, Cherubim, Thronen, and so forth, the basic Dionysian angelical hierarchy. Arrayed
next to these names are their Hebrew equivalents. Here, in other words, we see
compressed into a single illustration a whole array of esoteric influences to
form a seamless synthesis whose surrounding perspective (visible in the use of
Bhmes term Ungrund to frame the entire illustration) is theosophic, but might
well also be called pansophic.
At the same time, one should not think that because von Welling aimed at
such breadth as a pansophic esotericism requires, he elided many details. His
discussions of alchemy and astrology are very detailed and full of specific tables, diagrams, and analyses clearly meant to produce not only a theoretical
synthesis but a useful compendium of source material. Thus he writes regarding the nature and use of earthly mercury that the I (Mercury) out of L (the
Sun) is of a wholly different nature than that out of . . . x (the Moon) and out
of P (Saturn). Further, to properly prepare mercury, one needs to reduce it
in an alcohol, then in a Liquorem . . . prepare it in a series of alchemical operations in a pair of vials, and calcify it by hand.41 Von Wellings astrological instructions are equally detailed, with a plethora of astrological symbols, tables,
charts, diagrams, and instructions.
But it is with alchemy that von Wellings work both begins and ends. Indeed,
he appends to his five-hundred-page Opus several alchemical treatises in their
entirety, including D. Hensings Discurs von dem Stein der Weisen [Discourse
on the Stone of the Wise] (1722), Alchimische Fragen, von dem Universali
und den Particularibus [Alchemical Questions on the Universali and the Particularibus] (1726), and Manna Coeleste, das himmlische Manna genannt.
Die Bereitung des Steins [Celestial Manna: the Heavenly Manna Named. The
Preparation of the Stone] as well as Non plus ultra Veritatis: das ist, Eine Untersuchung der Hermetischen Wissenschaft [Nothing More True: That is: An
Investigation into Hermetic Science] by Francisco Sebastiano Fulvo
Melvolodemet, of Pisa. The collection concludes with a translation into German of English alchemist George Ripleys song of the newborn alchemical
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king. All of this underscores how alchemy and Hermeticism pervaded the pansophic esotericism that came to dominate the early modern period, and that we
will shortly examine further.
Here it is perhaps most useful to step back and consider how alchemy,
broadly seen, fits into our general discussion of Western esotericism and literature. If Kabbalah entails a literary mysticism in which letters and numbers reveal secret spiritual depths, and in which writing can form a pathway to the
divine, alchemy extends this literary mysticism into the entire cosmos itself, so
that everythingmineral, vegetable, animal, water, air, fire, the stars and planetsis revealed as a cosmic language and as a spiritual means of transmutation. Alchemy, and the Hermeticism with which it is allied are religious
chameleons, capable of taking on whatever coloration fits with their surroundings; and this almost infinite adaptability undoubtedly derives from the universalism of their central perspective, which consists in the transmutation and
restoration of all things.
While it is true that alchemical aims may at first seem circumscribed to the
revelation of the philosophers stone, for example, when we look more closely
at alchemical literature itself, we find that such aims are in fact vast indeed,
consisting not only in the perfection of elixirs or medicines drawn from herbs
and metals, but even more in the perfection of humanity. Such perfecting takes
place in the alchemists laboratory, of course, but only with the guidance of the
alchemical handbooks, recipes, or grammars. In some respects, alchemy is like
learning to use a language, requiring long familiarity with special symbols, letters, and images, as well as with what these represent, including not only chemicals and equipment, but subtle and spiritual qualities as well. One must learn
both to read, in the broadest possible sense, and to write.
There is, we can easily see, a natural homology between alchemy and art.42
Both entail emulating or paralleling the creativity of life itself; both seek to perfect this creativity. It is no coincidence that the alchemical work is also called
the great Art, for it consists not only in the creation of a particular form, like
a painting, but in a transmutation both of the focus of the work and of the artist.
In this sense, the alchemical work transcends that of the artist, for its focus is
not only in the mesocosm of the work, but also in the microcosm of the artist.
To effect the alchemical work requires that the artist enter into more transcendent states of consciousnessthe work is in this respect a mirror of changes
within the alchemist. Here, of course, alchemy goes well beyond contemporary
conceptions of art, for its claims are to a lasting awakening and transmutation
of the alchemist. Thus we may well say that, however far-reaching, contemporary art and literature remain quite limited in scope by comparison to alchemy
as spiritual illumination.
Alchemy, as we have come to see it since the seventeenth century, is a relatively modern phenomenon, particularly in the profusion of brilliant images
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and the complex kinds of linguistic riddles visible in alchemical works. However, the approaches to transcendence and the depictions of these approaches
within alchemical literature nonetheless reflect quite clearly what we have already seen to be the dominant paradigm of western esotericism in antiquity. For
there is here an operative mysticism of the wordthe written word and image
become a medium to express transcendence, and also a successors primary
guide to achieving transcendence. Just as in Christian mysticism one finds that
lines of influence are chiefly and perhaps sometimes exclusively literary
inspiration leaps from Dionysius to John Scotus Erigena to Eckhart and Tauler,
who then are listed by later mysticsso too in alchemy earlier alchemists are
invoked by the later ones in a litany of literary transmission.
Here in alchemy, as in Christian mysticism and in Jewish Kabbalism, literature takes on a greater significance than simply alluding to an oral tradition
where the real mysteries are conveyed. Oral commentary by a master is important, no doubt of that. But in alchemical works, the mysteries are conveyed primarily through literary riddles and parabolic expressions. I would use the word
decoding, except that an alchemical work is not simply decoded as if, in the
manner of a mathematical equation, were one to decipher what x and y mean,
one would have the solution. The solution, in the case of alchemy, extends into
a range of realms at once, and cannot be understood without reference to our
inner human landscape of consciousness. This is by no means to suggest, like
Jung, that alchemy is chiefly psychological. Rather, alchemy is understood
through living symbols that allow us to understand nature, humanity, and the
divine in ever more profound ways.
Indeed, alchemy consists in coming to understand the nature of consciousness and the consciousness of nature. Contemporary views of literature, like
those of science, largely have been based in a fundamental division between the
writer and the reader, between the observer and that which is observed, between
subject and object. It is true that more recently theorists, both of physics and of
literary criticism, have begun to argue the insufficiency and even the falsehood
of such easy divisions. But virtually no one has looked at alchemy as a field
where all such apparent divisions are overcome. For not only is the division between self and other or between subject and object gradually revealed to be
false in alchemy, so too is the apparent (but strictly modern) division between
the sciences and the humanities. For in alchemy literature is a means of transmitting precise knowledge of nature, humanity, and the divine, albeit knowledge that is not quantitative but qualitative, and that presupposes and requires
humility before power greater than oneself. In alchemy, literature, religion, and
science are one.
This unity is founded in the fundamental union of humanity, nature, and the
divine that it is alchemys goal to restore. In Christian terms, this is expressed
in terms of the Fall and expulsion from Eden; and the restoration of the right
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humanities. The Copernican revolution, the discovery of more complex technology, the emergence of biology, chemistry, archaeology, and geology, and the
historical and comparative investigations into Christian origins, all acted to separate religious faith from scientific investigation and from literature and the
arts. Whereas in medieval Europe and England, all human knowledge was conceived of as unifiedlike a wheel whose spokes are the various disciplines and
arts, and whose center is spiritual knowledgewith the advent of the Protestant
era, this sense of unity dissolved, at least in the secular world.
But Western esotericism, much more indebted to the medieval era than is
usually supposed, continued and developed this belief in a unified approach to
knowledge. It is true that, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, we find
a historical movement toward more and more specialized and fragmented
knowledge, with each of the disciplines ever more separated from the others,
and the sciences and humanities in turn ever more separated from religion.
However, in Western esotericism we find, particularly during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, quite the opposite movement. For the Western esoteric traditions that emerged during this period, as we have already glimpsed in
the case of alchemy, aimed for a universal approach to knowledge that, rather
than seeking to separate, say, physical chemistry from metaphysics, instead
seeks ever more firmly to conjoin them.
Indeed, the historical movement of Western esotericism during the modern
period is to unify the entire range of human knowledge, including, in the sciences, the fields of alchemy, medicine and astrology; in the arts, illustration and
literature; and in religion, comparative and syncretic, nonsectarian and ecumenical approaches to spirituality. Thus during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries we find numerous major esoteric figures who engaged in scientific
investigations, explored theology and metaphysics, wrote literary works, practiced medicine and astrology, and in general correspond to the description of
Renaissance man. One thinks of figures as diverse as Robert Fludd, John
Pordage, and Franz von Baader, to name only a few of the most luminary. But
here we do not have space for a complete survey of all such figures, nor is that
our aim. Rather, our approach being thematic, we will instead look closely at
some seminal authors in the modern esoteric traditions and by so doing, trace
the broader lineaments of recent Western esotericism.
Any study of modern Western esoteric traditions must consider the work of
Jacob Bhme (15751624), the illuminated shoemaker of Grlitz, a city on
the eastern side of Germany, near Poland. Bhme lived during a time of social
unrest, in a border area where he came in contact with a range of esoteric traditions, including Kabbalism and Hermeticism. But his inspiration came
chiefly from within, and drawing from his visionary experiences, he wrote numerous works beginning with Die Morgenrte, or Aurora, and including a vast
commentary on Genesis called Mysterium Magnum, as well as De Signatura
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Rerum (The Signature of All Things), Christosophia, and numerous letters and
shorter works.
Even these titles reveal the connections between Bhme and the earlier traditions we have discussed: Mysterium Magnum, with its elaborate exegesis of
Genesis, is certainly indebted to the Kabbalistic tradition; The Signature of All
Things is an extended discussion of, among many topics, the Hermetic doctrine
of signatures developed by Paracelsus; and Christosophia, often translated as
The Way to Christ, entails a chivalric ethic of fidelity to the feminine figure of
Wisdom, the Virgin Sophia. What is more, there unquestionably are profound
parallels between Bhmes writings and ancient Gnosticism, parallels that became even clearer in later theosophic figures like the English Philadelphians.43
Thus we can see how Bhmean theosophy reveals the syncretism so characteristic of modern esotericism more generally; here numerous traditions meet and
are fused into a profound new union that was to have enormous influence on
the subsequent history of Western esotericism.
Bhmes work, according to his own testimony, derived chiefly from his own
personal experience, but there is evidence that he had extensive contacts with
Hermetic and Kabbalistic circles of his day, including lengthy discussions with
Abraham von Frankenberg, himself an author on Kabbalistic subjects. That
Bhmes writing emerged from his own visionary perceptions and inspiration
is unquestionable, for he wrote with authority and certainty about a vast range
of cosmological and metaphysical principles. What is more, he developed a
particular language, drawing upon Hermetic, alchemical, and Kabbalistic
sources, to express this inspiration, a special terminology with both Latinate
and Germanic roots. But Bhme drew from prior traditions as well, and his
work may be described as unique or as a brilliant synthesis, for both are true.
Although Bhmes terminology and mode of expression are often difficult,
the basic elements of his thought are not. It is true that Bhme presents a complex cosmology, with his exposition of the Ungrund, or abyss, that precedes existence and that corresponds in Kabbalism to the en sof, and in Christian
mysticism to Eckharts Godhead; with his exposition of the seven source-spirits; and with his unfamiliar terms like limbus, lubet, and schrack, describing
hidden principles or aspects of the creative process. Yet Bhme has been popular for centuriesfrom Germany to Russia and Americaamong those drawn
to direct spiritual experience, and this popularity derives from the fact that
while his doctrines are almost inexhaustible, the fundamental nature of
Bhmes teaching is clear and simple.
Here I will compress a great deal in the hope of sketching the outlines of
Bhmes thought. Bhme held that before the cosmos came into being, there
was the Ungrund, or transcendent abyssal origin. From this emerged two
realms, the dark-world of wrath and the paradisal light-world, and after a series of primal catastrophes, a third principle, physical nature. Human beings
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can participate in all three of these principles; some people belong to the wrathworld of fury and destructiveness, some to the paradisal light-world, but mostly
we find ourselves mediating among all of these. Our purpose as human beings,
simply put, is to transmute the wrath-quality in ourselves into paradisal light
and love. This process of transmutation, a kind of spiritual alchemy, is true religion; without it, religion is merely outward Babel, the appearance without
the reality.
Bhmes approach to language is of particular interest to us, for, quite in line
with the numerous currents of the Western esoteric traditions that preceded
him, Bhme created a complex linguistic mysticism. In Aurora, Bhmes first
book, he introduced this mysticism of the word, writing that The whole power
of the Father speaks, out of all the qualities, the Word, i.e., the Son of God. The
same word, or the same sound, spoken by the Father, issues out of the Salniter,
or the powers of the Father, and out of the Fathers Mercurius, or sound . . . for
the outspoken Word remains as a glory or majestic command before the king,
but the sound, issuing through the word, executes the command of the Father
which he has spoken through the word, and in this is the birth of the Holy Trinity. The same takes place in an angel or in a man (vi.2). Bhmes language
here is resonant with alchemical and Jewish allusions, but these allusions appear in a clearly Christian context, and although they refer to the Word in the
Trinity, they also refer to the word in humanity.
Bhme extends this linguistic mysticism to every living thing. In his giant
commentary on Genesis, Mysterium Magnum, he writes that every creature
has its own center for its outspeaking, or the sound of the formed word within
itself, both eternal and temporal beings: the unreasoning ones as well as man;
for the first Ens has been spoken out of the sound of God, by Wisdom, out of
her center into the fire and light, and has been formed into the fiat, and entered
into compaction. The Ens is out of the eternal, but the compaction is out of the
temporal, and therefore in everything there is something eternal hidden in
time (xxii.2). Here Bhme elaborates on the metaphysics of what he also discusses in De Signatura Rerum, the esoteric view older than Pythagoras that
everything in creation emerges out of its resonating linguistic, sonic, energetic
origin as an emanation or manifestation of an archetype.
What is more, there is a teleological significance to this doctrine. For if all
beings prexist their material manifestation in the archetypal realm of the word,
after manifestation each manifested thing will return to its transcendent origin,
that belonging to love returning to love and that belonging to wrath returning to
wrath. Bhme writes: In that quality in which each word in the human voice
in the act of outspeaking forms and manifests itself, either in the love of God,
as in the Holy Ens, or in the wrath of God; in the same quality will it be taken
up again therein after it has been spoken out. The false word becomes infected
by the devil, and sealed up for its [future] detriment, and is received within the
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Mysterium of the wrath, in the quality of the dark-world. Each thing returns
with its Ens to where it has originated (xxii.6). This is not predestination,
exactly, but rather the sifting of the chaff from the wheat at times end.
We can see here how language is intimately tied up with the metaphysics of
love and wrath. In the fallen world, wrathfulness is the principle of separation
and objectification as well as of anger, and so the language of extreme ratiocination also belongs to the wrath. Reason has its place, but when it becomes separated from love, it becomes objectifying and destructive and a functionary of
wrath, while language divorced from its transcendent origin becomes Babel or
babble. Yet all of this refers to the fallen world, the sphere of discord, chaos,
confusion. The means of orders restoration is the Word, the restoration of light
and love in ones life. But such a restoration takes place through a process of
awakening or illumination that is a process of transmuting wrath into love,
darkness into light. This process is also that of restoring language from its
fallen state (as a means of objectification) into its primordial state of union.
This process is the awakening of the true Word in us. Bhme writes that our
whole religion consists in learning how to go out of dissension and vanity and
to renter the one Tree, whence we have come in Adam, and which is Christ in
us (Regener, viii.2). Thus, he who fully enters into this state of divine rest in
Christ arrives through Him at the perception of divinity. He then sees God
in himself and everywhere; he speaks with God and God speaks with him, and
he understands what is the Word, Essence, and Will of God. Such a one, and no
other, is capable of teaching the Word of God himself: for God is one with him,
and he wills nothing but what God wills through him (Mysterium Magnum,
xlii.63). The Word of God here has special and profound meaning; it refers to
the essence of deity, the transcendent origin of existence. And by realizing this
Word, one restores all subordinate language as well as nature itself (whose creatures each also incarnate divine signatures or words) to their primordial unitive
or paradisal state.
From all of this we can see that the fundamental impetus of Bhmes work is
integrative, not on a cultural so much as on an individual, primal level. Bhme
calls the individual toward reintegration or union, and it is the individual nature
of this call that has subsequently attracted so many people, in such diverse social situations, toward theosophy. But at the same time, we can easily see how
this same integrative impulse aimed at individual transformation could as well
be applied on a wider cultural scale, as for instance as the foundation of an effort to reunify the sciences and the humanities with religion. And in fact, such
an effort is precisely what we find happening over the century following
Bhmes life, in the movement called Rosicrucianism.
It may be, as some scholars have speculated, that Bhme was himself familiar with the same movement which, ten years before Bhmes death,
began to emerge under the name Rosicrucian, with the publication of the
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Fama Fraternitatis (1614) and the Confessio Fraternitatis (1615). But in any
event, Bhmes writing and thought both paralleled and influenced that of the
Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, which first came to general public attention
with the publication of the Fama Fraternitatis. And of course this brief work,
like its complement the Confessio, caused a great stir in Europe, for it captured the imagination of the age with its tale of Christian Rosencreutz and his
mysterious journeys through exotic lands and secret knowledge, as well as
with its assertion of a secret order as keeper of profound and powerful knowledge and means.
Not coincidentally, both the Fama and the Confessio reveal the fundamental
themes we have seen woven through the Western esoteric traditions. Certainly
we can agree with Frances Yatess assessment that Rosicrucian may more
wisely be seen historically as describing a particular kind of approach to arcane
knowledge than as a specific organized order, even if at times such orders did
exist.44 For when we look at the actual wording of the Fama and the Confessio,
we find ample confirmation of all the primary elements of Western esotericism
thus far traced. The Rosicrucians goal, according to the Fama, was to follow
Christ by renewing all arts to perfection, so that finally man might thereby understand his own nobility and worth, and why he is called Microcosmos, and
how far his knowledge extendeth into Nature.45 This universal renewal and extension of knowledge is, generally speaking, the gnostic goal of Kabbalism,
Hermeticism, and later, of Christian theosophy as well.
But there are many other elements here that correspond exactly to our primary themes. The Fama begins by telling the story of C. R., who travels among
the Arabians and the Jews on a quest to Jerusalem, and who goes as well to
Egyptprecisely where European esotericism has always located its sources of
arcane knowledge, in the Orient, and among Sufis and Kabbalists. This journey
may also be seen as a kind of visionary recital, a visionary trip to the Orient of
the spirit, but at the same time it links the Rosicrucian movement from the very
beginning with the most gnostic aspects of Islam and Judaism, underscoring
immediately the movements eclecticism, if not universalism. C. R., like us,
travels to the Fez and to the Damascus of the mind. To see the journey as a
visionary recital also helps elucidate its most salient feature: the book.
For from the very beginning of the Fama, the book is a central image and
source of wisdom. Indeed, we are told at the outset that were the learned wise,
they could collect Librum Naturae, or a perfect method of all arts. These
Books of Nature, however, are to be collected by the wise, whereas there is
another more mysterious book that is the source of wisdom, and this is the
book M. C. R. translates the book M. into good Latin from Arabic, and
later we are told that Paracelsus had also diligently read over the book M:
whereby his sharp ingenium was exalted.46 When C. R. returns eventually to
Germany, he begins a secret fraternity with only four members including him-
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self, and all are sworn to write down all that they learn, so that no one might
later be deceived. After this manner, the Fama continues, began the Fraternity of the Rose Cross; first, by four persons only, and by them was made the
magical language and writing, with a large dictionary . . . they also made the
first part of the book M.47 These early members of the Rose Cross order then
collected of their own writings a book of all that which man can desire, wish,
or hope for.
There is more. For when Christian Rosencreutz died, a century old, he was
placed in his tomb with a parchment book, called I. And there is in the tombs
description a great deal of arcane geometry and architecture, as well as a host
of mysterious letters and Latin inscriptions. The description is often hard to follow, as when we are told that every side or wall is parted into ten figures, every
one with their several figures and sentences, as they are truly shown and set
forth Concentratum here in our book.48 But the import is clear: the tombs architecture itself, full of geometric symbolism, forms sentences and a kind of
book of the hidden principles of nature and of the microcosm. Interestingly, the
Fama concludes by asserting that our building (although one hundred thousand people had very near seen and beheld the same) shall for ever remain untouched, undestroyed, and hidden to the wicked world.49 How could this
mysterious building be invisible and untouched unless the building, like the
book, belongs to the mind and imagination, not the body? And does not the
one hundred thousand resonate with the Book of Revelation, itself a work
with intricate geometric symbolism, and with mention of one hundred fortyfour thousand saved from the wicked world at times end?
These themes, of eclecticism or universalism, of the uniting of all arts and
sciences, and of reading the mysterious book of books, recur as well in the Confessio. The Confessio begins by telling us that its authors cannot be suspected
of any heresy, and pay no mind to the Pope or Muhammed, but follow only
Christ. Yet once again, we find references to far-flung places and hidden wisdom, and we find this definition of the Rosicrucian philosophy: No other Philosophy have we, than that which is the head and sum, the foundations and
contents of all faculties, sciences, and arts, the which (if we well behold our
age) containeth much of Theology and medicine . . . whereof all learned who
make themselves known to us, and come into our brotherhood, shall find more
wonderful secrets by us than heretofore they did attain unto . . . or are able to
believe or utter.50 Thus the essence of Rosicrucianism is the universal philosophy informing all arts and sciences; it is to read the universal book.
Certainly reading and writing are central to the Rosicrucian mysteries.
Among other questions, the Confessio asks: Were it not a precious thing, that
you could so read in one only book, and withal by reading understand and remember, all that which in all other books (which heretofore have been, are
now, and shall be) hath been, is, and shall be learned and found out of them?51
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Likewise, we are told that to some it is permitted that they see and use those
great letters and characters which the Lord God hath written and imprinted in
heaven and earths edifice.52 These characters and letters, as God hath here
and there incorporated them in the Holy Scriptures, the Bible, so hath he imprinted them most apparently into the wonderful creation of heaven and earth,
yea, into all beasts . . . From which characters or letters we have borrowed our
magic writing, and have found out, and made, a new language for ourselves,
in the which withall is expressed and declared the nature of all things.53
The implication throughout the Fama and the Confessio is that there is
dawning a miranda sexta aetatis, or sixth age, an era that recalls the earlier hierohistorical mysticism of Joachim of Fiore and his complex theory of a coming age of the Holy Spirit. The authors of the Fama and the Confessio
certainly believed in the hierohistorical significance of certain dates and astrological conjunctions connected, for instance, with the date 1604, and held that
there was emerging a new revelation, a new era for mankind. These aspects of
Rosicrucianism, including the hierohistorical view of dates and the expectation
of an impending apocalypse or unveiling, correspond closely to what we also
find in Christian theosophy at roughly the same time.54 It is no coincidence that
Bhme titled his first book Aurora, for instance. But this new revelation must
be approached with humility, and grave warnings are given to those who
approach its mysteries selfishly.
