Esotericism 2007

Esotericism

Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age by Olav Hammer (Numen Book Series, 90: Brill) deals with the transformation of religious creativity in the late modern West. Its point of departure is a set of esoteric beliefs, from Theosophy to the New Age. It shows how these traditions have adapted to the cultural givens of each successive epoch.

The claims of each movement have been buttressed by drawing on various structural characteristics of late modernity. The advance of science has resulted in attempts to claim scientific status for religious beliefs. Globalization has given rise to massive loans from other cultures, but also to various strategies to radically reinterpret foreign elements. Individualism has led to an increasing reliance on experience as a source of legitimacy. The analytical tools applied to understanding religious modernization shed light on changes that are fundamentally reshaping many religious traditions.

This study is divided into three main sections. The first serves as a necessary background, presenting some terms and concepts used throughout the text. Since this is a study of a modern mode of religious discourse as much as it is a study specifically of the Esoteric Tradition, several crucial terms relating to the study of religion and modernity are presented in chapter 2, before the Esoteric Tradition is briefly introduced in chapter 3. The second section, comprising chapters 4 to 6 and thus by far the most extensive, presents what Hammer has called the three discursive strategies. The third and final section consists of chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 examines how all three strategies interconnect and form a whole by examining a particular case: how the strategies are used to support the concept of reincarnation. A short summary caps the text.

This volume is concerned with a rarely studied sector of the history of religions: certain currents of modern or post-Enlightenment Western esotericism. Such currents have played a considerable role in the intellectual history of the West. They continue to hold great fascination for millions of people throughout Europe and North America. Nevertheless, they have been largely neglected by scholars.

One could think of several reasons for defying the canons of good taste in the history of religions. In itself, the dearth of scholarly studies in a field that affects and interests so many in the lay public makes the need for scholarly investigation particularly felt. It is something of an oddity that prominent religious innovators such as Alice Bailey (Arcane School) or Helen Schucman (A Course in Miracles©) and their respective doctrines have been slighted by historians of religion. The point of departure of the present study, however, also lies in a second direction. My decision to investigate contemporary forms of esotericism is due to a more overarching interest in the challenges and paradoxes inherent in religious faith and religious innovation in a modern, post-Enlightenment setting. This interest has motivated the restriction to certain contemporary or near-contemporary esoteric positions, i.e. those formulated during the period from 1875 to 1999.

There is a common tendency, probably inherited from the Enlightenment and strengthened in the early days of anthropology, to adopt an exclusivist and elitist view of Western intellectual development. According to this view, the development of science, of technology and of rationalist philosophies are part of a dynamic modernity, whereas folk religion in various guises, occult and esoteric currents, new religious movements and idealist beliefs form a kind of cultural arrière-guarde, stagnant survivals of magical thinking or reflexes of pre-scientific speculation. This study will attempt to show that although such a perspective may be valid at the grandest of scales, as witnessed by the gradual secularization not only of Western European society but of many religious traditions during the last two centuries, it unnecessarily trivializes the creativity of such non-rationalist Perspectives in coming to grips with the forces of modernity.

This study, then, combines these two personal interests and attempts to understand some of the mechanisms by which a number of modern esoteric currents have attempted to modernize, democratize and legitimize themselves, adapting themselves to an increasingly hostile cultural environment.