All of this, of course, reminds us rather strikingly of the Book of Revelation,
with all of its emphasis on hierogeometry, metahistorical events at the end of
time, and above all, the universal revelation of Christ to humanity. One can hardly
miss the Biblical resonances of these final words of the Confessio: Although we
might enrich the whole world, and endue them with learning . . . yet shall we
never be manifested . . . unto any man without the special pleasure of God; yea, it
shall be so far from him who thinks to get the benefit and be partaker of our
riches and knowledge, without and against the will of God, that he shall sooner
lose his life in seeking and searching for us than to find us and attain the wished
happiness of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross.55 The implication is that here, in
the Rosicrucian mysteries, is hidden the real essence of Christianity itself, and
that one must approach it with humility or find nothing, or worse than nothing.
Clearly for our purposes the most relevant aspect of these most seminal
Rosicrucian documents is their embrace of linguistic mysticism. Throughout
they emphasize reading the divine books of humanity and nature, and writing
in a magic language. Such an idea of a magic language has, of course, a very
long history in the West, stretching back at least to the Gnostics, and quite probably to Egypt. It certainly emerges in the Middle Ages in the works of Agrippa
and Trithemius, who as we have seen drew upon Kabbalistic sources. Agrippa
and Trithemius are well known for their primary and influential works on
magic, in which we find the sources of many subsequent works illustrated by
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sigils and magic squares, stellar and numerical patterns connected to specific
angels, demons, or intelligences. By using these stellar and numerical patterns
in ritual magic, one is calling upon the language of the stars in order to invoke
the powers or intelligences with which they are connected.
One also finds such a magical language in the work of Dr. John Dee
(15271604), who, in his controversial conversations with spirits along with
Edward Kelley, discovered the Enochian language, which has subsequently
played an extensive role in the history of magic in the West. The Enochian language is a mysterious tongue that requires tables or keys for its deciphering,
and it too has been used in magical workings. Here, Dees Enochian language
is important because no less an authority than Frances Yates concluded that the
single most important figure in the appearance of early Rosicrucianism is in
fact John Dee.56 Is it only coincidence that the date given as the discovery of
C. R.s tomb, 1604, is the date of Dees death? And is it only coincidence that
the Fama and Confessio make so much of a magical language, one of the
most famous instances of which Dee is responsible for?
We might also remark on the history of Rosicrucianism after the publication
of the Fama, the Confessio, and the outrageously baroque, brilliant, and playfully symbolic Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, a work so incredibly full of dense oneiric symbolism that next to it other literary works generally
seem comparatively devoid of symbols. The emergence of these three works
and their implication that there existed in Europe a secret high order of adepts
who possessed the keys to the hidden language of the cosmosnaturally
caused a sensation, and the subsequent furor manifested itself in a host of other
Rosicrucian works, as well as a developing mythology of Rosicrucianism.
Here, we have no reason to delve into the question of whether there existed any
such secret orders, or why, if there was such a fraternity as claimed in the Fama
and Confessio, it should be publicly proclaimed in this way.
But it is worthwhile to note that the Rosicrucian furor lasted only a few short
years, disappearing around 1620, as Frances Yates notes, precisely the time of
political upheaval in Germany and the advent of the Thirty Years War. By
1623, there was a great deal of anti-Rosicrucian sentiment, particularly in
France, even a kind of nascent Rosicrucian witch-hunt. And all of this was tied
in with the emerging rationalist and materialist paradigm of the so-called Enlightenmentwhich was precisely opposed to the Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
The Rosicrucian dream, which we see outlined in the Fama and Confessio, as
well as in subsequent literature, was of a non-sectarian, peaceful, universal culture dedicated to the investigation of the language of nature, written in the microcosm and in the macrocosm; it is a culture founded on Kabbalah and
alchemy, that is, on a pansophic mysticism.
Here we must introduce the word pansophy, or pansophia. One finds this
word appearing frequently in Hermetic publications immediately following
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the basis for magical practices including sorcery. And in fact most grimoires
have a Hebrew basis for the angelic and demonic names and characteristics that
they list for invocation or evocation. One also can see in such willingness to incorporate any form of knowledge whatever, including sorcery, the pansophic
impetus behind the legend of Johannes Faust, who refused to allow any boundaries to his search for knowledge.
The Faustian legend is so resonant still because it expresses something fundamental about the emerging modern period. Of course because of the ascent
of rationalist materialism and secularism, we tend to think of Faust, who makes
a pact with Mephistopheles in order to gain knowledge, as a somewhat medieval figure. Yet the Faustian impulse to search out all knowledge and means
of knowledge, even if it is illicit, is peculiarly modern and in some respects
characteristically pansophic. Once Protestantism and secularism began to
emerge in Europe, one finds a range of possibilities opening up, and if at one
pole rationalist disbelief in the transcendent becomes acceptable, at the other
pole research into the previously forbidden also becomes more common. In
some respects, the pansophic impulse is fundamentally similar to the scientific:
it consists in investigation into the mysteries of the unknown and of nature.
One sees this desire to map the cosmos in the emergence, in later Rosicrucianism, of vast and intricate tables, diagrams, and illustrations revealing the
hidden nature of the universe. Among the first of these, predating the Rosicrucian furor but certainly influencing its later productions, was the Calendarium
Naturale Magicum Perpetuum Profundissimam Rerum Secretissimarum Contemplationem [Perpetual Natural Magical Calendar] of Tycho Brahe, printed
by Theodore de Bry in 1582. Here we have a massive compendium of magical
knowledge, including the names and seals or sigils of angels in Hebrew and
Latin, magic squares, planetary correspondences, and much else. This compilation is of special importance for us because it reveals the far-flung syncretic
origins of the pansophic impulse, which later emerged in almost endless detail
in the Geheime Figuren [Secret Figures] of the Rosicrucians.
The Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer, a series of extraordinarily complex
illustrations, was published at Altona in 17851788. It was probably preceded
by and certainly followed by other versions, including a French edition titled
F. de La Rose-Croix,57 and in all cases is replete with examples of the effort to
map universal knowledge not only physical but also metaphysical. There are
numerous such manuscripts with various versions of these ilustrations, chiefly
under the title Physica, Metaphysica, et Hyperphysica, D.O.M.A., almost all,
and perhaps all belonging to the late eighteenth century.58 Characteristic of
these esoteric illustrations is one entitled Figura Divina Theosoph. Cabball. nee
non Magia, Philosophia, atque Chymia [Divine Figure of Theosoph. Cabballa:
Not Only Magic and Philosophy, But Chemistry]. It is an astonishingly complex
illustration, with concentric circles marking divinity at the top, and a series of
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triangles and concentric circles below, marking a host of alchemical stages and
enigmatic sayings as well as planetary and zodiacal symbols.59
There is a great deal of controversy over the precise relation of such a manuscript or illustration to Bhmean theosophy, for instance, or to Rosicrucianism. Is there a direct indebtedness to Bhmean theosophy, for instance, to the
esoteric illustrations accompanying Johann Gichtels edition of Bhmes collected works? Is this a specifically Rosicrucian illustration at all? Such questions I leave for others to answer; here we have a different focus. For our focus
is upon what such an illustration signifies. Here, in visual form, is an effort to
render a mappa mundi, but a map of the hidden aspects of the world, of its hyperphysical dimensions. Just as the eighteenth century was an era of physical
cartography, so too it was an era of hyperphysical cartography, of efforts to survey the ethereal realms.
And thus when we look at an illustration from D.O.M.A. entitled Unendliche Ewigkeit und Unerforschliche Primum Mobile [Infinite Eternity
and Unknowable Primum Mobile], we find a more or less typical series of images: above is the Prima Materia, marked also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as
well as Jehovah in Hebrew, surrounded by winged angelic forms. Below that is
an intermediate principial realm marked Water, Heavenly Seed, Animal
Seed, Vegetable Seed, and Mineral Seed, and so forth. This middle realm
is marked Figura Cabbalistica, and has on either side gnomic sayings, such as
Ein Prophet gilt nichst in seinem Vaterlande [A prophet is not honored in his
native land.] Below is an elemental sphere marked with the zodiacal signs, and
with the word Chaos. Here chaos does not mean total confusion so much as
potentiality; the lower sphere represents the temporal realm, and Earth depicted as a ball exists between the elemental and intermediate realms, partaking in both, that is, in time and in eternity.
Extremely intricate hyperphysical cartography like this seems to be chiefly
a creation of the early modern period; such spiritual mapmaking has its predecessors in the medieval era, of course, in scholastic theology, but it appears the
early modern mania for physical cartography had its exact complement in the
occult sciencesindeed, it seems entirely symbolically appropriate that Dr.
John Dee, the greatest occultist of his day, also was relied upon as Queen Elizabeths cartographer. The term occult sciences may raise an eyebrow, yet there
is ample reason to use such a term, not only because many of the early major
scientific figures were in fact also alchemists, but even more because there is
good reason to think of Western esoteric currents in general as being based in
verifiable experimentation, in investigation without regard for dogmatic religious barriers, and in the effort to create a comprehensive map of the cosmos.
Fundamentally the same characteristics mark the comprehensive esotericism
represented by the D.O.M.A. manuscript and the efforts at a comprehensive
cosmology found in modern science.
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There was a time, not so very long ago, when esotericists could imagine a
unified cosmology that included religion, science, the arts, and literature in a
spiritually centered universe. This is the kind of comprehensive worldview visible in such illustrations as the ones we see emerging during the eighteenth century, and it is also clearly visible in the major works of that era, stretching right
into the nineteenth century. We have already referred to Georg von Wellings
Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum (1784), representing exactly such
a compendium of knowledge in largely written form (albeit including also illustrations and tables). Another such figure, denigrated in his own day as something of a plagiarist, was John Heydon, author of such works as Theomagia, or
the Temple of Wisdom, (London: 16631664) and The Wise-mans Crown, or the
Glory of the Rosie-cross, (London: 1665). Heydons Theomagia in particular
attempts to be a kind of universal compendium of the occult sciences.
But such universalism is a constant theme from the seventeenth century on,
and is certainly not limited to works labeled Rosicrucian. One finds the same
effort at universality in theosophy, as for instance in the vast metaphysical cartography of John Pordage (16041681), who in his multivolume Gttliche und
Wahre Metaphysica (Frankfurt/Leipzig: 1715/1746) (probably written during
the 1670s, but published only in German), chronicled what one discovers in
visiting in vision the various discarnate realms of existence. One sees this also,
of course, in the numerous volumes of Emanuel Swedenborg (16881772),
originally a scientist, but after his visionary entry into discarnate realms, a prolific chronicler of the unseen. And one sees the same effort to bridge the realms
in the works of Franz von Baader (17651841), truly a Renaissance man, who
studied minerology, invented an industrial process, and became one of the most
impressive writers on religious and spiritual themes of the nineteenth century,
not a visionary, but a profound intellectual who consciously sought to bridge
the gap between the sciences and religion.
From the seventeenth until the twentieth centuries, in other words, Western
esotericism often aims at universal knowledge, at a truly comprehensive
metaphysics and cosmology. Such a universalist goal does not exclude the
human, and specifically, the social and political realm. And it is in the sociopolitical realm that the Rosicrucian impulse had considerable impact, first
with the consistent emphasis of Rosicrucian works on the transformation of
society and the establishment of a utopia, and later in the development of
modern Freemasonry. For all of the Rosicrucian, theosophic, and pansophic
movements we have discussed in turn fed into Freemasonry, which, unlike
these other more individualistic movements, maintained a definite organizational hierarchy and structure.
Freemasonry, of course, began in the medieval period as one of many craft
guilds, each of which guarded its particular mysteries, those of masonry belonging to the arts of architecture and building, and associated with the vast
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Fludd later claimed that he received no reply, he did say that the Rosicrucian
Pansophia or universal knowledge in Nature was very like his own view.60
Then again, it was also conventional to say that one had received no reply, since
the Rosicrucians were traditionally sworn to silence.
But in any event, it is clear that Fludd identified with the Rosicrucian views,
and through his acquaintance with Elias Ashmole, he may indeed have provided a bridge between the earlier Rosicrucian movement and the nascent Masonic one. By the early 1630s, it was clear to Fludd that identification with the
Rosicrucians subjected one to much public vitriolFludd had been the subject
of bitter attacks by a French monk, Marin Mersenne. Mersenne was a friend of
the young Ren Descartes, who had actually gone in search of the Rosicrucians
(to the dismay of Mersenne) and Mersennes massive attacks on Hermeticism
and Kabbalism as well as Rosicrucianism certainly influenced the emergence
of what has come to be known as Cartesian rationalism. Such attacks undoubtedly prompted Fludd to write in his Clavis Philosophae that the name Rosicrucian must today be replaced by simply the Wise.
Elias Ashmole, who was certainly acquainted with Fludd before Fludds
death in 1637, was a remarkable figure who stood at the center of esoteric currents in England. Ashmole, born to an aristocratic family, used his wealth and
influence primarily and one may even say, almost exclusively for esoteric
causes. Himself an alchemist, astrologer, and assiduous bibliophile, Ashmole
collected what undoubtedly was and remains one of the worlds greatest collections of papers and books, in the Ashmolean library at Oxford. That Ashmole knew of Fludd and his Rosicrucianism is certain, for he himself noted that
Robert Fludd in his apology for the Brethren of the Rosie Cross hath gone
very far herein.61 But for our purposes, most significant is the fact that Ashmole was demonstrably a Mason, having been initiated into a Masonic lodge in
1646, for thus we can see direct evidence of the link between earlier Rosicrucianism and later Freemasonry.
Yet this relationship itself is only the tip of a far greater network of associations and friendships as well as influences. Frances Yates convincingly argues
that Dr. John Dee, and especially his treatise Monas Hieroglyphica, was very
influential in the founding of Rosicrucianism some years after Dees travels
through Germany and Eastern Europe. Dees son, Dr. Arthur Dee, was himself
an alchemist and esoteric scholar, who in turn was a friend of Sir Thomas
Browne, one of the major English literary figures of the seventeenth century.
And Dee and Browne in turn knew Ashmole, who was responsible in part for
the renaissance of Rosicrucianism within English Freemasonry, and who collected much on and by John Deeso that one might well say that the esoteric
movement here went from England to the Continent, and back to England, back
and forth in an intricate series of associations and publications that certainly
have not been exhaustively examined.
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Ashmole, editor of the extensive Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum collection of alchemical works, was not simply an antiquarian, although certainly that
impulse was strong in him. He also was a practicing Hermetic esotericist,
whose mentor was William Backhouse of Swallowfield (15931662), himself
an alchemist and antiquarian as well as a botanist and student of architecture.62
Backhouses father, Samuel, had had connections with John Dee and Edward
Kelley, and William Backhouse adopted Ashmole as a son, attested in a note
by Ashmole dated 3 April 1651. This was a Hermetic spiritual adoption, said
to have its origins in the revelation of Hermes to his spiritual son, and transmitted orally from master to one disciple since antiquity. Backhouse contributed old alchemical manuscripts to Ashmoles collection, introduced
Ashmole to Hermetic circles, and according to Ashmoles note in 1653, when
Backhouse thought he was dying, conveyed to Ashmole in Silables the true
matter of the Philosophers Stone, bequeathed to me as a legacy.63
That this spoken revelation of the philosophers stone comes in silables
suggests strongly the nature of the Western esoteric linguistic mysticism we
have been tracing since antiquity. These silables may be seen as alchemical
hieroglyphs, or as Kabbalistic, but they are in any case gnostic, meaning that
they convey the true and secret name and character of the philosophic work. It
is significant that Ashmole, after recording this revelation, never referred to it
again, and wrote himself in Theatrum Chemicum that the spiritual son was
under an obligation never to reveal the mystery into which he was initiated, except to his own spiritual son. All of this, of course, resonates closely with the
Rosicrucian ideal of silence and invisibility, which in turn harks back to the
namelessness and invisibility of the true Knights of the Round Table in
chivalric literature. The true name is hidden, and must remain so.
If this were the only instance of magical language during this era of the
emergence of Freemasonry as a vehicle for esotericism, of course, one could ignore it, but instead one finds that a linguistic mysticism was in fact at the heart
of a movement that fired the English Civil War. Hugh Trevor-Roper remarks that
Cromwells movement was impelled by three philosophers . . . the real . . . and
only philosophers of the English Revolution, Samuel Hartlib (15931670),
John Dury (15961680), and John Comenius (15921690).64 These three men,
who had left Germany for England after the failure of the Palatinate, were at the
center of a movement of educational and societal reform called the invisible
college, or what Comenius termed the Collegium Lucis, an esoteric network of
illuminated intelligentsia. All three of the men had been active in Rosicrucian
circles, and now in England all worked at the immediate transformation of society into a peaceful, non-sectarian utopia where all the divisions of knowledge
could be studied together, using a symbolic metalanguage.
Comenius had developed a system of education based in analogical correspondences, and Hartlib had worked to form such colleges both in Germany
HISTORICAL CURRENTS
83
and in England, but it is on some remarks by Dury that we should now focus.
For Dury listed under Things to Be Observed in his platform for social
transformation:
1. Some extraordinary meanes to perfeit the knowledge and unvail the mysteryes of the Propheticall scriptures.
2. Meanes to perfeit the knowledge of the Orientall tongues and to gaine
abilities fitt to deale with the Jewes, whose calling is supposed to be neere
at hand.
3. Arts and Sciences, Philosophicall, Chymical, and Mechanical; whereby not
only the Secrets of Disciplines are harmonically and compendiously delivered, but also the Secrets of Nature are thought to be unfolded . . .
4. A magical Language whereby secrets may be delivered and preserved to
such as are made acquainted with it traditionally.65
Durys remarks here are interesting not least because they reveal his attraction to
Jewish Kabbalism, which from a Christian viewpoint could well be defined as
some extraordinary meanes to perfeit the knowledge and unvail the mysteryes
of the Scriptures, and had often been seen as a means of connecting Christianity with Judaism. Also important here is the third point, the conjoining of all the
disciplines in service of the secrets of Nature, certainly a pansophic goal.
But most important for us is the final point, the establishing of a magical
language for the conveying of secret knowledge. The aim of a magical language is, needless to say, esoteric: to limit those who understand it, and also to
convey what cannot be conveyed in common language. However, there is another aspect of such a magical language: its universality. Such a language, like
the symbolism of alchemy, would transcend any national or cultural linguistic
boundaries. Its pansophic universality has its parallel in the universalism of
Masonry, which quickly established lodges all across Europe and in America,
so that by the mid-eighteenth century much of the Western world was dotted
with Masonic groups.
Early in the eighteenth century, Masonry had a deist and rationalist quality
that aided in its spread, visible in James Andersons Constitutions of the
Freemasons (1723), which had a considerable influence in promoting Masonrys nonsectarian tolerance. Freemasonry, according to the Constitutions,
means that A Mason is obligd by his Tenure to obey the Moral Law . . .
whereby Masonry becomes the Center of Union and the Means of conciliating
true Friendship among Persons that must have else remaind at a perpetual Distance.66 But this rationalist tolerance marks exoteric Freemasonry, and as Edmond Mazet remarks, there is little in the basic principles of Freemasonry to
suggest a specific Masonic esotericism.
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Yet despite the insistence of some on a more exoteric Masonry, the tradition
has long been seen as maintaining occult knowledge, specifically, as maintaining a special linguistic power that lies at the heart of building, that is, of human
and divine architecture both. As we have already seen, such an emphasis on the
powers of divine creation is characteristic of Kabbalism since the medieval period, and so it is not surprising to discover that in 1676 we find Masonry associated with the Modern Green Ribbond Caball, as well as references to those
who are said to have the Masons word. In other words, from very early on in
the development of modern Masonry, the tradition is linked to Masonic linguistic mysticism. In the Graham manuscript of 1726, we find an exorcism ritual to be used by Masons in the construction of a building, a ritual that relies
upon foundation words.69
These words take their derivation from the building of Solomons Temple,
when the secrets of Freemasonry [were] ordered aright as is now and will be
to the end of the world for such as do rightly understand itin three parts in
reference to the blessed Trinity who made all things, yet in thirteen branches
in reference to Christ and his twelve apostles, which is as follows: one word
for a divine, six for the clergy, and six for the fellow craft.70 What are these
words divided evenly between the clergy and Freemasons? There is some evidence of Kabbalistic influence in Freemasonry of the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuriesfor instance, in The Whole Institutions of Freemasons Opened (1725): Yet for all this I want the primitive word, I answer it was
God in six Terminations, to wit I am, which Edmond Mazet sees as a clear
allusion to the six permutations of the trigrammaton YHW, by which, according to the Sepher Yetsirah (1.8), God has sealed the six directions of space.71
And there are some Hebrew words in early Masonic documentsnot surprisingly, since one finds Hebrew frequently in Rosicrucian illustrations and
works as well.
In other words, when we look closely at the emergence of Freemasonry, we
find that it definitely does draw upon earlier esoteric currents, and that as the
Masonic current continues through the eighteenth century, it continues to draw
upon these and other currents to become itself among the most eclectic of esoteric traditions, even if it is subject to periodic spasms of anti-esotericism.
Freemasonry, based as it is on the craft of building, has a natural connection to
Kabbalistic mysticism that also focuses on divine architecture; but it also later
drew explicitly and implicitly on the chivalric, theosophic, Rosicrucian, and alchemical currents of Western esotericism, especially with the founding of the
Orden des Guelden-und Rosen-Cruetzes, the Order of the Gold and RosyCross, a Masonic Rosicrucianism begun in 1757 in Germany that incorporated
Templar and alchemical symbolism too. Indeed, even to this day, the Ancient
and Accepted Scottish Rite, the most popular form of contemporary Masonry,
preserves its eighteenth grade as that of the Chevalier Rose-Croix.
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Like the Rosicrucianism that preceded it, speculative Masonry is a manifestation of the more general modern dream of universalism, in this case a universal esotericism that unites all forms of knowledge, joining the humanities and
the sciences under the aegis of a broadly conceived spirituality. Here, of course,
we are disregarding the more or less social aspects of Freemasonry, as well as
its political dimensions that came to the fore with Adam Weishaupt and others
during the eighteenth century. The universalist esotericist dream is not the
provenance of Masonry as an organization, but of individuals and circles within
the larger stream of Masonic tradition. One might best say that Freemasonry
contains the possibility of a universalist esotericism, which has been sporadically realized by individuals.
When we consider the seminal modern Western esoteric currents together,
including alchemy, Kabbalah, magic, Masonry, pansophy, Rosicrucianism, and
Christian theosophy, we cannot help but recognize similarities among them all.
Above all, we see a central distinction between them all and what we can characterize as the dominant modern materialist view. For whereas modern society
is founded on the objectifying separation of everything from the individual (allowing the exploitation of the entire cosmos, including humanity), all of these
esoteric traditions are founded upon the overcoming of this objectification
through the recognition of how microcosm and macrocosm are mutually illuminating, of how humanity is meant to redeem the cosmos, not consume it. All
of these esoteric currents further presuppose that humans are capable of spiritual regeneration and of attaining gnosis, or direct experiential knowledge of
the divine.
Finally, woven through all of these traditions is the theme of language, not
just as the means of communication among people, but as the actual medium
linking humanity, nature, and the divine. Here, in Western esotericism, language
is not just a means for objectification and separation, but actually the means for
overcoming that objectification. For according to Western esotericism generally,
divine language inheres in the whole of creationeach kind of creature bears
within it the divine stamp, its secret silable, or signature, and this the esotericist unveils through visionary perception. What is more, by coming to learn the
divine language of creation, the esotericist is actually redeeming or restoring the
cosmos to its transcendent or paradisal origin. Thus the esotericist plays a central role in the drama of cosmic redemption itself. And this role is played out
through reading and writing, the theme of our next section.
Figure 1
Alchemical images from Michael
M a i e r, T r i p u s A u r e u s ( F r a n k f u r t : 1 6 1 8 ) .
Figure 2
Another alchemical image
M i c h a e l M a i e r, T r i p u s A u r e u s ( 1 6 1 8 ) .
from
Figure 3
Theosophic image entitled Serenity from Jacob Bhme, Theosophia Revelata,
oder: Alle Gtliche Schriften Jacob Bhmens
(1730 ed.), edited by Johann Georg Gichtel.
Figure 4
Theosophic image entitled Three
Principles from Jacob Bhme, Theosophia
Revelata, oder: Alle Gtliche Schriften Jacob
Bhmens (1730 ed.), edited by Johann Georg
Gichtel.
Figure
5
Theosophic
image
entitled
Earthly
and
Heavenly
Mysterium
from
Jacob Bhme, Theosophia Revelata, oder:
Alle Gtliche Schriften Jacob Bhmens (1730
ed.), edited by Johann Georg Gichtel.
Figure 6
Pansophic image from Georg von
We l l i n g , O p u s M a g o - C a b b a l i s t i c u m e t T h e o sophicum (Frankfurt: 1784).
Note that beyond the celestial hierarchy is the Ungrund,
which is here explicitly identified with the
Kabbalistic en soph.
Figure 7
Pansophic image from Georg von
We l l i n g , O p u s M a g o - C a b b a l i s t i c u m e t T h e o sophicum, (Frankfurt: 1784). Note the threedimensional nature of the illustration, as
well as the prominence of the figure of the
eye.
Figure 8
Pansophic image from Georg von
We l l i n g , O p u s M a g o - C a b b a l i s t i c u m e t T h e o sophicum (Frankfurt: 1784).
Figure
9
Cecil
Collins,
The
Music
of
Dawn, 1988. Note the contrast between the
g e o m e t r i c a l i m a g e s i n G e o rg v o n We l l i n g s
illustrations,
and
the
evocative,
otherworldly nature of Collinss work.
Figure 10
Modern Implications
P R O S P E R O S WA N D :
M O D E R N E S O T E R I C L I T E R AT U R E
In the greatest of Shakespeares plays, The Tempest, something remarkable happens at the plays end. The main character, the magician Prospero, has brought
the plays action to an end, and the comedic drama is brought to its resolution,
so that we are left viewing the magician himself. Prospero then offers the
famous epilogue:
Now my charms are all oerthrown,
And what strength I haves my own,
Which is most faint. Now tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant
And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer
Which pierces so that it assaults
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or less like that of the early T. S. Eliot, and became, so his nephew Czeslaw
Milosz later wrote, a Don Juanesque figure. Then, in 1914, he experienced a
spiritual illumination, and from this period on became a serious scholar of Hermeticism, Kabbalah, theosophy, and Western esotericism in general. Financially ruined during this time by the collapse of Russia, Milosz also became
active as a diplomat for Lithuania, participating in the League of Nations and
serving until his retirement in 1938. It was during the first half of this service
that Milosz wrote his most Hermetic works, which are what concern us here.
Miloszs predecessors in the Western literary tradition are indissolubly
linked with religion and philosophy, and invariably sought to conjoin not only
the sciences and literature and the arts, but all of these under the sign of a Hermetic spirituality. One can, in fact, create a kind of lineage of such figures, beginning of course with Paracelsus and Bhme, and including such authors as
Emanuel Swedenborg (16881772), William Blake (17571827), LouisClaude de Saint-Martin (17431803), and Johann Wolfgang Goethe
(17491832). Diverse as this list is in certain respects, its members have in
common that most lived during the eighteenth century and that they sought, by
way of a renewed Hermetic spirituality, to bring about a cultural renaissance
that would join together the sundered limbs of human knowledge.
Among these figures, perhaps the most seminal is Swedenborg, who was
trained as a scientist but went on to write voluminous works surveying the nature, as he saw it, of heaven, hell, and the dwelling places of spirits. These Swedenborg saw, in vision, and depicted as peculiarly concretethe visionary
realms of the spirit for him are palpable and his work certainly a kind of hyperphysical cartography. Swedenborg was, and perhaps remains, far more influential than is usually acknowledged in intellectual histories; he remains a primary
force behind the works of William Blake, also a tactile visionary, and, for that
matter, Goethe, who as we will recall in his latter years tried to reunite the bythen separated fields of the humanities and the sciences with his works on
plants and color. In both Swedenborg and Goethe we see the emergence of what
we might call a nascent spiritual science.
But it is in Milosz that we see Swedenborgs approach, his effort to chronicle the visionary experience with a kind of new science of the spirit, come to
fruition in literary form. Swedenborg of course was himself preceded in this effort by John Pordage, whose massive works are themselves scientific in their
precise descriptions and careful elucidation of all the various divine mansions. However, neither Pordage nor Swedenborg was a poet, and both wrote
in dry, almost pedantic ways of their visionary experiences. Not so Milosz,
whose poems and prose are not only recountings of visionary experiences, but
are in fact also intended to invoke these experiences in the reader; Miloszs poetry, though drawing on this tradition of scientific observation of visionary
experience, in a mysterious way also embodies and is the experience.
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91
Here it may be useful to remark on the kind of new science we see emerging
in these writers, and especially in Milosz. Contemporary sciences are founded
in observation of the cosmos; the observer looks outward, and does not in general investigate the nature of the observers own consciousness. But the poet,
and especially the figures we are discussing here, turn their attention inward
and become careful observers of the inner landscape. Cartographers of consciousness, they are all intimately aware of the great schisms taking place in
modern humanity, the immense devastation of the self as it is torn asunder from
the divine, from the cosmos, and from its fellow humanity and seemingly set
adrift as an isolated being. This isolation Blake rails against in his epic poems,
insisting instead on the inner creative life of the artist; and like Blake, Milosz
experiences this inner devastation as well as the powerful creative life awakened when one enters into the living realm of the spiritual imagination.
Miloszs work is explicitly dedicated not only to entering into this realm of
the spiritual imagination, but indeed, to awakening it in his reader. Milosz
himself wrote in a brief and late treatise on poetry, summarizing in some respects his lifes work, that he anticipated a new poetry, which will contribute
in large measure to realizing an inner synthesis of the great discoveries in
physical chemistry, astronomy, and also prehistory and archaic history.4 He
discerned a new mysticism, which, setting out from proven scientific foundations, seems bound, through a new metaphysics, to join up with ancient
teachings.5 And he writes of the sacred art of the Word, which springs
from the hidden depths of Universal Being, telling us that poetry, the passionate pursuit of the Real, seems called upon, as the organizer of archetypes,
to survive not only our industrial civilization but also Space-Time itself.6
Thus he addresses his writings not to the present age but to the future reader
who will experience this new poetry and synthesis of all the disciplines, crown
of human knowledge.
At this juncture, it will no doubt be useful to look more closely at some of
Miloszs work, and in particular, at his Cantique de la Connaissance, or
Canticle of Knowledge, from The Confession of Lemuel (1918). The Canticle begins with the striking line: Lenseignement de lheure ensoleille des
nuits du Divin. [The teaching of the sunlit hour of the divine nights.] Thus the
canticle is devoted to teaching on the nature of spiritual illumination, which
Milosz experienced at eleven oclock in the evening, on 14 December 1914.
The canticle continues: A ceux, qui, ayant demand, on reu et savent dj. /
A ceux que la prire a conduits la mditation sur lorigin du langage. / Les
autres, les voleurs de douleur et de joie, de science et damour, nentendront
rien ces choses. [For those who, having asked, have received and already
know. / For those whom prayer has led to meditation on the origin of language.
/ Others, thieves of joy and pain, knowledge and love, will understand nothing of these things.]7
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93
existence. When he sings the canticle of the sunlight hour of the nights of
God and proclaims the wisdom of two worlds opened to his sight, he means
precisely what he says: I have seen. Simply that. Thus Milosz goes on to tell
us matter-of-factly that he who has seen stops thinking and feeling, and only
describes what he has seen. Here, Milosz tells us again, is the key to the world
of light. De la magie des mots que jassemble ici / Lor du mond sensible tire
sa secrte valeur [From the magic of the words I gather here / The sensible
worlds gold draws its secret value.]11
There is in the Canticle of Knowledge a continuous thread of allusions to
gold and to the sun, as well as to the solar egg of the soul, and knowledges
golden candlestick. But the allusions are not necessarily to earthly gold nor to
the sun visible from the earth, for as he told us before, these ancient metaphors
refer to substances, to names that precede and transcend their earthly counterparts, which only draw their value from their supersensible archetypes. And
so it is here. The man of light (lhomme la lumire) draws his knowledge from
this supersensible sun in the motionless realm of substances. Milosz speaks to
us directly: Do you feel the most ancient of your memories awakening in you?
/ I reveal to you here the holy origins of your love of gold. There is the earthly
gold, and the gold of celestial memory; he calls us to the celestial gold.
At such points, when Milosz addresses us directly, he implicates us in the
poem, calls us through its language into the truth that language manifests. For
la vrit ne fait pas mentire le langage sacr: car elle est aussi le soleil visible
du monde substantiel. [truth does not make sacred language lie: . . . it is also the
visible sun of the substantial world]. This distinction between truth and lie, he
tells us, is the key to the two worlds of darkness and light. These two worlds
correspond to the two worlds of Bhme, of love and of wrath, or in Miloszs
words, of blessing and of desolation. But beyond these two worlds is the word
enveloped in sun, the word charged by the thunder of this dangerous time [la
parole enveloppe de soleil, le mot charg de foudre de ce temps dangereux.]12
This charged and sun-enveloped word reminds us of the account in Genesis of creation, as well as the first chapter of John (In the beginning was the
Word), but also of the Corpus Hermeticum. Milosz exultantly writes, I have
named you! [Je tai nomm!], which recalls the primal naming of all things
by the primal man, Adam, and then comes the following passage: te voici
dans le rayon avant-coureur au sein du nuage fig, muet comme le plomb, /
Dans le bond et le vent de la masse de feu, / Dans lapparition de lesprit virginal de lor / Dans lapparition de love la sphre . . . [Here you are in the
first ray in the womb of the fixed cloud, mute as lead. / In the leap and wind of
the fiery mass, / In the appearance of the virginal spirit of gold, / In the passage from the egg to the sphere.]13
As we might recall, the first section of Poemandres in the Corpus Hermeticum is also a visionary creation-account, a revelation, that is, of the primal
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powers at work in the constant manifestation of existence. Here too we find the
leap and wind of a fiery mass; here too we find a kind of fixed cloud; here
too we find the emergence of light and life in the opening of the world of
light for the visionary seer.14 I am not suggesting that Milosz is directly alluding to the Corpus Hermeticum, even though I am certain that he was at least familiar with it; rather, Miloszs visionary experience here is quite simply parallel
to and in the tradition of what we also see in Poemandres and, for that matter,
in the visionary writings of Bhme, to whom Milosz was definitely indebted.
The ascent to the solar place that Milosz describes here brings one to the
omnipotence of affirmation, to a place where myriad spiritual bodies reveal themselves to virtuous senses, yet also to a place of utter desolation.
Thus in the Canticle of Knowledge, just as in so much of Western esotericism, we find a spiritual corporeality, and a kind of corporeality of language.
Milosz tells us that he has visited the two worlds, for the key to the world of
light also opens theother region. The omnipotence of affirmation is
counterbalanced, on this naked cold planet of iron and clay, by omnipotent
negation in Ce lieu spar, diffrent, hideux, cet immense cerveau dlirant de
Lucifer [This separated place, different, hideous, this immense, delirious, Luciferic brain].15 Here we find, not light and serenity of recognition, but great
trials of negation, an eternity of horror, and marrow of iniquity, those
lands of nocturnal din.
Yet there is a realm beyond these two worlds of affirmation and negation,
of light and darkness, and this is the solar egg, immense, innocent, selfknowing. Thus the poet tells us not to weep for him, because whether he is
dazzled by the solar egg, or hurled into the madness of the black eternity,
mois je suis toujours dans le mme lieu, / tant dans le lieu mme, le seul
situ. [I am always in the same place, / being in place itself, the only one situated.]16 See, Milosz tells us, the Father of Ancients, of those who speak pure
language, / played with me as a father with his child. This playing between
worst darkness and best light emerges from beyond both darkness and light,
and is the province of those who speak pure language.
In the concluding lines of the canticle, Milosz muses on his early poetry,
when like all nature poets I was sunk in profound ignorance [Comme tous les
potes de la nature, jtais plong dans une profonde ignorance.] Then one
day, he noticed that he had stopped before a mirror, and looked behind him,
where he saw the source of lights and forms, the world of profound, wise,
chaste archetypes. We might recall that the mirror, in theosophic tradition, is
the sign of Wisdom personified: Wisdom showed him the realm of Forms prior
to existence, and at this moment the sterile woman in him died. Thus, Milosz
writes, I learned that in its depths mans body encloses a remedy for all ills,
and that the knowledge of gold is also knowledge of light and blood. [Cest
ainsi que jappris que le corps de lhomme renferme dans ses profondeurs un
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remde tous les maux et que la connaissance de lor est aussi celle de la
lumire et du sang.]17
The canticle concludes with the poets prayer that when he is finally
cleansed of both evil and good, and clothed with the sun, he will not lose the
memory of the suffering he has undergone. Thus the canticle, at its end, reaffirms the importance not only of the ascent to the knowledge of light, but the
descent into immense suffering and privation; it affirms the significance not
only of the virginal gold of the souls solar egg, but also of the inner desolation
that one can also experience on earth. In this acknowledgement of fundamental
duality in the cosmos, Milosz is very much akin to Bhme, who wrote too of
the division and conflict between love and wrath, between the lightworld and
the darkworld. And in his allusions to the visionary descent into darkness,
Milosz is close to Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, [17751802]), and his
Hymns to the Night.18
But Milosz has forged his own mode of expression, and is clearly expressing his own direct experience. This understanding he expressed often in a peculiarly theatrical way, especially given Miloszs own essentially solitary life.
Frequently his poetry has a dramatic or semidramatic quality, as though the various elements of his mind were projected outward into a kind of initiatic psychodrama of the kind one also sees in ancient Hermetism or the Mysteries, as
well as in more modern movements like Freemasonry. In some poems he has a
choir or a chorus; in his 1922 poem entitled The Adepts Christmas Eve,
Milosz has his character The Adept speaking with his inner spouse, Beatrix.
This poem, because of its fusion of literature and Hermeticism, is especially of
interest to us here.
The Adepts Christmas Eve begins with the Adepts ritual gesture: sept
fois pour le pass, et pour nos trois jours venir, trois voisle signe, le signe!
[seven times for the past, and for our three days to come, again three times, let
us make the sign, the sign!] This is the sign of the cross, and with it the initiate
asks for peace for Beatrix and for himself. Master, you speak the truth, replies
Beatrix. And then the adept makes a strange remark: Les parents dorment l,
tendres mtaux poux, dans cet uf appuy sur le feu nuptial. Quils sont beaux,
innocents! [The parents sleep there, tender metal partners in marriage, in this
egg resting on the nuptial flame. How beautiful and innocent they are!]19 This
reference, to tender metal partners in marriage, is unquestionably alchemical,
but refers to an inner alchemy. Beatrix is surprised: So you can see them? How?
In this hermetic egg? With what eyes? The adept replies: Chre enfant, par la
grce de la vue du milieu. Et puisque nous connaissons depuis sept ans, je te
touche le front. [Dear child, by the grace of inner vision, and since we have now
known one another seven years, I touch your brow.] To this Beatrix replies:
Farewell, space and time! And the adept suggests they both to kneel in adoration devant le cher fourneau [before this dear Furnace.]
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work, in other words, eventuates in the birth of Christ in the alchemist or adept:
all these traditions are brought together in the service of what we may call an
Hermetic-alchemical initiatory psychodramatic poem.
Perhaps most interesting for us is the question of the poems reader. To
whom is Milosz writing in such a poem, and what effect does he anticipate the
poem will have? This is a much more far-reaching question than one might at
first imagine. In his exegetic notes to his own prose work Ars Magna (whose
title is drawn from the similarly named work by Ramon Lull), Milosz writes
that his work is a testament, a faithful and pious narrative, and that In the
authors mind, the meaning attributed to this word is that of a legacy to a posterity as distant as possible from this fourth age whose death agony we are witnessing. The poet of Ars Magna and the Arcana does not write for his
contemporaries.22 To whom does this legacy belong, then?
Undoubtedly, to read such a poem as Canticle of Knowledge or The
Adepts Christmas Eve, not to mention Ars Magna or The Arcana, by Milosz,
is also to participate in it, or rather, in what it reveals. Whereas much of what
we call modern poetry has only itself and the physical world for references,
Miloszs poems presuppose a visionary experiential reality behind and above
them. The incantory, sometimes decidedly strange language of Miloszs poetry
brings the reader into a similar state to that Milosz is describing; one senses
vast expanses around one, with the initiatory drama unfolding itself in an inner
theater whose audience is, after all, oneself. And there is in this unfolding
drama something profoundly impersonal, as unemotional as nature, as though
the poet does not exist as an ego.
To see how far Miloszs work is from what we often call poetry, perhaps we
should examine one of his exegetic notes on a single line of his own Poem of
the Arcana. The line is the fourth verse, Yet I shall humble in the dust before
you this brow which has received the crown. Miloszs commentary goes far, far
beyond what we might think such a line may mean. He writes in exegesis that
The revelation of a superior phenomenalism opens with a mystical consecration, archetype of the coronation of regents by divine right in the
material world. The various phases of this rite correspond to the principal
moments in the regeneration of a mineral. When the ascent through the
nebula is finished and the epopt [Gk.: initiate], perfectly awake, rests in a
horizontal position, at a small distance from the large cupric cloud which
conceals from him the upper luminous level, a light appears, not very
high in the vaporous mass behind the top of his skull, in such a way that
it seems to be seen through the parietal bone. At the same instant, the
large cloud vanishes, exposing the upper region which is suddenly
crossed, in an elliptical leap of extreme violence and with the noise of a
strong wind, by a metallic red-hot egg.
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Turning into a golden globe, it descends slowly towards the top of the
skull, on which it alights like a crown; thereafter, moving up a little, it assumes the appearance of a magnificent golden sun of oval shape, stands
still, becomes rounder, and plunges its omniscient stare for a long time
into the deepest thought of the new King.23
There is still more, but this lengthy excerpt is sufficient to show that even a single rather mundane line in Miloszs poetry has behind it far more experiential
referents than we might ever have expected. This account suggests that Milosz
is writing rather precisely, one may even say, scientifically, about an actual
experience of spiritual coronation.
Perhaps we can understand more clearly what Milosz means when he quotes
the master Goethe as saying that Every passing thing is only a symbol, and
adds that Behind the symbol there is an immutable situated reality. Miloszs
superior phenomenalism is his term for direct spiritual experience, and for
him such experience is more real than our mundane lives precisely because it is
not constrained by duration or mensurability. Such experience is of the truly situated, meaning the archetypal realm, and in this there is a kind of reversal, for
what seems situated and real in this world is revealed in the other to be unreal.
Only what is behind or in the symbolic is ultimately real. And authentic literature, because it springs from this archetypal reality, is revelatory and prophetic
in its very nature.
There is in Miloszs work a paradoxical insistence on humility, and a scorn
for our own era that bespeaks a kind of pride. He insists that in order to understand, we must bow down, that, as he put it in his last poem of 1936, only he
who bows down will be bowed down to. Yet at the same time Milosz in his
prose and poetry addresses himself to a future reader some centuries hence,
who will read these pages with a filial respect for their author, and with unspeakable scorn for the epoch which saw their birth.24 He writes sardonically
of the blindness and destructiveness of modern society with its industrial gigantism, its brutal mass wars, its secular hedonism and materialism, and insists
that his true reader will recognize the worth of his writings only far in the future. In all of this he assumes a prophetic voice, referring to the reader as my
son, thus bringing his reader into the dialogue much as one finds in the Corpus Hermeticum and in other Hermetic dialogues or monologues since antiquity. His is a peculiar combination of humility and pride intermingled; one
senses that his pride comes from a certainty of knowledge that is ignored and
despised by the human world, just as he ignores and despises that world.
It is perhaps useful, at this point, to remark on the question of Miloszs antecedents. Without question, he is among the most erudite of poets, yet his erudition, though including many great poets, is focused particularly on the
syncretic Hermeticism that began to flower in the eighteenth century. Milosz
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a mysticism that has all those things sleeping in closed books that open
themselves under the poets hand. Thus we find in this final poem of Milosz the
linguistic and, if we may coin a word, libric mysticism that has haunted Western
esotericism from antiquity. Here, just as in the Book of Revelation and just as
in Kabbalism, the archetypes of the cosmos exist inside letters, words, and
books, inside the books of life and of knowledge; and the true poet, the visionary poet, opens those books in order to reveal their inner mysteriesor rather,
the books open themselves to him. Nor is it coincidental that in 1933 Milosz
published his close study titled LApocalypse de Saint-Jean Dchiffre [The
Apocalypse of Saint John Decoded] and, in 1938, La Clef de lApocalypse [The
Key to the Apocalypse]. Milosz held, as early as 1919, that the work of the coming poet is to be a crowning of the New Testament as the latter was a crowning of the Old: It is not a book, it is not books that we are waiting for; we are
waiting for the continuation and fulfillment of the only Book.29 Here we see
the nascent Christian millennialism that pervades so much of Miloszs work as
he anticipated a future renaissance, and that he shared with much of the Christian theosophic tradition.
Hermeticism and Kabbalism, in short, are enormously important for understanding the complex work of Milosz and his mysticism of the word, but there
are still other currents of Western esotericism that emerge in the poets work,
drawn together with a universalism that both resembles and includes Freemasonry. In his Poem of the Arcana, in fact, Milosz tells of his visionary experience, says that I am entering the twelfth year of supreme knowledge, and
yet writes that he will humble his brow in the dust before you, my son, Hiram,
King of the unified world, Architect of the effective Catholic Church of tomorrow, the universal regent of faith, science, and art.30 The name Hiram is found
in Masonic tradition, and Milosz explains his poems relationship to Freemasonry in his Exegetic Notes, which are far more extensive than anything T. S.
Eliot, for instance, wrote for his poetry.
Under the heading Hiram, King of the Unified World, Milosz writes that
The personage who concerns us here is not the symbolic hero of the Templars or of Scottish Freemasonry in England, Germany, and Savoy. The
architect of those brotherhoods was Biblical in name only. The legend
of his assassination by three rebellious companions and of the discovery
of his body by the nine Masters is only a figure for the death of Jacques
de Mola. . . . The allegory is clearly indicated by the password Nekom
(Vengeance) used by the Chapter of Clermont and the Scottish lodge of
the Berlin Union. If the author has considered it useful to follow Lessing,
Joseph de Maistre, R. Le Forestier, and several other historians of the
brotherhoods in their research on the origins of an institution which
claims to descend from the Essenes and from the Priests of the Holy
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Sepulchre, it is above all as testimony of veneration for some of its members, particularly for Kadosch Dante Alighieri of the Fede Santa, and to
the Rosicrucian Polybius the Cosmopolitan, alias Ren Descartes.31
It is clear from this note alone that Milosz was intimately familiar with the history of Masonry and Rosicrucianism, and further that although he is drawing
on Masonic lore, his reference to Hiram in the poem is of his own devising.