A text such such as this must attempt to find a delicate balance between the neutral standards of reporting and the effect of an analysis that may or may not, depending on the perspective chosen, border on debunking. It is therefore more than merely a matter of record to state initially my stance in relation to the tradition that I discuss. What follows is an attempt to draw up a map of a territory that I myself do not inhabit; a spiritual tradition that in a deep sense is foreign country to me, who identify myself with the Enlightenment tradition. In attempting to come to grips with religious traditions that one does not share, four categories of approaches have emerged.' The first, the skeptical, is primarily concerned with evaluating the truth claims of those statements within a tradition that have empirical content, and generally show little or no interest in religion as a cultural phenomenon. The second, the theological, is motivated by the concerns of one's own religious point of view (e.g. Christian or perennialist), with the concomitant temptation to present value judgments as to the integrity of the tradition that one studies. The third is hermeneutical and attempts to reproduce as faithfully as possible the world-view of the believers themselves. Such studies are often centrally concerned with the meaning of cultural elements, as ways of understanding and living in the world. The fourth is analytic and sees such a hermeneutical reconstruction as the point of departure of an analysis that differentiates sharply between the emic (or believers') perspective and the etic (or analytic) perspective. Commonly associated with the hermeneutical approach is the concept of epoche, the bracketing of questions of truth or falsehood. Religious questions are characterized as meta-empirical and are therefore largely insulated from critique. The analytic perspective on the contrary notes that the documented doctrines and rituals of the world’s religions vary in all respects and are thus entirely dependent on social and historical context. Their claims are human constructions, and it is therefore relevant to ask how, by whom and for what purposes these claims are produced, legitimized, disseminated and reproduced.

The difference between a hermeneutical and an analytical approach need not only be a matter of personal predilection. Hermeneutical approaches often build on a post-Wittgensteinian view that considers the only legitimate approach to a foreign culture to be an understanding of what the world looks like from the inside, and insists that every life-form is closed and cannot or should not be judged by those who are alien to it. The hermeneutical approach, however, seems problematic on several accounts. Firstly, it can tacitly accept the presuppositions of certain post-Enlightenment protestant theologies in supposing that religions deal with a non-empirical, transcendent realm. This obscures the border between the meta-empirical claims (such as the "meaning" of life or the existence of a transcendent deity) and the many empirical propositions (e.g. the existence of witches or angels or the efficacy of spiritual healing) presented within any given tradition. Secondly, drawn to its conclusion, such a view is epistemologically hard to defend. Only those who participate actively in politics could understand the world of politics, while the untold millions who vote, comment on the activities of politicians, read newspapers and reflect on current affairs are only privy to the life-form of the spectator and do not “really” understand what politics is all about. Thirdly, as this example illustrates, it risks becoming ideologically blinkered, in that it can e.g. reify myth at the expense of the active process of myth-making, or ritual at the expense of the acts of postulating or contesting "correct" performance.

The point of departure of the present study is a sincere attempt at crafting an accurate picture of certain themes within the Esoteric Tradition, an analysis that naturally is based on the statements of the religious virtuosi of that tradition. It is, nevertheless, ultimately motivated by an analytic approach and therefore implies a strategy of reading that attempts to find subtexts that are implicit in the data but which are not part of the self-representation of the religious tradition itself. It is the opposite of a hermeneutical stance, an avowed attempt to subject a tradition that at times sees itself as an ahistorical perennial wisdom to what Mircea Eliade called "the terror of history".

Excerpt: Like the literature of most other religious traditions, Esoteric movement texts are filled with detailed claims that are part and parcel of a highly distinct frame of reference and probably appear reasonable only from within that setting. The particulars of reincarnation as documented in chapter 7 are a case in point. Of the many examples found in the literature reviewed there, the following two, which regard two famous thinkers of the nineteenth century, are taken from the writings of Rudolf Steiner. According to Steiner, the American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson received his poetic gifts in a rather remarkable way: Emerson's talents were, in a sense, inherited, since he had already lived a previous life as a writer. Emerson's considerable interest in exotic cultures was also an echo from this previous existence. Two thousand years earlier, the soul that was now incarnated in Emerson had lived as Tacitus. Similarly, other famous people's life stories are not primarily the result of genes, upbringing or biographical vicissitudes. Steiner relates that a large estate in north-eastern France was held during the early Middle Ages by a martial feudal lord. During a military campaign, this estate was captured by a rival. The previous owner had no means of retaliating, and was forced to see his property lost to an enemy. He was filled with a smoldering resentment towards the propertied classes, not only for the remainder of his life in the Middle Ages, but also in a much later incarnation—as Karl Marx. His rival was reborn as Friedrich Engels.