Milosz goes on to tell us that the future architect mentioned by name in
the Arcana is the spiritual son of Hiram-Abi, the builder sent by Hiram of
Tyre to Solomon. This Hiram will establish his temporal dominion over a
world unified at first in spirit by the Holy Catholic Church, the depository of
the one divine and human truth confirmed by philosophy and science.32
Here, even though Milosz implies that his Hiram is different from the Masonic one, he brings in the theme that, as we have seen, was so profoundly
characteristic of early Rosicrucianism and of Freemasonry as well: the union
of science and religion in a glorious unified future world. Indeed, many
themes in Miloszs outer lifechiefly his work in the League of Nations
reflect those of the Rosicrucians and early modern Masons, especially the
dream of a world utopia.
Hence Milosz continues his exegesis of his own poem with several pages on
the emergence of a unified world and a new world monarchy, as well as the
emergence of a Cathedral of Peace. He prophesies that all laboratories of the
highest thought will come to group themselves in an immense circle around the
future Church of Our Lady, a Virgin-Mother of Knowledge. And he imagines
too the approaching moment, relatively not distant, when the organization of
Europe will be based upon the principles which guided the foundation of the
great American federation.33 This last remark is especially interesting given
that not only were George Washington and Benjamin Franklin Masons, but so
too were fifty-three of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence.34 And Milosz goes on to ask, Who remembers the enthusiasm and the
hopes of 1789? Such a question takes on added resonance when one considers
the role that Freemasonry played in the French Revolution.
But Miloszs grand dream goes beyond Masonry as well. He writes that
Today, in the sacred poem of the Arcana, the times foreseen by Guillaume
Postel, the times of perfection in the Restitution of Nature, announce their impending appearance. Religion and science, like spirit and matter, like all the
continents and all the states of this world, aspire to holy unification.35 All of
this resonates so strongly with the Western esoteric traditions we have been
tracing that it would take several pages just to explicate this single sentence in
Miloszs Exegetic Notes. Here, it is perhaps enough to recall the prophetic
late-medieval character Postel, who announced a coming millennium, and in so
doing was drawing upon a tradition of the Restitution of All Things that runs
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from antiquity through such figures as John Scotus Eriugena and Jane Leade to
modern authors including Vladimir Solovyov and Nicholas Berdyaev.36 Milosz
too saw himself as a prophet of a future era of universal peace and knowledge,
of political, religious, and scientific fusion, to which era belongs the spiritual
son whom he addresses throughout his gnostic poetry and prose.
Just as Milosz drew on the full breadth of the Masonic tradition in his poetry
and prose, so too he drew on Masonry in his private life. Several years after his
illuminatory experience in 1914, he drew together a small esoteric coterie that
included Ren Schwaller, whom he later adopted as his spiritual son and gave
his family crest name, de Lubicz. This small group they called Les Veilleurs
(The Watchers), and in 1919 they established an exoteric center called the Centre Apostolique, Hirarchie-Libert-Fraternit, while also publishing numerous
articles in several journals of the time. And in 1929 Milosz wrote a letter to a
friend in which he explained that Carlos Larronde, one of Miloszs most devoted friends, was drawing together a new group of which Milosz was to be
spiritual director, a group that included the proletarian Masons whose G[rand]
M[aster] is one of our friends.37
This new esoteric group had some Masonic characteristics, among them its
ritual dress. Milosz wrote, in his letter to James Chauvet, The hour of Apostleship has soundedMilosz himself, of course, being the Christ-figure, the
other members being his apostles. Dress for meeting: the robes will be of
black silk, with a white collar. The Master alone will wear a red cap. These are
the three colors of the great work (spiritual and physical). The fundamental
teaching will be that of the Arcana. I am the enemy of exteriorization, but our
modern attire is truly incompatible with all effort toward the Good, moral or social. Our group will have no more than twelve members.38 Such a group, a
kind of Christian semi-Masonic esotericism, certainly has its historical predecessors: one thinks, for instance, of the London Rosicrucians of the early nineteenth century associated with Francis Barrett, author of The Magus. Here too
was a group with Masonic overtones, but explicitly Christian. And there are
numerous other such examples.
For us, however, most important is that Miloszs work extended into every
sphere of life, and that he deliberately, in his work as in his private life, sought
the widest possible range. In his work, as we have seen, Milosz explicitly forecast the unification of politics, the sciences, and the arts via religion, the science of the divine. And in his little esoteric group, he hoped to influence all
sorts of domains in the evolution of our terrible and admirable epoch.39 These
dreams of universality, and of forming a group of disciples that in turn would
help to transform the whole of human society, however outrageous they may
seem in their magnitude, not to say grandiosity, resemble nothing so much as
the inception of Rosicrucianism (whose advocates sought precisely the same
social transformation on a vast scale).
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Milosz is, today, a relatively obscure figure, little studied in academe, but
as we can see from this discussion of his work and life, there is no other figure
who so completely reveals the confluence of all the primary currents of Western esotericism in the modern era. There are, of course, others whose work certainly bears the imprint of esoteric influences, including such authors as
William Butler Yeats, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, the poet H. D., and Kathleen Raine, all of whom also were involved in esoteric circles. Indeed, the list
of names of modern authors and poets influenced by esoteric currents of
thought is nigh unto endless. However, Milosz is unique not only for the vast
range of his studies, but also for the universality of his aims. He sought nothing
less than to bring about the renewal of Christianity through its universalization,
and a new golden age, and in such aims is a classic exemplar of modern Western esotericism.
In these efforts, Milosz certainly resembles the figure of Prospero in Shakespeares The Tempest, for however assiduous Milosz was in working toward
universality in his writing and in his life, all of these efforts were ultimately
pointed, not toward the present, but toward the future, and specifically toward a
future reader whom he regards as his spiritual son. Like Prospero in his final
speech, Milosz in some respects cast aside his wand (any influence on his contemporary era) in order, through his writing, to reach an audience whom he
specifically invoked in his writing itself. There is in Miloszs poetry and prose
a peculiar hieratic quality and a special relationship to his imagined reader that
will inform our final two chapters, in which we begin to explore the theoretical
dimensions and implications of Western esoteric literature in relation to consciousness. Although we here will take our leave of them, we have by no means
finished with either of these inexhaustible figures: Prospero, and Milosz.
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will explore how her work explicitly and implicitly initiates the reader
through literature and art.
We should begin, however, by recognizing that H. D. belonged to what is
clearly an American feminine literary lineage that includes on the one hand
Emily Dickinson, and on the other Margaret Fuller, for H. D. very much resembles both of them in certain respects. I have written in detail about both
Dickinson and Fuller in The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance
(2001), so it will be necessary here only to allude to the parallels. Margaret
Fuller, like H. D., was fascinated by numerology, astrology, and what we might
term esoteric correspondences or patterns in life. She created a hermetic emblem or herald for herself, and it was included as the frontispiece for her most
well-known book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Likewise, H. D. was fascinated by esoteric correspondences in her life, was a reasonably accomplished
astrological interpreter, and soon (by 1911) came to see the emblem of the thistle and serpent as her own.
But when we begin to look at H. D.s early, explicitly esoteric book, Notes on
Thought and Vision (1919), the parallels we see perhaps most clearly are not
so much with Fuller as with Dickinson. For it seems clear from her poetry, as
many critics have observed, that Dickinson underwent at least one extended
spiritual and psychological crisis. In Esoteric Origins, I argue that this crisis
can be interpreted as initiatory, as a wrenching spiritual awakening. And when
we turn from Dickinson to H. D., we see very much the same pattern of psychological and spiritual crisis as awakening, save that in H. D.s life it is repeated a number of times. In his introduction to H. D.s Notes on Thought and
Vision, The Thistle and the Serpent, Albert Gelpi writes that H. D. underwent
a severe psychic breakdown, and her extreme sensitivity had made her preternaturally susceptible to the intensities of experience that others might overlook. Vulnerable to periodic psychic breakdowns, her unusual susceptibility
also made possible a breakthrough into heightened consciousness, which she
calls in Notes her jellyfish experience.41
Although the major works by H. D. for our purposes are her later ones such
as her poems in Trilogy and Vale Ave as well as her novel The Gift, the much
earlier work Notes on Thought and Vision helps to make clear H. D.s gnostic
perspective in relation to literature. Notes is a very unusual work; written in
July 1919 in the Scilly Islands, it argues for the characteristically Emersonian
idea of an overmind as a model of higher consciousness. She begins Notes
with the cryptic proclamation: Three states or manifestations of life: body,
mind, overmind. The work is essentially an elaboration of this gnomic statement. She writes:
If I could visualise or describe that overmind in my own case, I should
say this: it seems to me that a cap is over my head, a cap of consciousness
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a wrong path, one that leads toward the subconscious and illusionand this is
the path of the surrealists, with their overconfidence leading only to floundering in sea-depths of confused images and incongruous monsters.49
Thus, H. D. continues, Let us substitute / enchantment for sentiment, / rededicate our gifts / to spiritual realism. She calls us to prepare papyrus or
parchment, invoke Hermes-thrice-great, invoke the true-magic, / lead us
back to the one-truth. Her invocation continues: Let him (Wisdom, / in the
light of what went before, illuminate what came after, / re-vivify the eternal
verity.50 Here H. D. explicitly invokes the Hermetism of antiquity, who as the
sacred scribe is invoked through the act of using pen or brush, through painting or writing. H. D.s words here are an invocation and a kind of Hermetic initiation; she is calling herself to a sacred task, but also those who come after her.
The reader is called to sacred writing by way of H. D.s invocation of Hermes,
itself conveyed through the act of sacred writing.
In a well-known passage, H. D. then writes:
We have had too much consecration,
too little affirmation,
too much, but this, this, this
has been proved heretical,
too little: I know, I feel
the meaning that words hide;
they are anagrams, cryptograms,
little boxes, conditioned
to hatch butterflies . . .51
Taken in context with the earlier invocation of Hermes-Thoth, this passage suggests the complexity, the difficulty of conveying initiation through the written
wordit includes the implication that such efforts are bound to be deemed
heretical by some, and that one must know and feel by intuition the meaning
that words hide. The words themselves may resemble boxes, devoid of life, but
suddenly from them emerge living butterflies, symbols of Psyche reborn, of the
soul that passes through initiation and awakes.
The next work in H. D.s trilogy is Tribute to the Angels, and it begins with
an invocation again of Hermes Trismegistus, patron of alchemists, whose
province is thought, / inventive, artful and curious. This poem exhorts the
poet to plunder the past, as Hermes is patron of poets and thieves. The poet is
called to take what the old-church / found in Mithras tomb, candle and
script and bell, what the new-church spat upon / and broke and shattered.
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This, the shattered glass of the past, the poet must melt down and integrate.
One must reinvoke, re-create that which is now scattered in the shards / men
tread upon.52 These lines reveal many layers. One is the layer of the destruction in London during the bombing, the conditions under which, after all, H. D.
was writing these poems. Another is the layer of Hermetic invocation; and still
another is that of an older true unified religion rejected by a new-church, but
re-awakened, recreated by the poet, reinvoked in a new form.
We should not underestimate the magnitude of what H. D. is attempting in
her poetry here. She includes lines from the Revelation of John: I, John, saw.
I testify. I take these lines as placing the poets vision in the context of Johns
Revelation: John was a prophet and seer; so too can the poet be, and so too by
implication can we be. What does the poet see? The poem is far too vast to attempt a complete exegesis here, but I believe the heart of the poem is to be
found in the following section:
Invisible, indivisible Spirit,
how is it you come so near,
how is it that we dare
approach the high-altar?
we crossed the charred portico,
passed through a framedoorless
entered a shrine; like a ghost,
we entered a house through a wall;
then still not knowing
whether (like the wall)
we were there or not-there,
we saw the tree flowering;
it was an ordinary tree,
in an old garden-square.53
This is an account of self-transcendence (not knowing whether we were there
or not-there), but also of a meeting with an invisible spirit, an angel manifesting in the flowering tree, in the high-altar of a ruined building.
H. D.s poetic narrative reminds us of Rilkes accounts of meeting angels in
his Sonnets to Orpheus and Duino Elegies, but whereas Rilke could not write
during war, H. D. is in fact transmuting the war experience into one of divine
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revelation, joining together the worst and the highest of which humanity is capable. In this context, the next section is very important. In it, H. D. writes that
This is no rune nor riddle,
it is happening everywhere;
what I mean isit is so simple
yet no trick of the pen or brush
could capture that impression;
music could do nothing with it,
nothing whatever; what I mean is
but you have seen for yourself
that burnt-out wood crumbling
you have seen for yourself.54
Here she is conveying in poetic form what cannot be captured but only conveyed, alluded to, transmitted as an open secret (to use Carlyles phrase
describing Emersons essay Nature). One cannot capture this esoteric illumination; one can only suggest it so that the reader can realize it too, and this suggestiveness is how initiation through the word takes place.
In H. D.s Tribute to the Angels, she also builds toward a specific spiritual
experience in which she saw God in the other-half of the tree. This experience
was vision, / it was a sign, / it was the Angel which redeemed me, / it was the
Holy Ghost. This experience is what she calls the flowering of the rood, /
. . . the flowering of the wood, the name of the final poem in Trilogy. And this
experience is gnosis, but gnosis manifested through a web of interconnected
symbols, themselves conveyed to the reader through H. D.s poetry. This experience, conveyed through the poetry, is a gnosis of the word.
But there is another recurrent theme in Trilogy that we also cannot ignore
and that is indivisible from this mysterious and profound experience of the divine: the figure of Sophia, the divine feminine. H. D.s poetry in general, and
Trilogy in particular, bind together Christian and pre-Christian religious traditions, seeing Christianity as being a continuation of earlier traditions. Hence
H. D. writes that the Cross and the Tau or T-cross merge with the caduceus,
symbol of Hermes, and even more overtly, that Hermes Trismegistus / spears,
with Saint Michael, / the darkness of ignorance, / casts the Old Dragon / into
the abyss.55 Hermes and the Archangel are thus merged in H. D.s vision, just
as Christianity and the mystery religions of antiquity are joined indivisibly.
Sophia appears here in this larger context as a figure of the divine feminine
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appearing through Mary and through the ancient goddesses, Our Lady of the
Pomegranate, at once both Christian and pre-Christian, at once the Magna
Mater and the Virgin of the Book of Revelation of John, She who has been
seen the world over.56
Sophia herself appears to H. D., to her astonishment, and H. D. speculates
that she must have been pleased with us, / who did not forego our heritage
[35]. Here it might be valuable to recall that H. D. was a baptized Moravian,
and that, as we will see in more detail shortly, she was deeply familiar with the
esoteric spirituality of the theosophic community of Count Zinzendorf in Pennsylvania. Sophianic spirituality was in H. D.s own heritage, as we will see when
we turn to her novel The Gift. But the we who did not forego our heritage
also has a wider context, for H. D. then notes that she is referring to the straggling company of the brush and quill, of artists and poets who did not deny
their birthright but remained faithful to the spiritual origin and vision that is
the fount of living art. And there is one more critical detail: when Sophia appeared, under her drift of veils, she carried a book. This book is the transmission of the spiritual experience through the book of poems, just as the Word
is transmitted through the Great Book, the Bible.
And She is Holy Wisdom, Santa Sophia, the SS of the Sanctus Spiritus,
as well as the new Eve who comes bringing the Book of Life, obviously. Yet
Sophia is also the Vestal / from the days of Numa, she of the Bona dea, and
she carries a book but it is not / the tome of the ancient wisdom, for hers are
the blank pages of the unwritten volume of the new. And She is also Psyche,
the butterfly, / out of the cocoon. H. D. is reluctant to label Sophia as a single
reified figure; she retains the web of interconnected meanings and symbolisms,
preserving the evocative power of poetry that resists the power of reason alone,
requiring instead imaginative participation on the part of the reader.
This imaginative participation is at the heart of H. D.s Trilogy, right into the
final poem, entitled The Flowering of the Rood. Here the focus is not feminine but masculinethe birth of Jesus Christ and the coming of the Wise Men
bearing gifts. Here the refrain is changed to the words of Jesus to the thieves
who were crucified with Him: to-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise. This
refrain, in the context of the three poems together, clearly alludes to the figure
of Hermes, the thief, who is also redeemed, brought into paradise with Christ.
Hermes is the patron of the artist, the writer, the scribe, and the thief, allied to
Mercury also; thus The Flowering of the Rood is also about the redemption
of art through religious experience. The artist who participates imaginatively
with Christ is redeemed; the artist is the thief who is redeemed on the very day
that Christ is crucified.
It would be a mistake to presume that because H. D. affirms the divine feminine in her Trilogy poems, they are therefore a repudiation of Christianity in
favor of a neopagan goddess tradition. They are not. Rather, whether it is con-
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venient for the readers ideology or not, the Trilogy culminates with The Flowering of the Rood, with the experience of Christ, with the simultaneous symbolism of his birth and death. H. D.s poetry is far more complex than it is
frequently depicted as being, and the Trilogy exemplifies this complexity: it is
a profoundly evocative collection of poems at whose center is a complex of religious experiences that cannot be understood completely except by recognizing their multivalence, and that includes a unification of male and female
symbolism, as well as of Christian and pre-Christian religious symbolism. Hermes and Christ, Eve and Mary, the Vestal Virgin and Our Lady of the Pomegranate, all are interwoven here.
In her poetry, as in the original, unabridged version of her novel The Gift,
H. D. sought to accomplish a feat similar to that sought by the other great modernist poets T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats: to create or reveal a mythological net of
symbols that reunites a shattered modern world and makes sense of life in the
midst of total chaos. It is no accident that both the Trilogy and The Gift have
woven into them the horror, fear, and confusion of the Second World War as experienced in the bombing of London. In the midst of the worst of which humanity is capable, in the midst of the terror and chaos and destruction of war,
H. D. also reveals the overarching spiritual unity not only of mythology but, like
Eliot in his Four Quartets, of mysticism. To understand this mysticism more
fully, however, we must turn to The Gift.
The Gift. It is not surprising, I suppose, that until 1998, the only available versions of The Gift were more or less bowdlerized ones from which nearly a third
of the original text was missing. Such a massive lacuna is not surprising because it has at least some modest precedent in American letters. As I detail in
The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (2001), Margaret Fullers
most well-known work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was published
posthumously under the direction of her brother without her original frontispiece, an esoteric emblem that she designed herself. Her brother sought to
keep from the public eye his sisters interest in esoteric or occult areas of
thought. Likewise, when New Directions published their abridged version of
The Gift about a century later, the editors sought to remove many of the references to the mysticism that is in fact at the center of the book. What is more,
they even changed significantly the emphasis of the entire novel from Moravian spirituality to the gift of artistic creation.57 It was not until 1998 that Jane
Augustines edited original edition of this extraordinary novel was published,
complete with H. D.s own notes. Only when we read the original version of the
novel can we recognize just how remarkable an achievement it is, and how at its
very heart isthe gnosis of the word.
H. D. wove into The Gift her own extensive research into her familys history,
which was intertwined with the history of the Moravian Church in America in its
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earliest years. Her grandfathers name was Francis Wolle, and he was born in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; her grandmothers father, Old Father Weiss, or
Jedediah Weiss, was a watchmaker and silversmith for more than forty years in
Bethlehem. He was a gifted musician who sang in the Moravian choir. In other
words, H. D. came by her fascination with the Moravians naturally; it was in fact
in her blood. But her interest in the Moravians took on a new intensity when she
realized more about the esotericism of the original Moravians and of the charismatic Count Zinzendorf.
We can see the extent and depth of H. D.s research into this area when we
look at her own notes for the novel as well as the books from her own library,
especially those now housed at Yale University. Her notes for The Gift are remarkably detailed, and weave together genealogical and historical materials, offering the reader incontrovertible evidence not only that H. D. deliberately
incorporated much authentic historical background into the novel, but also that
the artistic and spiritual import of the novel is bolstered by being based on actual fact. Her notes are in fact an important aspect of the novel, itself, shaping
the way that she intended it to be read.
And her personal library gives ample proof that H. D. had done her research;
among its volumes are Andreas Freys A True and Authentic Account of Andrew
Frey; containing the Occasion of his coming among the Herrnhutters or Moravians (London: J. Robinson, 1753); Joseph Edward Huttons A History of the
Moravian Church (London: Moravian Publication Office, 1909); George Lavingtons The Moravians Compared and Detected (London: J. & P. Knapton,
1755); Georg Heinrich Loskiels History of the Mission of the United Brethren
Among the Indians in North America (London: Brethrens Society, 1794); and
Henry Rimiuss A Candid Narrative of the Rise and Progress of the Herrnhuetters, Commonly Called Moravians (London: A. Linde, 1753), as well as original copies of Rimiuss other major works on the subject. In toto, with its
numerous original eighteenth-century publications, H. D.s library demonstrates the depth of her research.
H. D. was herself a baptized Moravian, but one should recognize that there
is a considerable difference between the Moravian Church of the twentieth century and that of the Herrnhuters of Count Zinzendorf (17001760) who settled
in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in the middle of the eighteenth century. For
Zinzendorf and his group were far more esoteric in their interests than those
who were to follow them. Rimiuss works, cited by H. D. in her notes, make
clear this distinction. Rimius, Zinzendorf s most effective detractor, accused
the early Moravians of gross and scandalous . . . Mysticism, of the Arcana,
or Secret Counsels of their Leaders, as well as of Secrets probably known by
the adepts alone.58 About such accusations, H. D. wrote that they were precisely what she found attractive about the Unitas Fratrum: Personally, I consider these findings highly stimulating and exciting, though I must confess, in
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my own day, there was no hint of this exoticism. We were a small community,
respected and highly respectable.59
There can be no doubt that Zinzendorf himself and his early circle held
views that were seen as unacceptable by the German Protestant establishment
at Dresden. Zinzendorf espoused a doctrine of the Trinity that conjoined the
Holy Spirit with the divine feminine, referring to Father, Mother, and Son; he
also held that every woman represented an image of the Bride of Christ, conventionally the church. The Moravian Church that he was instrumental in revivifying in the mid-eighteenth century actually was linked more to Greek
Orthodoxy than to Rome, and had existed in Bohemia-Moravia for many hundreds of years before what is now called the Reformation. The Moravian
Church, or Unitas Fratrum as resuscitated by Zinzendorf, saw itself as a branch
of the primordial and pure Christianity, and its doctrines as representing a pure,
nonhierarchic tradition of true Christianity. Its esotericism derived its power
from these beliefs.
But more important than Zinzendorfs own esotericism is how it was incorporated by H. D. into The Gift. The Gift is an initiatory work in the classic anthropological sense: it is on one level a story of how a young girl, Hilda, is
initiated into the matrilinear gnosis of her familys secret Moravian traditions.
It is written in a characteristically modernist fragmented style that reflects on
the one hand the fragmentation of modernity and on the other hand, through the
readers assembling of clues into a larger narrative, an overarching spiritual narrative that redeems modernity from its chaos and fragmentation. This redemption from chaos that the reader undergoes by working through the novel is
parallel to the initiation of the child Hilda, who through the course of the novel
comes to realize the true nature of her gnostic Moravian forebears and their
unique relationships with American Indian spiritual elders. The novel, in short,
is a coming-of-age or initiation-into-the-mysteries-of-adulthood narrative.
But The Gift is also an initiatory work in the other sense of the termit
opens up into an initiation into the spiritual mysteries of the Unitas Fratrum as
well, and in this sense the book is clearly meant by H. D. to initiate the reader.
But the reader is initiated into these mysteries vicariously; the reader is carried
along vicariously on the discoveries not only of young Hilda, whose voice in
the novel is clearly childish, but also of the older poet H. D., writing these reflections during the siege of London in the Second World War. For suddenly we
encounter the voice of the elder H. D., explaining the novels initiatory power
via the word and image within the novel itself in a kind of metanarrative. She
tells us that there is a Gift waiting, that someone must inherit access to a
hidden continent that includes links to people long dead. There is no royal
road into this kingdom, H. D. writes, you just stumble on it; it is one of those
things that you really do find in your Grimm or your Anderson . . . it does
exist. She goes on:
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[reportedly] had been destroyed and obliterated by the Inquisition, but that
wasnt really destroyed, only driven underground to resurface with Count
Zinzendorf and his disciples.62 Like the Templars, the Moravians were accused of
scandalous behavior, but this was untrue, Mamalie continues.
The most important scene for this gnostic drama, though, is not Europe but
North America, where the Moravians came during the eighteenth century and
immediately formed a rapport with the American Indians, in particular the
Shawnee. This rapport is historically verifiable; it is not a confabulation of
H. D.s.63 In The Gift, though, she draws upon historical fact in order to build a
larger mythos, chiefly through the narrative of elderly Mamalie. According to
Mamalie, Johann Christoph Pyrlaeus was a musician who collected Indian
words and sayings and made a dictionary of them. He said it would be impossible to follow the language without the music, so he made notes of tones and
rhythms of their voices. Pyrlaeus passed on a scroll written in curious characters, Greek, Hebrew, and Indian dialects and writing and marginal notes of
music. This scroll, kept in a birch-bark case, bore the names of Cammerhof,
Pyrlaeus, Zeisberger and Christian Seidel, the Christian initiates of the fateful
meeting at Wunden Eiland, along with a list of medicine-men or priests of the
Indian tribes, done in their picture-writing.64
The Indians and the Moravians indeed had an unusual relationship, not least
because the Moravians respected Indian spirituality. The Moravians and the Indians under the chief Paxnous met in order to let their guiding spirits determine
the fate of white-Indian relations. As Mamalie put it in her narrative to Hilda:
In fact, the answer given by the Spirits, was to decide the future of the
whole country . . . to give the answer that the warriors had debated at
their councils, as to what was to be the relationship in future between the
white-men and the Indians, altogether. Already tracts of land further
north were depleted of their wild animals.65
In this spiritual meeting of the medicine men and the Moravian initiates, they
conducted a syncretic ritual that joined the spiritual traditions of the two peoples,
so that It was laughing, laughing all the time, not just Minne-ha-ha, but all of
them, said Mamalie, like scales running up and down, the laughter of leaves,
of wind, of snow swirling, it was the laughter of the water; indeed, it was the outpouring of the Mystic Chalice that Paxnous priest too, had a name for; it poured
from the sky or from the inner realm of the Spirit, this laughter that ran over us.66
How did Mamalie know so intimately what it was like, this meeting of the
Moravians and Indians under the sign of the Great Spirit / Holy Spirit? She was
a musician, and a hundred years after this ritual meeting and descent of the
Holy Spirit took place, she decoded it from the cryptic musical notations and
multilingual script of the parchment kept in the birchbark case. She and her
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young husband, Christian Seidel, decoded it and she played it, so that the two
of them shared in the original descent of the Holy Spirit just as Hilda was later
to share in it through communion with it via what she calls the Gift. Mamalie
and her young husband were taken away in rapture by this union with the original ritual and spiritual illumination, so much so that she never played music
again, having burnt it up.67 Thus the Gift was transmitted from the original
Moravian participants in the ritual to Mamalie and her husband, who was to die
at twenty-five, and then, in an even more attenuated form, to young Hilda as
Mamalie became delirious on her deathbed.
The Gift, Mamalie, said in her fragmented narrative, could have lifted the
dark wings of evil from the whole world, but instead what we see is a tragic
history. In 1755, the Moravian colony of Gnadenhtten, composed of both local
Indians and Moravians working with them, was attacked by a band of Indians
loyal to the French, and both Moravians and Indians were slaughtered, those
hiding in the attic burned alive. And in a subsequent event, called New
Gnadenhtten, about 150 Indians working in a Moravian settlement were attacked and about ninety slaughtered by ragtag American soldiers under the
command of one David Williamson. Among those killed were twenty-four
women and twenty-two children.68
The final section of The Gift at first seems anticlimactic. Instead of recounting the transmission of Mamalies understanding to young Hilda, or a subsequent
realization of the original Moravian-Indian spiritual illumination, we return to the
fragmented narrative of the Second World War, where the falling arrows of the
original French Indian attack on Gnadenhtten metamorphose into the falling
bombs of the Germans attacking England. In her notes, H. D. even refers to the
American David Williamson, who was responsible for the attack on New
Gnadenhtten, as Aryan. Thus we can see the palimpsest form of the novel,
past and present superimposed upon one another and intermingling, a means of
underscoring that the immense promise of the Moravian-Indian spiritual brotherhood and sisterhood, of universal peace and the descent of the Holy Spirit, stands
perpetually opposed to those whose aim is slaughter, domination, raining down
terror from the skies. So it would seem that The Gift is a tragic book.
And yet in the very final passages, all of these themes are brought together
into a unified whole. At the novels conclusion, we realize that the Moravian
sanctuary island, Wunden Eiland, or Wounded Island, is also the wounded island of England as it is being bombed by the Germans, and Hilda tells us that
We have been face to face with the final realities. We have been shaken out of
our ordinary dimension in time and we have crossed the chasm that divides
time from time-out-of-time or from what they call eternity.69 The two worlds
have become one, so that even amid the terrible bombing of England, the
promise of Wunden Eiland and of the descent of the Holy Spirit is not lost but
realized again.
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In England, Hilda hears the voice of Christian Renatus, one of the original
Moravian initiates, singing of the Wounds, she hears the deep bee-like humming
of the choir of single brothers, she realizes that Our earth is a wounded island
as we swing round the sun, and she has suddenly achieved the union again in the
twentieth century just as Mamalie had realized it in the nineteenth, and the original initiates had realized it in the eighteenth.70 She hears the great choir of the
strange voices that speak in a strange bird-like staccato rhythm, but she knows
what they are saying even though they are speaking Indian dialects. There is a
great soundthe sound of the all-clear siren in London, and the sound of the
Moravian-Indian choirs of the pastand with this the novel concludes.
H. D. and Western Esotericism: Some Conclusions. Among major twentiethcentury authors, H. D.s work stands with that of Yeats and of O.V. de Lubicz
Milosz as exemplary of the literary-mythological possibilities of Western esotericism. In her profoundly ambitious works, both poetic and fictional, we find
a wide range of Western esoteric currents manifesting themselves, not merely
as decorations, but as integral to her work. Indeed, the more deeply one looks
into her works, the more certain one is that here is someone whose work cannot
be understood fully without reference to Western esotericism. But above all,
H. D.s work exemplifies what I have termed initiation through the word, both
as a theme treated explicitly in her poetry and prose, and as the way in which
her work functions for the reader.
As we have seen, H. D.s poetry and prose reflect a sense of the transparency
of time and place: from Notes on Thought and Vision onward, her work suggests
that past, present, and future continually intermingle, and that it is possible to realize a timeless state she terms the over-mind, an echo of Emersons Oversoul, in which the individual consciousness is exalted, and out of which all great
work is generated. Her later work in fact exemplifies exactly this idea, not least
because although outwardly its modernist fragmentation suggests confusion and
chaos, this fragmentation actually represents in artistic form a higher union of
past and present, as well as of timelessness and time. Out of the chaos and random destruction of the bombing of England in her Trilogy and The Gift emerge
not only a palimpsest of Moravian past and H. D.s English present, but also a
larger unity that even presents a way beyond chaos and evil into transcendence.
In this context, H. D.s fascination with various figures and currents of Western esotericism becomes more than a collection of interests; it becomes the
foundation for an entire worldview. Her interest in spiritualism, for instance,
does not exist separate from her poetic and fictional work but rather represents
an important aspect of it. In her poetry and fiction, past and present, the dead
and the living are not separate but part of an interwoven continuum. Likewise,
her abiding fascination with Moravian esotericism is not merely an aspect of
her genealogical interests, but rather is woven into her entire worldview; there,
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she found an esoteric religious perspective that recognized the divine feminine
in the form of Sophia, and that also incorporated a sexual mysticism she found
deeply congenial.
H. D.s esoteric worldview is complex and rather heterodox, to be sure, but
understanding it places her work in an entirely different light, illuminating
many aspects that otherwise could not be fully understood. At the center of her
esoteric worldview is the primacy of the word as means of initiatic transmission. Through the codex left by the original Moravian initiates, through her
grandmothers reconstruction of it in The Gift, through her fiction and through
her poetry, H. D.s work is fundamentally that of esoteric transmission through
ahistorical continuity, timelessness conveyed through time by way of word and
image. She had begun to outline this concept already in her early Notes on
Thought and Vision, but it was only in her later work that we see it, and its implications, outlined in entirety.
We cannot conclude without reference to H. D.s complex 1957 poem Vale
Ave, which makes it absolutely clear that in her later poetry she was even
more deeply immersed in Western esotericism. The poem begins with the following preface:
This sequence introduces Adams first wife, Lilith. Is she the Serpent
who tests the androgynat primordial? Serpent (saraph) it is said, has the
same root derivation as Seraph, so Lilith may be Serpent or Seraph, as
Adam, whom we invoke as Lucifer, the Light-bringer, in his pre-Eve
manifestation, may be Angel or Devil.
The Lucifer-Lilith, Adam-Eve formula may be applied to all men and
women, though here we follow the processus through the characters of
Elizabeth and Sir Walter [Raleigh], meeting and parting, Vale Ave,
through timespecifically, late Rome, dynastic Egypt, legendary
Provence, early seventeenth-century England, and contemporary London. She is the niece of the Elizabethan poet and alchemist Sir Edward
Dyer. Sir Walter secretly and mysteriously becomes her lover during the
last months of his life in the Tower of London. After his death, Elizabeth
recalls him to her, through her uncles Art and through the alchemy of
memory. Sir Walter was himself an alchemist, as history tells us, and
Elizabeth identifies herself with him, although:
I hardly knew my Lord, true we had met
in sudden frenzy, parted in the dark,
and all the rest was mystery and a portent.
Mystery and a portent, yes, but at the same time, there is Resurrection
and the hope of Paradise.71
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Obviously, this preface and the poem itself are filled with esoteric elements, but
for our purposes the most important is the foregrounded theme of male-female
spiritual alchemy that may be applied to all men and women, the alchemical
processus of transmutation that is brought about for Elizabeth through her
uncles Art and through the alchemy of memory.
Here again we find the same themes that recur throughout H. D.s lifetime of
work, here again the words laugh, echoing the laughter in the culminating initiatory moment in The Gift; here again we find that I transcribed the scroll
. . . the Mystery, the Writing, and the Scroll, / infinity portrayed in simple
things.72 Here again the scroll becomes a palimpsest, and again through it
I had the answer. I cite from Vale Ave here because it makes clear that H. D.s
recurrent theme of initiation through the word, of timelessness revealed in
times transparency, is not a youthful digression but central to her work even
late in her life. Her poetry and her prose, taken in toto, reveal a profoundly esoteric worldview that offers to its readers nothing less than an initiation into
and an inauguration of a new age and a new mythology, but a new mythology
that turns out to be the grand theme of Western esotericism and that is perhaps
as old as the mystery of the word itself.73
Magical Fiction
In a poem entitled Dreams, Kathleen Raine wrote of how the mysteries were
once upon the earth, the mysteries of the tree and miraculous bird, the mysteries of the holy well. But then From grotto grove and shrine, the holy presences
withdraw, the springs gone under the hill. Her poem ends with the stanza:
Inviolate in dream
The mysteries still are shown,
The dead are living still;
But bring them back none may
Who wakes into this day.74
In our day of ever more complex technology and ever more information, it may
seem as though nothing could be farther from us than a world in which magic
is possible. Yet in the twilit realm of fiction, as in poetry, magic and the ancient
mysteries still dwell. Here, I would like to explore not the art of magic, but
rather how magic dwells in the realm of relatively recent fiction, just as it
dwells in the realm of dreams.
Of course, magical fiction in fact belongs to a larger category, that of initiatory fictionnovels and short stories whose evident purpose is to take the
reader along into new and perhaps unfamiliar kinds of consciousness. But my
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aim here is to explore fiction that carries the reader into the working of expressly magical ritual and experience, fiction in which the ancient mysteries are
still alive and have not withdrawn their springs. This is actually a rather rare
kind of fiction, as one might imagine. But chief among such authors are without doubt the Inklings (in particular, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles
Williams), as well as Dion Fortune (Violet Firth). Here, while I will draw on
some writings of Tolkien and Williams, I will concentrate on the works of
Lewis and Fortune in order to explore how their fiction becomes magical, and
perhaps becomes itself a magical act.75
In his essay On Fairy Stories, in a collection of essays presented to Charles
Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien begins by describing fairy stories as those stories
touched by fary, which might best be translated as magic. But later in the
same essay, he backtracks and remarks that Magic should be reserved for the
operations of the magician, whereas the elvish craft might best be referred
to as enchantment. He continues:
Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and
spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces,
or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World. It does not
matter by whom it is said to be practiced, fay or mortal, it remains distinct
from the other two; it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in
this world, domination of things and wills.76
While the distinction Tolkien makes, here, seems reasonable enough in theory,
when we turn to actual works, things are not nearly so clear cut. Is there really
a difference in practice between enchantment and magic, between the production of an artistic Secondary World and a work whose purpose is also alteration in the Primary World? It would seem that in reality these two can coxist
in a single work.
Let us take an example. In his extraordinary novel That Hideous Strength,
C. S. Lewis describes a magical invocation that marks the climax of the
book. His main character, John Ransom, invokes the Oyresu, the true
powers of Heaven, the planetary spirits of Perelandra, or Venus, Viritrilbia,
or Mercury, and so forth. Ransom explains what is happening to the resurrected ancient magician Merlin, saying I have become a bridge. Sir, what
will come of this? asks Merlin, for if they [the Oyresu] put forth their
power, they will unmake all Middle Earth. Their naked power, yes, replies
Ransom. That is why they will work only through a man. Through a man
whose mind is opened to be so invaded, says Ransom, one who by his own
will once opened it.77 In the subsequent chapter 15, The Descent of the
Gods, Ransom invokes these powers he calls the Oyresu, and the descrip-
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magician Merlin participates. The invocation takes place, of course, in a secondary world of fiction, but Lewiss novel is clearly about the primary world
in which we live; the magical working here is meant also to have effects in the
primary world of the reader. In other words, The Descent of the Gods is
about a celestial healing of a ruined world, but this healing is also one in which
the reader necessarily participates.
It is important that this magical working is not the end of the book, though
one could easily imagine it so. After the descent of the gods is achieved in the
fifteenth chapter, in the following chapter we see the destruction of the malevolent Institute and its depraved characters, and all is brought to a conclusion in
Venus at St. Annes, the seventeenth chapter. Here the various good characters come together to discuss what happened, and the Director (Dr. Ransom) is
taken up to Perelandra bodily, rather like Elijah or King Arthur. But even this is
not the end: the end comes when the character Jane returns to her husband Mark.
Uncertain whether to enter the lodge where he is sleeping, she sees that clothes
are piled inside, and Marks shirt is hanging partway out of the window. How
exactly like Mark! Jane thinks. Obviously it was high time she went in.81 I
cite this prosaic finale precisely because it is so deliberately ordinary: it brings
us back completely from the magical atmosphere of the novels main body to
mundane life, to the familiar world in which a married couple need each other.
Lewiss work is a masterpiece not only because of how it carries us into the
magical working in the descent of the gods, but also because of the delicate tension it maintains between ordinary life and magical events. Lewis brings us into
the realm of Ransoms and Merlins magical rescue of England from the grip of
a malevolent force, but he always maintains a link with mundane life even at the
heart of the magical working itself (by way of the device of two rooms, one with
ordinary people, and one with Merlin and Ransom). In so doing, Lewis not only
achieves dramatic success, but also is able to take along even the skeptical reader.
One feels a satisfaction at the conclusion of That Hideous Strength that very few
novels are able to elicit; even though of course the reader has not physically participated in the invocation of the Oyresu, still it feels as though one imaginatively has; the novel has dimensions that most other fiction simply does not, and
by its end, the reader feels as though he has passed through those dimensions too.
This passage is what I mean by magical initiatory fiction.
One finds exactly the same sense of initiatory passage in the novels of
Charles Williams, whose work I would certainly be remiss if I did not mention
here. About Williamss novels, Gareth Knight observes in The Magical World of
the Inklings:
those who read his fiction tend to be affected strongly in two ways. His
description of both good and evil is such that it can bring a real extension
of personal knowledge and experience of each to the reader. Therefore
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some may feel depressed or repulsed by the down side of his books and
their evocation of the essence of evil. On the other hand, it is possible to
respond to the quality of good, and divine reality and angelic brightness
shines through the other side of his work. Thus a close reading of his novels can have a purificatory, almost cathartic effect. In effect they are initiations. [Emphasis added.]82
Exactly the same thing may be said here about Lewiss foray into what was
chiefly Williamss domain, for both writers evoked magical workings or paranormal events in ways that very few authors have. By doing so, both Williams
and Lewis were able to widen the metaphysical dimensions of fiction, to make
fiction something much more powerful than it ordinarily is, for in the act of
reading, one is also encountering new realms of existence.
But while Williamss fiction certainly touches upon magical themes and features magician characters both noble, such as the poet Peter Stanhope of Descent
into Hell, and decidedly corrupt ones, such as Simon Leclerc in All Hallows
Eve, still Williamss fiction is still by and large of a different kind from the
specifically magical fiction that we saw in Lewiss That Hideous Strength, when
Ransom invokes the planetary powers. Williamss characters offer insights into
what it is like to be dead, for instance; they reveal forms of necromancy; they unveil the power of archetypes and, in general, allow us to enter into worlds generated by questions like: what if the Holy Grail were discovered to be physically
real? Or: what if the Platonic archetypes began to break through into this
world? In brief: Williamss fiction is often initiatory, but rarely if at all in exactly
the form I wish to consider here: initiation into magical ritual itself.
For that, we should turn to a second exemplar: the fiction of Dion Fortune.
Fortune rarely wrote about her fiction, but she did offer some preliminary remarks to her novel Moon Magic, and her observations are revealing. She writes
there that
Those who read this story for the sake of entertainment will, I am afraid,
not find it very entertaining. It was not written for its entertainment value.
I wrote it, in fact, to find out what it was about. I have put a great deal into
it, and there is a great deal more in it than I ever put in. One might even say
that the writing of it was a magical act. [Emphasis added.] If it be true
that what is created in the imagination lives in the inner world, then what
have I created in Lilith Le Fay? . . . Who and what is Lilith, and why did
she live on after the book about her was finished, and insist on appearing
again? Have I furnished myself with a dark familiar?83
Here Fortune gives voice to exactly the theme we are here investigating: how
the writing of a book can be a magical act, and how therefore the reader is in
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some senses a participant in that magical act. She gave rise to the character
Lilith, and was startled to find that the character lived on in Fortunes own
imagination after The Sea Priestess was finished.
That Fortune was herself a magician is not in question. There is little evidence that Lewis was a practicing magus, but Fortune was, after all, the founder
of the British Society of the Inner Light, and author of numerous books on the
practice of magic and related subjects. Fortunes wealth of direct personal experience in the practice of magic, not surprisingly, appears clearly in her novels,
often enough in the first person from the viewpoint of a female character. She
writes matter-of-factly about all manner of paranormal events, and this matterof-fact tone of voice has an effect similar to that of the ordinary characters in
Lewiss That Hideous Strength, as if those characters were somehow joined with
Ransoms voice. In some respects, Fortunes novels are as much like primers on
magical practices as they are fiction, and in this the prosaic tone of the narrators
voice itself acts as a kind of counterweight to what the narrator is discussing.
Moon Magic is exemplary of this complementary relationship between the
extraordinary events the narrator relates and the matter-of-fact tone in which
such events are discussed. In the novels seventh chapter, the narrator begins
this way:
I will tell what I did, putting my cards on the table, for it shows how we
use the Door Without a Key to escape the Lord of This World, who is
Moloch, and take refuge in the Secret Kingdom, which is the dark side of
the Moon, the side She turns away from earth.
The Door Without a Key is the Door of Dreams; it is the door by
which the sensitive escape into insanity when life is too hard for them,
and artists use it as a window in a watch-tower. Psychologists call it a
psychological mechanism; magicians call it magic, and the man in the
street calls it illusion or charlatanry according to taste. It does not matter
to me what it is called, for it is effectual.
I made the astral projection by the usual method; that is to say, I pictured myself as standing six feet in front of myself and then transferred
by consciousness to the simulacrum thus created by my imagination and
looked at the room through its eyes. Then I visualized the face of the man
with the greying red hair, and imagined myself speaking to him. The
magic worked. I had the sensation of the descent of a swift lift, which always characterizes the change of the level of consciousness; all awareness of my physical surroundings faded, and I seemed to be in a strange
room; a shabby, untidy, badly lit and ill-tended room.84
Here we are observing a magical working of a very different kind from that
evoked by Lewis through his character Ransom. Fortunes novel, like all of her
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fiction, is concerned with practical magic and phenomena like astral projection; she is interested in putting her cards on the table, an expression characteristic of the way she clearly lays out in her fiction to reflect the way her
magical practice is experienced. There is little art in the way she tells of the
magical working: if Lewiss account is closer to poetry than to prose, Fortunes
account here is closer to journalism.
Such an observation is not meant entirely as criticism, but also to point out
a means by which Fortunes novels attract and hold a reader. Characteristic of
this strategy is one of Fortunes earliest and best-known works, a collection of
stories entitled The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, based on the life of one Theodore
Moriarty. The Secrets of Dr. Taverner certainly falls under the category of occult fiction, but it is in fact just as much in the genre of detective fiction, in particular that of Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes. As a character, Taverner is
patterned after Holmes, while the stories are written from the perspective of his
companion, Rhodes. Holmes, one will recall, was consummately the logician,
and something of the same flavor comes across in Taverner, with the addition
of Taverners great experience in magical or occult events.
Among the more interesting of these stories is A Son of the Night, which
is about an English nobleman whose family seeks to have him certified mad in
order to take over his estate, and who is in fact of supernatural lineage. Taverner
gets to the bottom of the case immediately, but perhaps most interestingly, at
the end of the story, Rhodes, (a kind of Watson to Taverners Holmes), who represents the voice of the ordinary observer, decides to heed the call of nature that
he feels, to enter the Unseen, to pass an invisible barrier of consciousness.