As seen in the last chapter, Steiner claims to have uncovered the precise mechanisms of reincarnation. Among the many emically rational rules governing the succession of lives on earth are astrological influences. As in truly pre-modern belief systems, correspondences are thus established between what is seen as separate domains by the secularized worldview: celestial mechanisms and the character and fate of the human being. Steiner's Esoteric religion partakes of what philosopher Charles Taylor calls ontic logos: a view of the cosmos as a meaningful order, in which a natural one-to-one correspondence exists between the actual structure of the world, the knowledge we can have of it and the moral law we are to follow.'

Considering the strongly pre-modern flavor of many of Steiner's claims, it should be remembered that anthroposophy is not merely an isolated "survival" in an otherwise disenchanted world. One of the main connecting threads of the present study is the contention that in their claims of possessing valid knowledge, the major spokespersons of the Modern Esoteric Tradition have adapted to many of the default assumptions of a Western postEnlightenment context. Thus, Steiner repeatedly insists that information of this kind is the result of scientific investigation. One of the foremost present-day anthroposophists remarks that anthroposophy "contains no dogmas or other doctrines that cannot be reached by rational means. Nor is it a philosophical system that somebody has thought out. Anthroposophy is a path to knowledge". Other Esoteric spokespersons may not go quite as far as Steiner did. Writers that could be classified as espousing a New Age worldview are, with a significant difference in nuance, apt to claim that their message is based on, compatible with, or explainable by means of modern science. Few spokespersons resist the temptation of appealing to the ethos of science.

For the anthroposophist, spiritual science is as inexorably logical as the natural sciences. The path towards attaining knowledge of the higher worlds, including insights into the exact mechanisms of reincarnation, lie open to those who practice the methods of Geisteswissenschaft to the full. It is not only part of Steiner's experience, but also potentially part of the experience of every individual. A carefully outlined series of meditative exercises describes how one can attain knowledge of the spiritual truths.

All of these details regarding the reincarnation of individual souls can be found in a massive work entitled Esoterische Betrachtungen karmischer Zusammenhange. Since the title of the book explicitly men- tions the concept of karma, one could infer that Steiner sees at least an indirect link between his own method of spiritual insight and an Indian tradition. A perusal of Steiner's writings will indeed reveal a host of references to what are originally Indian concepts. Other Esoteric positions, especially theosophy, are even more apt to borrow terminology from Sanskrit. Thus, India plays a central role for many of Steiner's colleagues. For anthroposophy, however, the links to the East are of secondary importance as parts of a discursive strategy. Steiner's admirers might claim that he did not actually borrow ideas from Oriental sources. To the extent that there are similarities between these worldviews, a more likely reason, according to anthroposophists, is that Hindu sages glimpsed the same reality that Steiner saw. Since these insights were purportedly gained by means of a systematic process of investigation, the invention of tradition is of secondary importance compared to the appeal to logic and science.

Thus, the founders of modern Esoteric movements are embedded in a modern context. The prophets of an earlier age could perhaps have relied on their charisma, on having been chosen by their god, or on their inner certainty. If one presumes to speak in the name of a god who is believed in by all the members of a society, this may be enough of an argument to present one's claims as self-evident fact. Spokespersons of the Modern Esoteric Tradition, however, live in an epoch permeated with Enlightenment values. How would they make their claims of possessing true knowledge sound plausible? As the present study has illustrated, theosophists, anthroposophists and New Age spokespersons have attempted the paradoxical task of combining seemingly rational arguments with claims of possessing ancient, revealed wisdom.

One factor that has been indicated to explain the increasing secularization of many countries in the West is the contact with an ever larger number of competing religious belief systems. How should one handle the insight that other people worship other gods or no gods at all?