After his entry into the Unseen, in all things there was a profound difference,
Rhodes remarks at the storys conclusion, for to me they had suddenly become
alive. Not only were they alive, but I shared in their life, for I was one with
them . . . I was no longer alone; for, like Taverner, Marius, and many others, I
had passed over into the Unseen.85 And so the book concludes. Thus Rhodes,
the ordinary observer of the magus Taverner, at the end of this collection himself becomes an initiate by entering into communion with the wild and sacred
heart of England: he too has passed over into the Unseen. The initiation we
see in A Son of the Night is a simple change of consciousness: it is an awakening to the inner life of nature. Rhodess initiation into nature magic corresponds in some respects to the natural magic of Merlin in Lewiss That Hideous
Strength: it represents a kind of foundation for other sorts of magic.
But there are other sorts of magical initiations in Fortunes fiction as well,
and here too there are correspondences with what we have seen in That
Hideous Strength. In Fortunes novel The Winged Bull, an unsavory magician
named Hugo Astleywith some similarities to Aleister Crowleyand his proteg, a fellow named Fouldes, set loose a magical attack on the protagonists, a
bullish young man named Ted Murchison, a young woman named Ursula
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Brangwyn, and her half-brother, an experienced magician. The three protagonists were just about to go to bed when Murchison cocked his head and stared
into space over Ursulas head. Fortune continues:
Then Brangwyn also caught it, and felt the waves of evil influence come
rolling in, banked and double-banked.
He was experienced in dealing with such things, and the waves divided and swept past him like the tide round a pier. But there was nothing
he could do for the other two . . . It was best to leave Murchison to his unaided wits. The girl he could do nothing for. She had passed out of his
reach on the tides of the force as if water had whirled her away.86
At first it appeared that Murchison and Ursula were to be lost in the force
of this magical attack, but then Murchison, a bear of a man, became furious and the force of his fury came back over the telepathic wire to
Fouldes and Astley. If Fouldes and Astley were en rapport at the other
end of the telepathic wire, they were getting it in the neck, Brangwyn
concluded. Then, suddenly, a change came over the atmosphere of the
room. The strange, evil power that had been pouring in as steadily as
waves beating into a bay, broke and starred like a smashed mirror, running in every direction like spilled quicksilver, and in another moment
the room was empty . . .
Well, said Brangwyn, breaking the embarrassing silence, so thats that.
Yes, replied Murchison, dropping into a chair as if exhausted. That
is very much that.87
The writing here feels a bit more awkward than in some of Fortunes other novels, but one can certainly see some parallels between it and Lewiss That
Hideous Strength.
In That Hideous Strength, there are also depraved black magicians, among
them men named Frost and Wither, who have developed a means for communication with what they call Macrobes (in fact another name for demons).
Frost and Wither are without mercy; they are without morality, and, like Astley
in The Winged Bull, represent evil on another scale entirely from that which one
usually sees depicted in modern fiction. These characters represent sheer
malevolence against humanity, pure selfishness, cold and merciless. Yet paradoxically, such characters are necessary not only dramatically, but also logically, in order to generate the greater polarity necessary for what we might call
the metaphysical battles that take place in both books. Of the two books, of
course Lewiss is far the greater both in literary skill and in significance, but
clearly in both depravity is necessary on one side in order that there can be
noble transcendence on the other.
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This is not merely a clich: in order for the magical drama to go forward,
there must be in these novelsas also in books of Charles Williams such as
War in Heavena metaphysical polarity between good and evil. This provides
the profound tension that drives these works and that creates the space within
which the magical workings take place. There is, in this kind of fiction, a series
of magical initiations that begin with something like Rhodess entry into the
Unseen, at the end of The Secrets of Dr. Taverner, but that also go beyond seeing into nature, rising to insight into the metaphysical underpinnings of human
life. In all of the fiction we are considering here, there are two kinds of magic
black and whiteand the dramatic power of these novels emerges from the
readers initiation into the existence of both, which represent profoundly divergent ways of relating to the cosmos.
When the reader enters into the magical fiction of Lewis, Williams, and Fortune, he is in fact being initiated into the existence of forces invisible to the vast
majority of people, powers both good and evil. The phrase magical initiation
is perhaps most suitable here for the works of Fortune, whose novels without
any question reflect the fact that she was herself the founder of an initiatory
order, initially called the Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society,
but later called the Community of the Inner Light, and finally the Society of the
Inner Light.85 In the works of Fortune we are unquestionably seeing the reflection of her own extensive experience in magical initiation. But Charles
Williams and even C. S. Lewis, while more circumspect about their own
knowledge and at least in Williamss case, experience of magic, also reflect at
least some initiatory knowledge in their writings.89 While the works of these authors are more artistic than Fortunes, they also carry the reader along on an initiatory course.
In Approaches to Western Esoteric Currents, Antoine Faivre discusses the
nature of initiation, and in particular how the individual on an esoteric path follows a process of awakening. Faivre writes that
We follow this path by committing ourselves to it, either alone, helped
by appropriate texts, which hide the mysteries while revealing their
keys, or with the help of an initatory, who can be an isolated master or
a member of an initiatory school. The initiation serves to regenerate our
consciousness, thanks to a process that lets us reappropriate the knowing we have lost . . . thanks to which we refashion the experience of our
relationships to the sacred and the universe. Whether or not a disciple
has a master, he has to access a knowingor a form of nonknowing
transmittable by the word, and thanks to that, to advance in the knowledge of the connections uniting the disciple to higher entities
(theosophy strictu sensu) and to cosmic forces, to living Nature (theosophy lato sensu).90
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I would suggest that the order of these final points be reversed, since in the fiction we have been discussing, initiation into living Nature tends to precede initiation into the powers of higher entities. But this passage as a whole clearly can
be read as referring to initiation transmittable by the word, and thus to written works like novels. In fact, as one reads a novel like Dion Fortunes The Sea
Priestess, one is to some degree at least refashion[ing] the experience of our
relationships to the sacred and the universe just as the neophyte character Wilfred Maxwell is transmuted by his magical work with the character Vivien Le
Fay Morgan.91
Faivre goes on to remark that to succeed in this process of regeneration or
initiatic awakening, active imagination is essential. Indeed, he calls active
imagination the essential component of esotericism.92 This special kind of
imagination allows one to escape both from the sterility of a purely discursive
logic, and from the rule-free extravagances of fantasy or sentimentality,
putting us in contact with the mundus imaginalis or imaginal world that is the
space of intermediary beings, a mesocosm possessing its own geography, thoroughly real, perceptible to each of us as a function of our respective cultural imagery.93 Faivres observations here are particularly important because they help
us to understand in a different light what Lewis, Williams, and Fortune were up
to in their fictional works. For magical fiction is in fact remarkably suited to,
if we may so put it, initiating readers into the space of intermediary beings, a
mesocosm possessing its own geography.
What conclusions can we draw, then, from this brief foray into the realm of
magical fiction? First, we may note that the distinctions drawn by Tolkien between a secondary world of artistic creation and the primary world of this
earth do not hold for magical fiction precisely because magical fiction represents a passage between the matter-of-fact world that we are familiar with, and
a realm in which one may encounter and work with nonphysical beings and
powers. Second, we have seen that central to this initiatory passage is a tension
between matter-of-fact or ordinary characters and those experienced in magical work. Such a tension corresponds, in literary form, to the age-old relationship between the initiate and the initiator, even though the ultimate source
of the readers magical initiation in fiction is the author. Third, we have seen
that magical fiction in general represents to the reader a series of stages or
grades, moving from initiation into elemental or natural magic (represented by
Lewiss character Merlin, for instance) to initiation into encounters with transcendent beings the Oyresu in Lewiss That Hideous Strength, or such as Isis
in Fortunes The Sea Priestess. Finally, we have seen that often central to this
magical initiation is a kind of magical battle between evil and good magicians,
which manifests a deeper conflict between destructive and constructive powers in the cosmos as a whole, behind the scenes of the drama of ordinary
human life.
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The authors we have considered here knew or knew of one another, and
were engaged at least to some degree in similar enterprises, which is why I have
chosen to study them together. Still, there remain fundamental differences.
While Fortune was certainly a practicing magician, her novels have a workmanlike quality: they do depict magical rituals and do offer insights into the nature of magic. But it is in the work of Lewis that we find an initiation into
magical working that rises to the multivalent level of full artistic creation. It is
in Lewiss That Hideous Strength that the reader can perhaps most powerfully
encounter the transmuting power of artistic beauty expressing ritual magic that,
indirectly or directly, is linked to the world in which we live and that offers us
profound insights into the cosmos and into humanity. Thus, if I may be permitted a single conclusion, it is this: there is undoubtedly art in magic, but the most
magical works of all may well be found in literary art.
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worldview, even as they transmit that worldview to the reader. The aphorism is
in many respects the most poetic form of prose; the aphorism by its nature
stands on its own surrounded by the white space of the page, so that the reader
has a greater task than in prose works, for he must leap the gaps, must make
intellectual connections individually.
By reading Collinss aphorisms, one is placed in contact with another reality
through them, and this from a comparatively early period in his work. In
Hymn of Life, consisting in excerpts from Collinss journals during the Second World War, he writes:
O holy ones I long for you, I long for my race, I long for my kingdom; we
are all exiles. I know of your existence, I remember you, and my life with
you. But here I wander, and I know nothing. But you exist, and most holy
are you O beautiful servants. [14 January, 1945, Totnes, Devonshire]94
He writes beautifully also of his life in nature, of his solitary walks in the
countryside, of The long eternal afternoons robed in blue, with the white
compassionate temples of the clouds floating in wise happiness and detached
love, or again, of how The tasting of these things in our days and nights is
the partaking of the sacrament of existence. Ordinary life in the natural
world, for Collins, is imbued always with spiritual significance; and the task
of the artist is to remind us of this, to show us the hieroedietic beauty of life
through art.
If Collins loved solitude and nature on the one hand, on the other his works
are infused with profound criticisms of the insect-life of modern industrial
society. In Cambridge in 1945 he wrote acidly
What an age to live in! It bites into you with a formless denying of the
life in us. A frustration of all that which is growing, of all that which desires to give, to come to fruition. Our time denies, denies all who have inward fruit. Denies the artist, the contemplative, the human being. A
winter of the spirit is over all society. The coldness of the vanity of the intellect on one side, and cheap vulgarity of attitude towards life on the
other side. It is this official denial of life that confronts us in everything.
But deep underneath flows the secret stream.95
In 1965, Collins gave a public lecture titled The Artist in the New Age, and in
it he wrote that
It is part of our democratic self-deception and sentimentality that we
vaguely assume we are without an elite, when in fact it is quite clear that
we are ruled today by the elite of scientific technocrats and politicians
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who are quite clearly spiritually and culturally illiterate. They represent
a low level of awareness and consciousness; they have no philosophy of
life other than the exploitation of nature and of man, and the making of
money. This is the same thing actually.96
It is remarkable how timely Collinss critique of industrial society has remained, how apt his descriptions still are of the moribund vacuity characterizing so much of modern life.
Collins calls us out of this stupor of the insectoid hive-life in industrial society through his art, and central to our awakening is a change in consciousness.
In his essay Art and Modern Man, Collins distinguishes between how
knowledge and why knowledge. How knowledge refers to mere process
and manipulation of apparently dead objects, whereas why knowledge is
concerned with the significance of things, the meaning. How knowledge is
merely instrumental, whereas
a great deal of why knowledge is known only through nuance of consciousness. Transformation of consciousness cannot be known or be
brought about by thinking, by description, by measurement or analysis. It
can only be known by inner nuance, rapport, and sensitivity to the vibrations and rays of that livingness which is at the heart of things.
The higher worlds are inaccessible to the insensitive; they cannot be
reached by knowledge of them, but only by rapport with those worlds.
For like answers to like and creates actualization . . . the instrument of art
helps to sensitise the interior nature and to continually re-sensitise it
when it grows stale and dull in the world of mere existencethe world of
repetition.97
Works of art, in Collinss view, awaken this inner rapport in us; they offer avenues into direct inner spiritual realization, another way of expressing what he
calls why knowledge.
The value of the artist is not to decorate, to make pretty that empty and mechanical desert we call modern civilization, but to offer what Collins calls
rapport with the transcendent, and thus ultimately nothing less than a transformation of our consciousness. In Art and Modern Man he continues to discuss what art is capable of achieving:
Art is a realization of what is and not of what appears to be[;] art is
therefore an instrument of mans inner nature and it enables him to manifest in the phenomena of matter the nuance and living quality of his
inner life so that his environment is no longer neutral or alien: a rapport
is established.
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ally, and the eye of the heart is opened by these two artists, the one with
the sword, not afraid to wound the heart, make it bleed, and the other with
the light. What we are asked to do in the new age is to understand what
the function of art is and to give our support and collaboration to the
artist, an active support, that we may share each others creative response
to life.100
The phrase eye of the heart is found in Christian theosophy; it refers to the
inner visionary spiritual capacity of the individual, and here it seems an appropriate way for Collins to conclude, reminding us of the innate spiritual awareness that we can awaken if we wish to do so.
Collinss paintings reflect an uncanny unity from the earliest to the last. In
all of them the human form and/or landscape is present but stylized. Human
forms are elongated and have a geometric quality thats intensified in some,
such as The Invocation (1944), by patterns on the limbs and torso. The Invocation reveals a paradisal relationship between the invoking angelic human
figure, her head bent back and contemplative, her hand outstretched over the
land in benediction, and in this it captures (in 1944!) precisely the sacramental
relationship with nature that Collins discussed in his lectures so many years
later. Here, as in many of his visionary paintings, landscape is transformed as
well; in The Invocation, it is as though the black-and-white world of industrial civilization is being transformed before our eyes into the paradisal realm
suggested by the awakening colors in its landscape.
Often, too, Collinss paintings are ecstatic, like Angels (1948). Here the
landscape below seems to be swelling up and rising with energy like an ocean
swell, while above it sweep golden spirals and a red sun, to the left the sweeping forms of two intertwined angels whose colors partake of the earths brown
and of white, their faces closed in rapt contemplation as they seem but a moment from ascending, around them a halo of golden-yellow light. Such paintings are mysterious in their capacity to evoke in us a sense, a rapport with
something that we cannot quite articulate, but that is uplifting and paradisal, a
union of figure, landscape, and vibrant color.
In many of his later paintings, the figures eyes are opened, as if to reflect
Collinss own opened sense of inner vision interconnected with the exterior
world, or to show to us how interwoven is our own consciousness with that
which he is revealing through the paintings. Many of these images have a
strange, dreamlike, hieratic quality, revealed as clearly as anywhere in The
Music of Dawn (1988). Here the entire image is awash in golden light, to the
left the orb of the sun, to the right a human figure with a sweeping robe that
looks as though it rises out of the earth exactly as does the hill behind it. The
figure looks out with a far-off gaze, its features smooth and surrounded by a
mane of hair, in its hand a staff topped by an orb. To gaze at this painting is to
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the restoration of paradise, these are the themes of these great artists, the hidden themes perhaps of our entire era, made visible in the mysterious archetypal
images of Collins.
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in the Western esoteric traditions, gnostic experience is the crown and purpose of human life.
All of these aspects of Western esoteric literature may seem foreign to contemporary eyes, schooled as we are in the division between subject and object.
In modern education, we are taught from childhood that I am separate from
the other, and that knowledge consists in learning about the various divisions
or aspects of the I and of the other. Hence we find the basis of all the various
disciplines: biology, geology, chemistry, history, psychology, sociology, and so
on. All of these disciplines are expressions of the same general theory of objective, quantifiable knowledge, and implicit in them all is that there is an I
that is separate from and learns about the cosmos, gathers means of technical
power over the cosmos, but never overcomes and rarely is even aware of this
great gulf between self and other.
Western esoteric traditions, on the other hand, are founded in a totally different way of seeing the individual in relation to the cosmos. This other view is
particularly acute in alchemy, where alchemical work consists in the transmutation of both self and other at once. The alchemist works with natural substancesfor example, plant extracts, or mineralsbut that work is not merely
manipulating chemicals or substances. Rather, alchemical work is based on a
fundamental correspondence between self and other, between the human and
natural realms. Alchemical work consists in raising up or redeeming both humanity and nature, in achieving what one might call as well a restoration of paradise or a golden ageas we have already seen, an explicit goal of such
modern poets as Milosz and H. D.
Within this fundamentally different way of understanding nature and humanity is also a profoundly different way of understanding literature and art,
but to understand why this is so requires some further explanation. For the correspondence between humanity and the cosmos can take place only by means
of a third: the divine. Here is the essential division between a modern, materialist worldview and what we find in Western esotericism. In a modern worldview, there is only the division between self and other, between humanity and
the cosmos, which often enough becomes humanity pitted against the cosmos.
But in Western esoteric traditions, one finds the ternary predominating:
humanity, the cosmos, and the divine.
Western esoteric traditionsand this is true of all of themare founded on
the existence of this mysterious, hidden, third element, the divine, that transcends and links both humanity and the cosmos. And Western esoteric literature, be it Rosicrucian or alchemical, theosophic or Kabbalistic or magical,
works only by reference to this third element, the divine, whose fundamental
nature is to join together self and other. Under this broad rubric of the divine,
we can discern two general levels: there is the archetypal realm of Forms, Ideas,
or Symbols, and there is sheer transcendence, sometimes called by Bhme the
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Ungrund, and by others the Nothing, meaning by that not absence, but nothing, the absolute unity of subject and object, perhaps denoted by some
ancient Gnostics under the term Pleroma, or Fullness.
These two aspects of the divinebut especially the lower, archetypal
realmare critical to understanding Western esoteric literature. For the purpose of such literature is, first, to awaken the readers consciousness of this archetypal realm. The author has presumably already journeyed to this realm, and
in returning has written or illustrated a work, which in turn is meant to guide or
awaken the reader to its archetypal or symbolic reality. Milosz calls this awakening power Memoria and insists that it is the essence of our consciousness,
this latent memory of higher consciousness waiting to be awakened. This archetypal realm, the Platonic realm of Forms or Ideas, is the origin of both
nature and humanityand of art.
For this sphere of archetypes is the infinite hieratic, symbolic realm of images contacted by the imagination from which in turn appears the panoply of
the arts. Thus the artist, in this worldview, is in fact prophetic, by definition a
seer, who partakes in a particular kind of hieroeidetic knowledge. The artist,
in order to create, must see into the archetypal realm that is above the limitations of time and space; and so there is in all true art a timeless and universal
quality. Hence we may view the Prophecies of William Blake, the Vision
of William Butler Yeats, and the poetic prophecies of Oscar Milosz in perhaps
a different way, for all three of these poets, suffused by their deep study of
Western esoteric traditions, in turn created clearly prophetic works meant to
foretell a future that they also invoked.
There is in the universalist aims of these poets a definite indebtedness to the
inherent universalism of Western esoteric traditions. That is: whether we look
at Kabbalah, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, theosophy, or any of the other major esoteric currents, what we find in fact is not limited to the sphere of religion
alone, but instead ranges freely across all of what we today call separate disciplines or fields. In all of these traditions, we find a divine art and a divine science, a divine mathematics, biology, cosmology, and literary expression. The
eighteenth-century alchemist is often at once a poet and a historian, a mythologist, a theologian, and a chemist, an artist, a biologist and geologist and a
priestly hierophant. One cannot separate any of these roles because they are all
intimately bound up with the enormous range covered by the rubric alchemist.
Underlying all of these Western esoteric traditions is also a universalism in
the myth of the fall and of restoration. This mythalthough it appears in numerous variantsis always tied to the Ur-Mensch, Adam, and his fall from paradise. In brief, what transpired before history goes something like this:
Primordial humanity, often seen as androgynous, was tempted to look outside
itself for knowledge, and in this externalization was the separation or fall from
paradise into the increasing objectivization of history. The aim of the esoteric
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Bible or the Jewish Talmud or the Islamic Koran; and it may also be the visionary Mysterium Magnum of Jacob Bhme or an alchemical manuscript. But in
all cases the mode of transmission is in some sense a book.
It is true that many of the worlds religious traditions include sacred writings, but it is a peculiar fact that the three major monotheist traditions
Judaism, Islam, and Christianityhave a specific reverence for the sacred
book, and what is more, regard the book itself as a primary means of transmitting the tradition. It is one thing for the Upanishads or the Sutras or the Tao te
ching to be written down as a means of preservation and continuity of the tradition; but it is quite another for the writing itself to become so primary as the
sacred writings of the three monotheistic traditions. In Hinduism or Buddhism,
the traditions are largely continued by means of initiatory lineages of teachers,
gurus, or masters, who were in turn taught by a spiritual master, and so on back
into antiquity. Such initiatory continuity is found also in Islam with Sufism,
and in Judaism with Kabbalah.
But what about Western esotericism in the Christian world? Why are there
virtually no verifiable traditional initiatory lineages like those we find in other
traditions? There are of course exceptionsone thinks in particular of
Freemasonry and its claims to a continuous lineage going back at least to the
time of the Knights Templar, and indeed even farther back. However, even in
this case it is not a matter of an initiatory master-disciple tradition in quite the
same way as we see in Sufism, for instance, or in Buddhism. Indeed, it is
rather difficult to find any cases of such initiatory lineages even within the
broad sphere of Western esotericism, much less in Christianity specifically.
Certainly there were such nascent initiatory lineages early in the Christian era
among gnostic circles, but there is no evidence that any of these continued
even into the medieval period.
Thus we are left with the enigma of Western esotericism, where initiatory
lineages seem largely broken, interrupted, or nonexistent. Even in the case of
alchemy, where it is traditionally said that one must be initiated by an alchemist
in order to work the magistery, there are virtually no available records on any
such actual initiatory lines in Western European literature, other than occasional fragmentary lists and the perfunctory listing of such figures as Plato,
Hermes, and Geber. But perhaps there is a solution to this general absence of
initiatory lineages.
Given our overview, it seems entirely possible that Christianity and Western
esoteric traditions more generally, rely upon the written word not only as a
focus for oral communication or transmission, but also as a primary means of
spiritual transmission. This would certainly explain why figures like Meister
Eckhart or Johannes Tauler did not found initiatory lineages of disciples, but
rather relied upon the written word, which indeed still finds them audiences
today. It certainly fits well with Kabbalistic mysticism, where the tradition
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focuses a great deal not only on mystical exegesis, but also on writing as an actual means of spiritual illumination. One thinks here, of course, of Abraham
Abulafia, and his method of writing the names until one enters ecstasy. And
one recalls the Rosicrucians, who never revealed themselves publicly at all, but
who rather offered the world only written works, which in turn generated a host
of further written worksas if the written word itself were the primary means
of individual and social transformation.
Such a view of the written word is, naturally, rather far indeed from most
contemporary perspectives, for in all cases, it assumes that writing has a sacred
origin and purpose. In modern parlance, writing is essentially a collection of
signs, a means of conveying information, or data; it is a means of horizontal communication between two discrete people. By contrast, to write in all of
these traditions means something quite different, for it above all has what we
may call a vertical aspect. That is to say, whether it be in Kabbalah or alchemy
or theosophy, the divine is seen to inhere in language generally, and specifically
in revealed or illuminated writing, the writing of someone who has actually
realized the traditions aim of spiritual illumination.
We see exactly such a view in the figure of O. V. Milosz, who, whatever one
may think of his poetry, is unquestionably an exemplary figure not least because
he consciously represented in his work virtually the entire range of Western esoteric traditions, but also because he quite clearly saw himself as an illuminant
who by writing was also transmitting this illumination into the future, to some
future initiate in a far century. Milosz, in addressing this far-off son, had no
prospect of actually meeting or initiating him directlyhis poetry and prose had
to serve that function. Somehow, Miloszs future reader would have to become
Miloszs initiated successor by way of Miloszs writing alone. Thus we can conclude that the writing itself is meant to have an initiatory function.
Is it possible for writing alone to serve as means of initiation? Naturally, the
answer to this question depends upon what one means by initiation. If by this
word one is referring to some kind of ceremony or ritual involving a group of
people, and insists that the word can only mean direct contact between two living people, then of course writing could not be initiatory in itself. But if the
word initiation is taken to refer to an awakening of higher degrees of consciousness, then it is indeed possible for the written word to serve this function.
Indeed, when we look at the writing of Milosz, and in particular at its strange,
hieratic, dreamlike language and imagery, it seems obvious that the poetry is
intended not only to describe but also to evoke the kinds of consciousness it
represents. Such evocation is, I believe, initiatory.
Let us take another example. Christian theosophic literature, particularly the
works of Bhme, have been adorned with copious illustrations, often strikingly
beautiful. These illustrations, for example the famous ones accompanying
Gichtels well-known edition of Bhmes works, are not simply decorations, but
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gave rise to them.107 Or again, in his Warning to the Reader, Bhme tells
us that if we are not in earnest on our way to the new birth, we should leave unsaid the words in the prayers he gives us, or they will be the judgement of
God in you. Be rightly warned.
If on the one hand, Bhmes works require stern admonitions to those who
might not approach them properly, on the other hand his writing is addressed to
those who have a desire to begin, for they will experience not only the words
he has written, but, he tells us, the source from which they emerge. Here
Bhme is plainly saying that his writing is charged and has initiatory power
one can move through his work toward the divine, not by merely mouthing the
words, but by internalizing and becoming what one reads. Hence Bhme includes in Christosophia prayers for ones entire daily lifea prayer for when
one awakens on Monday morning, and for when one rises; a prayer for washing
and dressing; a prayer for ones daily work; a prayer for noon; a prayer for the
evening; and a prayer before sleep; and so on for the entire week.108 Clearly this
work is initiatic in at least two ways: first, that it encourages one to begin the
spiritual path, and second, that it encourages a change in consciousness that
permeates ones whole life.
Bhme is quite adamant in his insistence that the aspiring soul must follow
the difficult path of giving up selfishness and the arrogance of reasoning,
judgemental consciousness. In Christosophia he writes that as soon as the soul
eats of self and lives in reasons light, it walks in its own delusion. Then that
thing, which it sees as divine, is only the external constellation that intoxicates
it as soon as it grasps at it. Then it walks in error until it again gives itself completely into resignation.109 The individual soul must ceaselessly sink down into
the divine Nothing, and become not its own possession, but the instrument of
God. It must remain in resigned humility just as a fountain depends on its
source.110 And only if it does this will the soul awaken into its divine inheritance and true purpose, to become a channel for the divine current.
This passage is particularly useful for us because it neatly encapsulates the
shift in consciousness toward which Bhme is guiding his reader. When one is
caught in the self-other or subject-object division, one automatically is caught
in delusion, and whatever one perceives as divine is in fact tainted by this constant separation, so that even what is apparently divine is in truth merely another facet of the outward constellation, or objectified realm. So long as the
divine remains objectified outside oneself, it cannot become authentically a
part of ones direct awareness, and in fact much of what we term divine is in
fact nothing more than a projection. Bhme insists that the reader must overcome this self-other division, this objectifying delusion, and experience the
divine directly, so that consciousness shifts to awareness.
The word consciousness implies always a dualityone is con-scious, or has
knowledge-of. But the word awareness does not entail a subject-object duality,
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not even in relation to the divine. There is simply awareness; the self in one
sense continues to exist, in that there remains an observer, but the observer in
another sense is no longer separate from the divine that is observed. There
emerges a spacious or open quality. This divine self-awareness Bhme sometimes alludes to as the divine eye turned inward, or the divine eye that sees itself. Here we are, of course, at the far limit of what we can express in language,
and it is at this point that paradox and enigmatic expression become necessary.
But we have reached the center of the theosophic tradition, and might from
this point recapitulate by way of a diagram a schematic overview of how language may be understood in this context. Above, we have the point of origin, the
origin not only of language, but of the cosmos itself. This transcendent point
gives birth to duality, the yes and the no, the light and the dark, love and wrath,
and these in turn give birth to the qualities or archetypes inherent in the entire
cosmos. From these archetypes then emerge the natural and human realms,
where they are incarnated or manifested in the everchanging panoply of history.
Divine Unitythe No-thing
*
Duality: The Yes and the No, Love and Wrath
**
The Archetypal Realm of the Imagination: Divine Language
***
The Manifested or Elemental World
****
Language belongs above all to the archetypal realm, intermediate between
nature below and the divine above. Thus language belongs also to the intermediate human realm, for it is only humanity that can mediate between sky and
earth, between the divine and the natural. Language is the means by which this
process of mediation or reconciliation is effected: it is, in other words, divine in
its origin, as are nature and humanity. Indeed, as we have seen, in Western esotericism generally, language is said to inhere in the entire cosmos. If humanity
and the cosmos itself are fallen, or divided from the divine, then language must
reflect this division; just as, conversely, a path beyond this separation and suffering must go through language.
For language is in its innermost nature divine, and at its most sublime when
it expresses or manifests this transcendent divinity. In this sublime unity there
is no congealing into an objectified self-other divisionthrough paradox and
enigma is expressed the sheer transcendence out of which emerges the dazzling
archetypal realm, where, although there are divisions between archetypes, there
is no sense of separation between self and other, or subject and object, or perceiver and what is perceived. In other words, in the archetypal realm there is
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still no possession or ownership, there are only the archetypal powers or forms
that the poet or visionary may experience directly in vision, or manifest more
indirectly in literature. These archetypal forces do not belong to the poet; they
may be glimpsed and even imperfectly expressed, but never owned.
Ownership belongs to the fallen realm of separation and objectificationI
own this as opposed to thatand therefore belongs also to fallen language, language as merely a collection of signs functioning as more or less arbitrary designators. Nothing could be further from the various viewpoints of Western
esotericism than the fallen language of mere designation, yet this expresses a
very prevalent supposition underlying much contemporary literary theory,
which is rife with the language of objectification, or separation into self and
other. Undoubtedly, this objectification of literature and literary theory has
much to do with why such theoretic discussions are so often unreadablefrom
a viewpoint within the ambit of Western esotericism, any objectifying perspective divorced from the divine origin and purpose of language automatically will
be barren or sterile.
Here we are beginning to discern how Western esotericism in all of its various manifestations or guises is fundamentally different from modern views in
its approach to language. For Western esotericism, language is in its very nature
bound up with the divine; it is a vehicle not of separation but of union between
humanity, nature, and the divine. Language, in these esoteric traditions, is
transformed from objectifying to unifying, restoring to humanity its proper relation to nature and to the divine. By contrast, in modern literary theory or theories of language, the divine is perforce unmentionable; in vogue instead are
theories of causality that refer to a world devoid of the divine, of sign and object and manipulation of one or the other. There is such a gulf between these
two views as to seem almost unbridgeable.
Is it possible to build a bridge between a modern, secular, and objectifying
worldview and the perspectives that characterize Western esotericism? Perhaps
not, for after all, the secular modern world emerged through the jettisoning,
suppression, or ignoring of most of these esoteric currents. From the eighteenth
through the twentieth centuries, esotericism remained mostly underground
alchemy was denigrated as nothing more than a primitive precursor of chemistry, pansophy and theosophy were relegated to movements of merely
historical interest, and so forth. The massive machine of the modern technological, consumerist state was built from a materialist, secular, and objectified
worldview, and the participatory, transformative, and gnostic perspectives characterizing Western esotericism seem far removed from and incompatible with
that machine.
But by the late twentieth century, alternatives to the technoconsumerist machine became more commonplaceecosocial criticism began to emerge, including harsh critiques of technologys effects on the natural world. During this
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time, too, one found a growing awareness of the limits that the natural world
imposes on consumerist expansion, even while the bulk of society industriously
tried to avoid recognizing those limits. One also found increasing interest in alternative approaches to medicine and to spirituality, and widespread acculturation of Asian religious and medicinal traditions. Buddhism, in particular, with
the intense focus of many of its practitioners on meditation practices, began to
have profound effect on many people in the formerly Judeo-Christian world, inspiring more than a few to also rediscover overlooked Jewish and Christian
mystical traditions.
Given these tendencieson the one hand criticism of technoconsumerism,
and on the other the burgeoning interest in Asian meditation practicesit
would not be surprising if one also found the time ripe for a rediscovery of the
Western esoteric traditions, and for a revaluation of all the various disciplines
in that light. Western esotericism is inherently transdisciplinary by nature, including elements of the sciences, psychology, religion, and the arts, to name
only a few. Joining all of these disparate disciplines is a focus on the transmutation of consciousness, which has ramifications not only for the nature of
knowledge, scientific or otherwise, but also for society itself.
As we have seen throughout this study, the various currents of Western esotericism with all their diversity share a common thread: the transmutation of
consciousness through hieroeidetic knowledge. Be it Kabbalism or alchemy,
troubadours and chivalry, the Lullian art, magic or theosophy, pansophy or esoteric Rosicrucianism or Freemasonry, one finds a consistently recurrent theme
of transmuting consciousness, which is to say, of awakening latent, profound
connections between humanity, nature, and the divine, and of restoring a paradisal union between them. It may well be that we have reached a time when the
ceaseless and ever more minute exploration of the cosmos may give way, at least
for some, to an exploration of the inner cosmos and of how we perceive the
world. If so, then the ways of exploration are already marked out for us, imaged
in alchemical manuscripts and in Kabbalistic treatises, in theosophic works, and
in the countless literary works that express the discoveries of those who have
gone before us. But to begin to explore this new, inner territory, we must begin
by coming to see literature and the meaning of the word in new ways.
To this we now turn.
L I T E R AT U R E , A R T, A N D C O N S C I O U S N E S S
It is evident, after all that we have surveyed, that inherent in the Western esoteric
traditions is what we have called a libric or alphanumeric gnosis. Here we are
discussing not merely the obvious fact that such traditions are represented in
written works, but rather the idea that these literary works themselves are
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dance, and song, and it changes the dry dust of logic into color and music and
a rapture of prophecy. Whatever went to making an intricate harmony of
color and sound, he wrote, the imagination of the ending of the long tale of
time, of nature become so ethereal that it was the perfect mirror of deity, and
the withdrawal of the universe into the Pleromaall that was wrought in some
secret laboratory within the psyche.112 Yet what comes back to us from that
high sphere loses beauty in its descent, as Ishtar in the Chaldean myth had
crown and scepter and the royalty of her robes taken from her when descending
from heaven to earth.
Thus, perhaps surprisingly, the creation of poetry in A. E.s view actually
emerges from a dimunition of spiritual vision, from a descent after an ascent.
A. E. analyzes the movement of consciousness, focusing on his experience
emerging from a deep sleep, when once he became conscious while in some
profundity of being. There was neither sight nor sound, but all was a motion in
deep being. Although he struggled to remain in this state, he found himself
dragged down toward waking consciousness, and then what was originally
a motion in deep being broke into a dazzle of images which symbolized in
some deep way a motion of life in that profundity. And still being drawn down
there came a third state in which was originally deep own-being, and after that
images, was later translated into words.113 This movement of consciousness
A. E. later discussed with W. B. Yeats, who said that he had experienced precisely the same descent into words.
Yet A. E. recognized his limits, that his experience belonged to the psyche or
soul, and not to the sublimity of the spirit. I have, he wrote, never had the
high vision of those who have gone into the deeps of being and who have returned rapture-blinded by the glory, and cried out in a divine intoxication to the
Light of Lights.114 A far exile from that glory, A. E. still recognized that
greater light shines behind and through the psyche. It is the light of spirit that
transcends the psyche as the psyche in its own world transcends the terrestrial
ego.115 He understood something of the psyche, but of the universal spirit he
understood little, for its subtlety and universality make it ungraspable: It cannot be constrained. But there are enchanted hours when it seems to be nigh us,
nigher to us than the most exquisite sweetness in our transitory lives.116
Still, the poet, even if unaware of precisely how or why, somehow comes in
touch with this sheer transcendence. A. E. writes that all true poetry was conceived on the Mount of Transfiguration, and there is revelation in it and the
mingling of heaven and earth. The Mount is a symbol for that peak of soul
when, gone inward into itself, it draws nigh to its own divine root, and memory and imagination are shot through and through with the radiance of another
nature.117 For this reason, A. E. looks upon the poet as a prophet, and remarks
that almost the only oracles which have been delivered to humanity for centuries have come through the poets, though too often they have not kept faith
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with the invisible . . . But at times they still receive the oracles, as did the sybils
of old, because in the practice of their art they preserve the ancient tradition of
inspiration and they wait for it with airy uplifted mind.118 The poets and musicians offer us the sense of a glory transmitted from another nature, and as we
mingle our imagination with theirs we are exalted and have the heartache of infinite desire.119 Through them the immortals utter their divine speech.
In this exaltation or transcendent creativity, the poet or seer enters into a
realm where conventional notions of self begin to vanish. A. E. tells the story of
how he once in his office went into a reverie and saw a host of imagesa redhaired watchful girl, a cobblestone streetand to his astonishment later discovered that these images belonged to the actual world of his office companion.
And A. E. goes on to remark that he often thought the great literary masters like
Shakespeare or Balzac endowed more generously with a rich humanity, may,
without knowing it, have made their hearts a place where the secrets of many
hearts could be told; and they wove into drama or fiction, thinking all the while
that it was imagination or art of their own, characters they had never met in life,
but which were real and which revealed more of themselves in that profundity
of being than if they had met and spoken day by day.120 Thus when we sink
within ourselves, when we seem most alone, in that solitude we may meet multitude. The psyche, when it becomes truly self-conscious, through love and
sympathy may come to know that the whole of life can be reflected in the individual, and our thoughts may become throngs of living souls.121
These insights of A. E. into the nature of poetic vision or imagination,
though they do not take place in the explicit context of Western esotericism
properly speaking, still conform strikingly to the model we have begun to develop as characteristic of the Western esoteric traditions. In essence, the view
of literary creation that A. E. expresses here is not far from what we see in the
work of an exemplary and influential esoteric figure like Jacob Bhme, for in
both cases one sees a visionary who penetrates deeper than ordinary people
into the mysteries inherent in creation, and imbued with this new visionary understanding, returns to the cave of constrained or dulled ordinary life to create
written works that are themselves also permeated with the seers visionary realizations. These written works express and indeed embody some of the secret
structure inherent in the cosmos; they come trailing clouds of glory.
And there is more. Throughout our investigations, we have seen Western esoteric traditions as including the restoration of paradise, which could also be
expressed as the ending of objectification, or division into self and other. In
Christian theosophy, we find numerous accounts of the spiritual path as exactly
such a movement beyond ordinary distinctions of self and other. Thomas Bromley, for instance, in his The Way to the Sabbath of Rest (1650), wrote of how
they that are in this near Union, feel a mutual Indwelling in the pure Tincture
and Life of each other: and so, the further we come out of the animal Nature,
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the more universal we are, and nearer both to Heaven, and to one another in the
Internal; and the further instrumentally to convey the pure Streams of the heavenly Life to each other, which no earthly Distance can hinder.122 As the soul ascends toward paradise by way of spiritual praxis, it increasingly enters a
paradisal union with those on the same path, and its relationship to nature also
becomes paradisal or unified. One experiences great bliss, and the world is shot
through with light.
Of course, there are differences between what Bromley is describinga
kind of mutual communion among those in a spiritual group, irrespective of
time or distanceand A. E.s discussion of how the poet may unknowingly absorb or participate in other peoples lives or personalities, which later emerge in
poetry, fiction, or drama. In Bromleys case, one is looking at people consciously engaged in a spiritual path together; in A. E.s case, he is discussing
how the poet may unwittingly enter into an archetypal realm of the imagination,
where, as if by happenstance, he may encounter unfamiliar figures, events,
symbols, and experiences, and later forge them into a written work of uncommon power. In the first case, one finds spiritual seekers who actively pursue
inner vision; in the latter case, the poet is more like a receiver, passive.
But nonetheless, there are unquestionably parallels between these two examples, and between the models that they represent, on the one hand an exemplar of Western theosophic esotericism, on the other a visionary poet.
Underlying both of them is a clear movement beyond objectification, or beyond
a rigid self-other distinction. This movement goes through an archetypal realm
in which they experience figures vaster, more powerful, and stranger than any
experienced in ordinary life. In this realm, although there is still an observer
and what is observed, there also is participation in what is observed. One
becomes what one sees.
Such experiences are not very far at all in turn from our own ordinary reading of, say, a novel. For who, absorbed completely in a book, does not participate in it along with the characters? Its characters enter into our consciousness,
become part of us and indivisible from our inner lives. And so it is possible for
us to speak of the great Gatsby, or of Captain Ahab, as if we knew them as
neighbors. Reading, like theater, takes place on a field midway between audience and author, and so requires our sympathetic participation. We are carried
along on the words of the author, but must enter into the work by an act of
imaginative participation. Likewise, the author also is not directly present; the
book or work has been separated from its writer, and taken on a kind of life of
its own, in between both author and reader.
Thus we can see that the experience of reading itself corresponds in some
respects to a visionary encounter like those described, for instance, by A. E. In
order for a book to reach us it has to resonate within us, and we must, at least
temporarily, set aside a space within our consciousness where the characters or
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insights it expresses can exist. The barriers between self and other become at
least a little permeable. And in fact Ralph Waldo Emerson, who himself was
certainly influenced by the Western esoteric traditions, emphasized exactly this
point about ideasthat they are not our individual property, but emerge in our
consciousness if we are open to them. The visionary encounter is similar in that
here too, the consciousness is not caught up in its humdrum of daily affairs, but
in a space within itself leaves room for self and other to meet on the stage of
the imagination.
Of course, one could argue that what is other in visionary experiences like
those alluded to by Bromley is in fact merely a psychological projection of the
ego, merely imaginary in the dismissive sense of the word. But in fact Bromleys friend John Pordage, for example, took great pains to point out that the visionary realm he had experienced was not imaginary but real, existing in a
supraphysical dimension. And indeed, the history of Western esotericism is filled
with such insistence on the actual nature of what is being discussedalchemy is
real, the visions of the theosophers are real, magic is real, Kabbalistic cosmology is real, our authors tell us. Perhaps, rather than diminishing the visionary encounter to mere fantasy, we might reverse the terms, and suggest that literature
and art in their highest forms are an attenuated kind of visionary encounter.
Here we are beginning to develop a schema to see how poetry, fiction, essays, drama, and art can be understood in light of the Western esoteric traditions and their continuing themes of spiritual reading, writing, and books. This
schema is based on the idea of self-transcendence, precisely what is at work
also in the visionary encounter, in alchemical work, and in Kabbalistic practice.
For when a reader engages in a literary work, it is indeed analogous to what is
said to happen when someone engages completely in the practice of one of
these forms of esotericismthe ordinary world drops away or disappears, and
one enters into the new birth, where the cosmos can be read in new ways.
Ordinary, habitual self is gone, and one has entered a new world.
The difference, of course, between studying a work of literature or of art on
the one hand and these forms of esotericism on the other is that the effects of
reading a work of literature are limited: one is imaginatively engaged, but eventually puts the book down, one turns away from the painting. By contrast, these
esoteric traditions in general aim for enduring changes in consciousness. We
see this in the Book of Revelation, where to have ones name in the Book of
Life, or to have it stricken, symbolizes eternal conditions. We see this also in
the insistence of Bhme that one must read his work with an attitude of humility and reverence for the divine or suffer lasting consequences by stirring up
wrathfulness in ones consciousness. And we see it in the assertion of the alchemists that alchemical work can bring one to the pinnacle of human possibility, or make of one a laughingstock and utter failure. Literature is playing the
game with no stakes, whereas the esotericist is, presumably, playing for keeps.
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153
Yet it may be that the two versions of the game remain essentially similar.
Certainly modern Western literature owes a great, largely hidden debt to the
Western esoteric traditions and to their common theme of the mysticism of the
word. The deeper we investigate into the origins of modern literature, the more
we uncover links between major literary figures and various currents of Western esotericism. Works such as Marsha Keith Schuchards landmark dissertation Freemasonry, Secret Societies, and the Continuity of Occult Traditions in
English Literature (1975) and Dsire Hirsts Hidden Riches (1964) are important initial forays into this field, but there is much more to be done. And it may
very well be that the origins of modern poetry, fiction, and other forms of literature are to be found in Western esotericism and its pervasive theme of reading and writing the world.
But fundamental questions remain. If the movement of a given reader ideally is toward self-transcendence, what is the motivation of the author? It was
J. R. R. Tolkien who suggested that a poet or author is a kind of co-creator reflecting, in the process of creating a fictional world, the divine creativity that
brought the cosmos into being. But regardless of whether one subscribes to a
theistic perspective or not, one can still find a correspondence between reading and writing, for if the reader is ideally moving toward a momentary union
of subject and object, so too is the author. Miloszs insistence that he wrote for
a single reader not yet born is perhaps an extreme example, but reveals an underlying motivation of literary creationthat through this work one will connect profoundly with the consciousness of another, that through this work one
attains a kind of immortality.
And here too is a profound parallel with Western esotericism. For literary
immortality is in some respects a second birththe author may have long ago
died, but what came into existence through him, the literary work, lives on. If a
primary aim of the alchemist, the Kabbalist, the gnostic, is to attain paradisal
immortality, perhaps the literary impulse may be seen as a secular reflection of
this goal. Yet at the same time, the alchemist, the Kabbalist, and the gnostic
themselves live on for us their readers precisely the same way as does Shakespeare or Dante or Emersonthrough written works. And one joins the literary
community of the ages the way one joins the community of alchemists, gnostics, or Kabbalistsby self-election. One reads and rereads ones predecessors
works until the authors become like old friends, their works like second nature.
Thus the essential trajectory of both author and reader or artist and audience
is toward communion and union. Through the medium of the written word or the
painting, the sympathetic reader and the author may meet, and may even connect
profoundly with each other. Such a trajectory is intensified in the case of esotericism, where communion and union are an underlying expectation of both author and reader. Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Ramon Lull, Abraham
Abulafia, Jacob Bhme, Thomas Bromley, Jane Leade, John Pordage, Nicholas
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Flamelthe list can be extended indefinitely, but in every case, the author is
reaching out, and explicitly seeking to guide the reader toward new and intensified kinds of consciousness. And the reader from his side is seeking to comprehend, to be guided by the author, to vicariously participate in the authors
understanding, to in Emersons words, add it to his own arsenal of power.
It may well be, therefore, that Western esoteric and Western literary and
artistic traditions are far more mutually illuminating than we could have
guessed. They exist on a continuum that includes reading or viewing art for diversion or pleasure, but that also includes those who insist on far higher stakes
and greater rewards, for whom literature and art are the expression and vehicle
of spiritual illumination and of the transfiguration of the world, a means for
nothing less than the restoration of paradise. Perhaps the symbolism of a novel
is an attenuated form of what we find made even more explicit in these esoteric
traditions, where everything in the cosmos is seen as bearing its divine signature. And perhaps all forms of Western literature, esoteric or not, emerge from
a pervasive human need to discern or restore the hidden unity of all things by
reading and writing the world anew.