During the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the educated elite in the Christian West seems to have had a fair knowledge of existence and particulars of the faiths of nearby lands. However, with few exceptions, this was combined with a very limited tolerance towards these religions. Thus, the medieval text Confutatio alcorani dismissed the prophet Muhammad as merely an epileptic tribal chief.' As for cultures that were more distant in time and space, the level of ignorance seems to have been considerably higher. Hermeticist interest in an imagined Egypt was matched by a profound ignorance of actual Egyptian culture. The map of the world expanded with the rise of the modern age. Jesuit missionaries, travelers, explorers, merchants and diplomats were among the increasing number of writers to convey something of the richness and diversity of the world's cultures and faiths. A greater familiarity gave rise to a mild relativism. The contrast between the two views of the Other can be seen by juxtaposing a sixteenth century chronicler with a precursor of the Enlightenment.

One of the earliest texts to describe a native American people is Jean de Léry's Récit d'un voyage en la terre du Brésil, published in 1578. De Léry visited large and well-organized villages of five to six hundred inhabitants, and was struck by how well life in these villages and the relations between their inhabitants worked in the absence of a judiciary system. There can be little doubt that his chronicle contributed to the appreciation of "savages" so evident in Montaigne's essay On Cannibals. However, de Léry's tolerance abruptly ended when he described the faith of the Tupinamba Indians. The sixteenth chapter of his book is the only one that has a directly deprecating content. The poor natives live in spiritual darkness; they venerate no gods, have no places of worship, no scripture or sacred days in their calendar. They do not pray, nor do they have any theories regarding the origins of the world.

A vast gulf exists between the religious exclusivism of de Léry and the budding relativism of a pre-Enlightenment thinker such as Descartes. In his Discours de la méthode, he writes:

On ne saurait rien imaginer de si étrange et si peu croyable, n'ait été dit par quelqu'un des philosophes; et depuis, en voyageant, ayant reconnu que tous ceux qui ont des sentiments fort contraires aux nôtres, ne sont pas, pour cela, barbares ni sauvages, mais que plusieurs usent, autant ou plus que nous, de raison; [---] en sorte que c'est Bien plus la coutume et l'exemple qui nous persuadent qu'aucune connaissance certaine.'

[Descartes Discours de la méthode 11:4; "No opinion, however absurd and incredible, can be imagined, which has not been maintained by some one of the philosophers; and afterwards in the course of my travels I remarked that all those whose opinions decidedly repugnant to ours are not in that account barbarians and savages, but on the contrary that many of these nations make an equally good, if not better, use of their reason than we do. [—] I was thus led to infer that the ground of our opinions is far more custom and example than any certain knowledge".]

Once one dares to entertain such thoughts, the position of Christianity as the exclusive truth begins to erode. Certainty is transformed into belief, into one opinion among many. By the end of the Enlightenment, this relativism was accompanied by the first steps toward a freedom of religion as well as from religion: legislation in countries such as the newly founded United States of America made it possible for spiritual entrepreneurs to experiment with non-Christian doctrines and rituals and incorporate elements from various exotic creeds.

However, a profoundly biased mental map of these exotic Others emerged. By the early nineteenth century, leading spokespersons had developed a pool of resources from which to pick images of non-Christian wisdom. The present study has briefly surveyed the ways in which e.g. a generic Orient, the belief in the noble savage and the veneration of ancient civilizations arose at different times and were supported by different spokespersons, yet were amalgamated into a common vision of the positive Other.