To what degree are these themes universal for human existence? Here we
may step for the first time outside the sphere of Western esoteric and literary traditions, and place them in a world religious and philosophical context. There are
two philosophers whose work is of special value for us in considering the place
of the Western esoteric traditions in this larger context: Nicholas Berdyaev
(18741948) and Nishitani Keiji (19001990). These authors are important for
us because their religio-philosophical perspectives, taken together, help explain
what I am arguing about the various currents of Western esotericism.
One should not be too surprised at the introduction of Berdyaevs work here,
for as I have discussed elsewhere, Berdyaev was himself definitely part of
Western esotericism, and publicly identified himself as a Christian theosopher
in the line of Dionysius the Areopagite and Jacob Bhme.123 But Berdyaev was
also a philosopher, and intimately familiar with the history of modern philosophy; moreover, being Russian and deeply influenced by Eastern Orthodoxy
rather than Western European Christianity, his work formed a kind of bridge
between Eastern and Western Christianities and worldviews. Here we have neither space nor need to survey Berdyaevs life and work, but instead will look at
his philosophical contributions, and how they correspond to what we have
learned about Western esotericism, literature, and consciousness.
In what could be considered the summation of his thoughtthe book The
Beginning and the EndBerdyaev discusses the immense significance of
Jacob Bhmes concept of the Ungrund for religion and philosophy.124 The Ungrund, Berdyaev tells us, precedes all being, and indeed even God himself. In
being, which belongs to history and to the constraints of time and space, there
is no true freedomtrue freedom is to be found only in the Ungrund, in the
M O D E R N I M P L I C AT I O N S
155
divine Nothingness prior to existence itself. This true freedom Berdyaev calls
meontic, in contradistinction to the deterministic and merely ontic realm where
there can be no real freedom. Meontic freedom has its origin in sheer transcendence, and its expression in human creativity.
Berdyaev is a philosopher of creativity, and what he writes about creativity
is revealing when considered in light of the continuous renewal and creative
transformations of the Western esoteric traditions. Berdyaev writes that the
creative imagination which demands what is new, issues from existential eternity, to which our categories of thought are not applicable. To enter into union
with mystery is not only the frontier of knowledge. It is knowledge, a different
sort of knowledge.125 This assertion of a different order of knowledge certainly
describes what we see in the Western esoteric traditions, as well as the close ties
between those traditions and the arts, particularly the arts of literature.
In both casesin esotericism and in poetic, fictional, or essayistic creationone is on the frontier, at the point where ontic dissolves into meontic, or
to put it another way, where one moves from the realm of social necessity or determinism or law into the realm of mystery and freedom. As Berdyaev points
out, the artist, the poet (and the esotericist) all often find themselves marginalized or shunned by their contemporary society because they represent the emergence of newness, of creativity, of direct contact with the springs of inspiration
and human awakening. Creative activity, he writes, begins with dissatisfaction with ordinary life; it is an end of this world, and is the beginning of a
different world. Here Berdyaev puts his finger on a fundamental link between
esotericism and the creator, the artist, or the poet: all are concerned with
beginning or entering a new world.
But Berdyaev does not follow his own premises to their logical conclusions.
He insists on the importance of an eternal personality, which extends the division between subject and object beyond death, and runs counter to his own
recognition of the central importance of Jacob Bhmes Ungrund in Western
philosophical-religious history. For if meontic freedom has its origin in the divine Nichts of absolute transcendence, then how could the indefinite extension
of personality, and therefore of division, correlate to this? That Berdyaev is of
paramount importance in contemporary philosophy I have no doubtbut his
work in the end remains caught in the dilemmas that have proved so tragic for
Christianity as a whole, at the center of which is precisely this problem of
whether self-other ultimately dissolves into unity, or whether this division persists into eternity so that the soul is always in some sense separate from God.
And at this point we turn to our second religious philosopher, Nishitani
Keiji. Coming from a Buddhist perspective, but deeply learned in Western and
especially German philosophical tradition up to Heidegger, Nishitani is certainly familiar with but not limited to the problems inherent in Christian theological paradigms. By drawing on the Buddhist tradition, and especially on the
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M O D E R N I M P L I C AT I O N S
157
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. See Steven Katz, ed., Mysticism and Language (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992).
2. See the definition of the Association for the Study of Esotericism [ASE] and
more information on this growing field at www.aseweb.org, the official Web site of the
ASE. I retain the conventional distinctions between the capitalized terms Gnostic or
Gnosticism (when referring specifically to figures or the current belonging to late antiquity) and the uncapitalized gnostic as a more general term not tied to any particular
era. I also retain the distinction maintained by Antoine Faivre between Hermetism (the
current associated with Hermes belonging to late antiquity) and Hermeticism, which
belongs more to the Renaissance and after.
3. See Arthur Versluis, Methods in the Study of Esotericism, Esoterica IV
(2002): 115 and Methods in the Study of Esotericism Part II, Esoterica V (2003):
175210. See www.esoteric.msu.edu.
4. For an overview of Western esotericism, see Antoine Faivre, Access to Western
Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). Faivre, who held a
chair at the Sorbonne in Western esoteric currents of thought, published a large body of
work outlining and detailing numerous aspects of esotericism, much of it in French.
There are a number of other scholars now working in this field as well, including
Wouter Hanegraaff, a Dutch scholar, whose encyclopedic book New Age Religion and
Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996)
reveals the underlying connections between new religious movements today and their
Western esoteric antecedents. The State University of New York Press series of books
in Western esotericism edited by David Applebaum also represents an important contribution to this field, and readers would do well to become familiar with it. See also
the journal Esoterica [www.esoteric.msu.edu ] for articles, mostly by North American
scholars, in this field.
5. See Hanegraaff, ibid.
159
160
6. See Faivre, op. cit., pp. 1015; see also Faivre Lsotrisme (Presses Universitaries de France, 1992), pp. 1421.
7. Jean La Fontaine, Initiation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986),
p. 14.
8. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (New York: Harper, 1975), p. 223.
9. See Arthur Versluis, Christian Theosophy and Ancient Gnosticism, Studies in
Spirituality 7(1997): 228241; see also Wisdoms Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 219233.
10. Victor Sogen Hori, Koan and Kensho in the Rinzai Zen Curriculum in Stephen
Heine and Dale Wright, eds., The Koan: Texts and Context in Zen Buddhism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 307.
11. Ibid., p. 309.
12. See, for an explicit example of this inward sojourn and perception, John
Pordage, Sophia, in Arthur Versluis, Wisdoms Book: The Sophia Anthology (St. Paul:
Paragon House, 2000), pp. 76106. Pordage writes that the invisible paradisal earth of
Sophia is hidden from ratiocination and even scoffed at by those limited to reasoning
alone, but they like everyone have access to this inward realm all the same, whether they
know it or not. See ibid., p. 97.
13. See Versluis, ed., Wisdoms Book: The Sophia Anthology (St. Paul, Paragon
House, 2000), pp. 83 ff.
CHAPTER ONE
1. See Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974), pp. 18 ff.; see also
Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York: Schocken, 1965), pp. 37 ff.
2. See Charbonneau, The Bestiary of Christ (New York: Parabola, 1991); see also
Dionysius the Areopagite on like and unlike images.
3. Nag Hammadi Library, p. 145.
4. Nag Hammadi Library, p. 151.
5. See Versluis, Gnosis and Literature (St. Paul: Grail, 1996), pp. 5189.
6. Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Theosophic Correspondence (Exeter: Roberts,
1863), p. 248.
CHAPTER TWO
1. All of this is to be found in the ninth chapter of Parzival.
2. See the fifteenth chapter of Parzival.
3. See my discussion in Gnosis and Literature (St. Paul: Grail, 1996) of Piers
Ploughman.
4. See Frederick Goldin, Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvres (New York:
Anchor, 1973), pp. 140, 180. Translation is mine.
5. Ramon Lull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, E. Peers, trs. (London:
Sheldon, 1978), p. 111.
161
162
39. I have translated this work of Pordage, and also written an extensive commentary on it. This commentary was shared with people from diverse walks, including two
physicists, a theologian, a musician, a cosmologist, and others, in a group called the
Round Table.
40. From von Welling, Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum (Frankfurt:
Fleischerischum, 1784), table of contents.
41. Ibid., p. 371.
42. See Versluis, The Alchemy of Art, forthcoming.
43. See Versluis, Christian Theosophy and Ancient Gnosticism in Studies in Spirituality (Fall, 1997).
44. Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1972),
p. 220. For an excellent survey of the scholarship since Yates, see Donald Dickson, The
Tessera of Antilia: Utopian Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth
Century (Leiden: Brill, 1998).
45. The texts of the Fama and Confessio in English are most easily found as appendices to Yates, Resicrucian Enlightenment. The following page references are to Yates, for
the readers convenience. The original (short) titles of Fama and Confessio were Allgemeine und General Reformation, der gantzen weiten welt . . . (Cassel: Wessel, 1614) and
Secretioris Philosophiae Considertio brevis . . . (Cassel: Wessel, 1615). The first English
translation was published by Thomas Vaughan in 1652. See, for text, Yates, op. cit., p. 238.
46. Ibid., Fama, p. 241.
47. Ibid., Fama, p. 242.
48. Ibid., Fama, p. 246.
49. Ibid., Fama, p. 251.
50. Ibid., Confessio, p. 252.
51. Ibid., Confessio, p. 253.
52. Ibid., Confessio, p. 255.
53. Ibid., Confessio, p. 257.
54. See Versluis, Wisdoms Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (State University of New York Press, 1999), especially on Gichtels and other theosophers tendency
to carefully date their revelations, and even chart them astrologically.
55. Ibid., p. 260.
56. Ibid., p. 221.
57. See Codex Rosae Crucis D.O.M.A.: A Rare and Curious Manuscript of Rosicrucian Interest, M.P. Hall, ed. (Los Angeles: Philosophical Research, 1971), p. 49.
58. Ibid., p. 37.
59. Ibid., D.O.M.A. ms., p. 22.
60. See Frances Yates, Theatre of the World, p. 67, and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p. 77.
61. C. H. Josten, ed., Elias Ashmole (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), II.681. See, for
background, William Huffman, Robert Fludd and the End of the Renaissance (London:
Routledge, 1988).
62. See Josten, Ashmole, I.77. See also Marsha Schuchard, Freemasonry, Secret Societies, and the Continuity of the Occult in English Literature (Ph.D. diss., University of
Texas at Austin, 1975), p. 129.
63. Ashmole, I.102104.
163
64. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (London:
Macmillan, 1967), p. 240. See Dickson, op. cit., pp. 162168.
65. See Marsha Keith Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistc
Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 409, and Margaret Bailey, Milton and Jacob Boehme (New York: Oxford: 1914), pp. 6667, citing B. M. Sloane, M. S.
654, pp. 247249.
66. See James Anderson, The Constitutions of the Free-masons: Containing the history, changes, regulations . . . (London [Philadelphia]: B. Franklin, 1734), Charge I. See
also Bernard Fay, Revolution and Freemasonry, 16801800 (Boston: Little, Brown,
1935), p. 110.
67. See George David Henderson, Chavalier Ramsey (London: Nelson, 1952), and
Albert Cherl, Un aventurier religieux au XVIIe sicle (Paris: Perrin, 1926). See also
Schuchard, Freemasonry, p. 191.
68. See Edmond Mazet, Freemasonry and Esotericism, in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, A. Faivre, ed. (New York: Crossroad, 1992), p. 268.
69. See Le manuscrit graham in La franc-maonnerie: documents, fondateurs
(Paris: lHerne, 1992), pp. 257272.
70. Mazet, p. 253.
71. Ibid., p. 256.
CHAPTER THREE
1. See M. E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2001); see also Max Ernst, Beyond Painting and Other Writings by the Artist and His
Friends (New York: Wittenborn, 1948).
2. H. D. believed that surrealism drew on esoteric currents in a confused way, and
without doubt there are bizarre and even deliberately inverted elements in much of surrealism. It may well be that a closer investigation of symbolist and surrealist poetry and
art would further reveal its affinities to Satanism, as is in fact suggested in Bernice
Rosenthal, ed., The Occult in Soviet and Russian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1997), especially in Kristi Grobergs The Shade of Lucifers Dark Wing: Satanism in Silver Age Russia, 99134. Certainly surrealism and related movements such
as symbolism provide much more complicated examples than we can deal with here.
3. On Emerson and Hermeticism, see Versluis, The Hermetic Book of Nature (St.
Paul: Grail, 1997).
4. O. V. de L. Milosz, The Noble Traveller (West Stockbridge: Lindisfarne, 1985),
p. 417.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 414.
7. Ibid., pp. 170171.
8. Ibid., p. 39.
9. Ibid., pp. 170171.
10. Ibid., pp. 172173.
11. Ibid.
164
165
166
vom westlichen Fenster] (1927). But Meyrinks works are complex enough to deserve a
study in themselves, so I have decided not to include them here, maintaining our focus
on the Inklings, Fortune, and their circles in mid-twentieth-century England.
76. C. S. Lewis, ed., Essays Presented to Charles Williams (Oxford University
Press: 1947), pp. 43, 7071.
77. C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (Macmillan: 1965 ed.), p. 291.
78. Ibid., p. 320.
79. Ibid., p. 322.
80. Ibid., p. 323.
81. Ibid., p. 382.
82. Gareth Knight, The Magical World of the Inklings (Shaftesbury: Element,
1990), p. 197.
83. Dion Fortune, Moon Magic (York Beach: Weiser, 1994) p. 10.
84. Ibid., p. 91.
85. Dion Fortune, The Secrets of Dr. Taverner (Columbus: Ariel, n.d.), p. 239.
86. Dion Fortune, The Winged Bull (York Beach: Weiser ed., 1988) p. 112.
87. Ibid., p. 115.
88. See Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (State University of New
York Press, 1994), pp. 104104, for a discussion of contemporary esoteric magical
groups, including Fortunes.
89. Williams was a member of Arthur Edward Waites magical fraternity, retained
his magical regalia in his office, and while his experience in magical ritual has been
downplayed by some literary critics, without doubt had direct experience in magical initiation that was reflected in his fiction. See on this point, Gareth Knight, The Magical
World of the Inklings, op. cit., p. 154.
90. Faivre, op. cit., pp. 2021.
91. See for instance, Maxwells account of his growing understanding of the elemental forces like wind and fire, and his intensifying strange awareness as a function
of his magical apprenticeship with Vivien Le Fay Morgan, in The Sea Priestess (York
Beach: Weiser ed., 1993), pp. 124125.
92. Faivre, op. cit., p. 21.
93. Ibid.
94. Subsequent references are to Cecil Collins, The Vision of the Fool and Other
Writings (Ipswich: Golgonooza, 1994), noted hereafter as Vision, and Meditations,
Poems, Pages from a Sketchbook (Ipswich: Golgonooza, 1997), hereafter noted as Meditations. See Collins, Vision, p. 40.
95. Collins, Vision, p. 40.
96. Ibid., p. 95.
97. Ibid., p. 87.
98. Ibid., p. 88.
99. Ibid., p. 101.
100. Ibid., p. 102.
101. Ibid., Collins, Meditations, pp. 8283.
102. E. Ellis and W. B. Yeats, The Works of William Blake, 3 vols. (London: Quaritch,
1893), I.25.
103. Southey, Letters from England (London: Longman, 1814), p. 127.
167
104. Irina Gutkin, from The Magic of Words: Symbolism, Futurism, Socialist Realism, in B. Rosenthal, ed., The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997) p. 225.
105. Bromleys is the image on the cover of my book Theosophia (1994); I added
the colors.
106. See Versluis, Ancient Gnosticism and Christian Theosophy in Studies in
Spirituality (Fall 1997).
107. Christosophia, I.1, Vorrede, and I.31, Warnung an den Leser.
108. See, for example, Peter Erb, trs., The Way to Christ (New York: Paulist Press,
1978), II.1 ff., pp. 71 ff.
109. Christosophia IV.31.
110. Ibid., IV.2930.
111. A. E., Song and Its Fountains (Burdett: Larson, 1991), p. 62.
112. Ibid., pp. 6263.
113. Ibid., p. 63.
114. Ibid., p. 93.
115. Ibid., p. 94.
116. Ibid., p. 95.
117. Ibid., p. 74.
118. Ibid., p. 78.
119. Ibid.
120. Ibid., p. 39.
121. Ibid., p. 40.
122. Versluis, Theosophia: Hidden Dimensions of Christianity (Hudson: Lindisfarne, 1994), p. 199.
123. See my overview of Christian theosophy in Magic and Mysticism, forthcoming.
See Charles C. Knapp, Nicolas Berdyaev: Theologian of Prophetic Gnosticism (Th.D.
Diss., Toronto: 1948), p. 40 and pp. 275 ff. See Berdyaevs introduction to Jacob
Bhmes Six Theosophic Points (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1958); See also
The Destiny of Man, pp. 25 ff.; Freedom and the Spirit, pp. 194 ff.
124. Nicholas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End (New York: Harper, 1957),
pp. 108 ff.
125. Ibid., p. 170.
126. Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1980), p. 103.
127. Ibid., p. 105.
128. Ibid., p. 106.
129. Ibid., p. 285.
130. Ibid.
INDEX
Brahe, Tycho, 77
Bromley, Thomas, 142, 150
Browne, Sir Thomas, 81
Bruno, Giordano, 76
Buddhism, 2829, 147
Buddhism, Tibetan, 28, 45
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 5, 4243
Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, 75
Chivalry, 3543, 46
Christ, 24, 28, 97, 105
Christianity [origins of], 1719
Clement of Alexandria, 18, 31
Cloud of Unknowing, 1
Collins, Cecil, ix, 89, 129135
Comenius, John, 8283
Confessio Fraternitatis, 72
Consciousness, 66
Corbin, Henry, 22
Cordovero, Moses, 48
Corpus Hermeticum, 80, 93, 94, 97
Cremer, Abbot, 57, 59
Dante, 4, 5, 4041, 96
Dee, Arthur, 8182
Dee, John, 53, 75, 78, 8182
Descartes, Ren, 81, 99
Dickinson, Emily, 104
Dionysius the Areopagite, 20, 2728, 31,
52, 154
Dogen, 11
Dury, John, 8283
169
170
INDEX
Hermetica, 21
Heydon, John, 79
Hieroedetic knowledge, 25
Hinduism, 19, 140
Hippolytus, 28, 29
Hiram, 100
Hirst, Dsire, 153
Homer, 5
Hori, Victor Sogen, 11
Hutton, Joseph Edward, 112
Geheime Figuren, 77
Gelpi, Albert, 104
Gichtel, Johann Georg, 63, 78
Gnosis, 4, 1921, 2728
Gnosticism, 1821, 2631, 50, 105, 137
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 90, 97, 99
Grail cycle, 3639
Gutkin, Irina, 139
H.D., ix, 89, 103119
Hardenberg, Friedrich von [Novalis], 95
Hartlib, Samuel, 8283
Heidegger, Martin, 155
Hermes [Trismegistus], 21, 22, 56, 76,
107, 109
Hermeticism, 65, 89103
Hermetism, 2122
INDEX
Meyrink, Gustav, 40
Milosz, Czeslaw, 90
Milosz, O.V., ix, 89103, 105, 137, 141
Milton, John, 5
Minotaur, 2627
Moravians, 112113
Morienus, 56
Moses de Leon, 48
Mysticism, 2
Nag Hammadi Library, 19, 25
Native Americans (and Moravians), 113,
115, 116
Nature [concept of], 66
New Age, 8
Nishitani Keiji, ix, 154156
Norton, Thomas, 57, 58
Numbers, sacred, 2930
Olympiadorus, 56
Origen, 18, 52
Pansophy, 64, 7578
Paracelsus, 60, 69, 76
Parzival, 36, 3738
Pascal, Blaise, 99
Pasqually, Martinez de, 99
Philip, Gospel of, 3031
Pico della Mirandola, 52
Piers Ploughman, 5, 32
Plato, 5, 18, 21, 92, 99, 105, 148
Platonic archetypes, 123
Poimandres, 21
Poiret, Pierre, 84
Pordage, John, 13, 14, 63, 68, 79, 90
Porete, Marguerite, 2
Postel, Gillaume, 53, 101
Prajnaparamita Sutra, 29
Pre-Socratics, 99
Prospero, 8788, 103
Pyrlaeus, Johann Christoph, 115
Pythagoras, 70, 92, 99, 148
Radical ecology, 3
Raimbaut dOrange, 40
Raine, Kathleen, 103, 119
171
172
INDEX
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 82
Troubadours, 3543
Ungrund, 6970
Universalism [esoteric], 6769
Upanishads, 140
Valentinus, 10, 31
Viterbo, Egidio Cardinal, 53
Versluis, Arthur, 10, 104, 111
Warlick, M.E., 88, 106
Washington, George, 101
Weishaupt, Adam, 86
Welling, Georg von, 63, 64, 79
Willermoz, Jean-Baptiste, 84
Williams, Charles, ix, 103, 120, 122123
Williamson, David, 116
Yates, Frances, 75
Yeats, W.B., 89, 103, 111, 137, 148
Zen Buddhism, ix, 2, 9, 10, 55, 156
Zinzendorf, Nicholas, 103, 110, 112113
Zohar, 48, 148
Zosimos, 56
A standard reference for scholars and a general introduction to Western esotericism as a field of study is Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), along with its companion
book, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2000). A useful historical overview is Jean-Paul Corsettis Histoire
de lsotrisme et des sciences occultes (Paris: Larousse, 1992). Important anthologies of scholarship in the field include Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman, eds., Modern Esoteric Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1992), and
Antoine Faivre and Wouter Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism and the Science of
Religion (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), as well as Roelof van den Broek and Wouter
Hanegraaff, Gnosis and Hermeticism: From Antiquity to Modern Times (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1998). In the voluminous sotrisme,
Gnoses, and Imaginaire Symbolique: Mlange offerts Antoine Faivre edited
by Joscelyn Godwin et al. (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), readers will find many further avenues of research by a wide variety of contributing scholars. An exceptionally wide-ranging book is Wouter Hanegraaff s New Age Religion and
Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1998). Earlier, important if sometimes a bit uneven background works in the field include the books of Will-Erich Peuckert,
notably Gabalia (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1967) and Pansophie (Berlin: Erich
Schmidt, 1956), as well as the series by Karl Frick titled Die Erleuchteten
(Graz: Akademische, 1973) and Licht und Finsternis, 2 vols. (Graz: Akademische, 1975). Readers may also wish to consult the journals ARIES and Esoterica
(www.esoteric.msu.edu) and to visit the Web site of the Association for the
Study of Esotericism [ASE] at www.aseweb.org. I should note that the two volumes by Cecil Collins cited in Restoring Paradise have subsequently been
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174
combined into a single volume entitled The Vision of the Fool and Other Writings, enlarged edition (Ipswich: Golgonooza, 2002), edited by Brian Keeble.
This is a beautifully produced book and highly recommended. Many of my own
previous and forthcoming books also deal with themes and subjects touched on
in Restoring Paradisein particular, Wisdoms Children: A Christian Esoteric
Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), Wisdoms Book:
A Sophia Anthology (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2000), and Theosophia: Hidden
Dimensions of Christianity (Hudson: Lindisfarne, 1994), as well as The Mysteries of Love: Eros and Spirituality (St. Paul: Grail, 1996), Gnosis and Literature (St. Paul: Grail, 1996), and The Esoteric Origins of the American
Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).