Total relativism is devastating to any religious claim. If there is no consensus between faiths, on what grounds does one make one's choice? The canonical texts and the spokespersons for various faiths muster arguments that seem to endorse mutually incompatible claims with more or less the same degree of credibility. David Hume expressed the problem succinctly in section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). Numerous religions of the world have established themselves on the basis of their miracles. If so, they cancel each other out; each religion establishes itself as firmly as the next, thereby overthrowing and destroying its rivals. A commonly adopted counteracting strategy is to claim that there is an underlying unity beneath the apparent diversity. Part of chapter 4 was devoted to the proposed solutions to the fundamental problem of this strategy, namely the difficulty in stating what such a common spiritual core would consist of, since the overt characteristics of the various religions (and thus their differences) are readily observable. Chapter 4 also elaborated on the strategies used by Esoteric spokespersons in their attempts to transform what is basically heterogeneous into something more homogenous, to somehow make plausible the maxim plus fa change, plus c'est la même chose.

Among the strategies selected for review are those that convert a pre-existing religious material into something new. These include selectivity, i.e. the tacit eschewing of any religious traditions that contradict one's totalizing vision; pattern recognition, i.e. the argument that doctrines and practices from various peoples are "in fact" reflexes of the same underlying wisdom; synonymization, the related claim that terms taken from the religious vocabulary of various faiths designate the same reality; and the universalizing exegesis that undertakes to find common elements in myths from various traditions. To these can be added strategies that fabricate religious "traditions" more or less ex nihilo. Entire civilizations can be created in the pages of a movement text. The Secret Doctrine is a major source of fantasy images of Atlantis and Lemuria. A somewhat less extreme form creates new legend elements and grafts them onto a historically plausible scenario or person. Examples of this would include the claims that Jesus was a member of an order of Essenes, or that he had learned yogic techniques in a monastery in Ladakh.

Through such processes, spokespersons for various positions of the Esoteric Tradition radically reinterpret history, at times to the point of inventing traditions. American and Western European spokespersons express values and beliefs that belong in a post-Christian, psychologizing and Esoteric culture by means of a terminology and doctrinal elements culled from other traditions. In practice, the freedom to be eclectic that a globalized religious ecology could have produced actually results in attempts to subvert the differences between belief systems. Spokespersons for Esoteric positions have created a new tradition of their own using the myths, symbols, rituals and doctrinal statements of various other traditions, as found in religious texts or secondhand reports.

The final case study in chapter 4 shows just how distant an Esoteric interpretation can be from the significant Other from which it attempts to draw legitimacy. Texts describing the tantric concept of chakras became available to an educated Western audience in the 1910s, notably with the publication of Arthur Avalon's The Serpent Power. In the eighty years that have passed since then, the concept of chakras has become a staple of New Age literature. At the same time, the chakras have been not-so-subtly transformed from being elements in a pre-modern belief system and a meditative praxis, to a set of terms with which to express American middle class values such as autonomy, individualism and expressiveness. Tantric terminology has been adapted to the characteristically late modern concerns of identity formation.

The theoretical concept of position is linked to that of discourse, which in the classical, Foucaultean sense is inextricably connected with issues of power and authority. Although this aspect of the Esoteric Tradition is only marginally addressed in the present study, it may be appropriate to briefly note that the construction of tradition is indeed a question of taking the right to speak authoritatively. All presumptive spokespersons are free to make their own choices from the pool of culturally given resources, to use pattern recognition and other strategies at will, and to present their own interpretations as being particularly legitimate. When a spokesperson uses a discursive strategy rather than a more formal demonstration to support the claim that his or her interpretations should be a valid grid through which others could or should interpret reality, this is an ideological maneuver. Modern movement texts, e.g. Caroline Myss' two books on the chakra system, are ambivalent on this point, since the author encourages readers more or less in passing to accept only what feels right. Yet Myss devotes several hundred pages to constructing a system of correspondences that is backed by only rhetorical evidence; in this case, whatever "feels right" can hardly be subject to independent confirmation, and must therefore be accepted or rejected at face value.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Christianity was not only challenged by other faiths. Arguably the most serious competitor were the materialistic and—more or less implicitly—secular natural sciences. A God who actively manifested his power and majesty in the workings of the world and in the history of mankind was gradually replaced by the far more distant creator of the deists. Reliance on scripture, miracles or revelation was criticized by Enlightenment philosophers on rational grounds. In this cultural climate, the first attempts were made to construct religious (or quasi-religious) systems on seemingly scientific grounds.

The history of scientistic religiosity was briefly reviewed in chapter 5. By the mid-1770s, Franz Mesmer had created a form of alternative medicine. According to his theories, all diseases had a common cause: an imbalance in the magnetic fluid that flowed through the patient's body. Mesmer created a number of healing rituals aimed at restoring the flow of animal magnetism. Mesmer soon began to attract pupils, some of whom would experiment with his methods and modify them. In 1784, one of Mesmer's disciples, Armand Marie Jacques de Chastenet, the marquis de Puységur, created the perhaps most significant innovation in the early history of mesmerism. One of Puységur's servants, Victor Race, had been afflicted with a respiratory ailment accompanied by fever, and the marquis attempted to cure him by mesmeric means. However, Race did not experience any of the common symptoms of crisis, but merely appeared to fall asleep. Nevertheless, Puységur noted that Race seemed to hear everything that was said and slavishly followed every command. After the treatment, Race claimed not to remember anything that had happened during the session. Puységur named the new mesmeric symptom magnetic sleep or somnambulism.

The radical innovation consisted in the focus of Puységur's and his followers' investigations. Whereas Mesmer was entirely committed to his view of mesmerism as a method of curing patients, the reformed mesmerists under Puységur paid attention to the exotic symptoms manifested by many of their clients when subjected to magnetic sleep: they appeared to read thoughts, gave proof of X-ray vision, heard voices or foretold the future. Puységur and his colleagues lived in a pre-psychological age. Many of them appear to have understood the experiences of their mesmerized patients as an empirically valid path to access a religious (or, to borrow an anachronism, paranormal) world. The mesmerists seemed to gather experimental evidence in support of what had previously been religious or folk beliefs. By being empiricists of sorts and thus "scientific", the spokespersons for various versions of the mesmerist worldview created a syncretism between faith and rationality.

The present study has shown how each generation of Esoteric spokespersons since the days of Puységur has attempted to incorporate the scientific advances of their epoch into a religious bricolage.

As magnetism became an everyday phenomenon, electricity partially replaced it as a powerful metaphor for vital forces. Then electricity also lost its nimbus, and atomic theory, relativity theory and quantum physics became new sources of inspiration. Since then, scientism has come to permeate many aspects of the Esoteric movement texts that form part of the present corpus. Paratextual markers, such as the author's academic titles and the scholarly credentials of those who endorse the books, give these texts legitimacy. The structure of certain texts is modeled on that of scientific treatises. The vocabulary is infused with terms taken (i.e. disembedded) from their origins within the scientific community. Movement texts may claim scientific status for an array of doctrinal elements ranging from auras and astrology to various forms of healing. Religious activities are expressed by means of a rationalistic vocabulary that makes these activities acceptable to a largely secularized audience.

What, besides rhetorical legitimacy, does one accomplish by incorporating contemporary science? On the one hand, it becomes possible to attempt a seamless synthesis a la Fritjof Capra or Gary Zukav. On the other, as shown by the final case study in chapter 5, it also becomes feasible to attempt to employ single elements of scientific theories or terminology as strategies to legitimize concepts that an earlier age might have seen as typically religious. In the case study, the type of events that may have been interpreted as miracles by an earlier age are explained as belonging to the domain of science but of a science that is vastly more encompassing than the purportedly narrow and materialistic science practiced in research laboratories around the world.

The claim that the third discursive strategy, the appeal to experience, is part of a late modern religious creativity may have surprised the reader. References to ancient wisdom or quantum physics are relatively obvious products of the religious creativity of a modern age. How could religious experience be a modern phenomenon?

Of course, it would be odd to claim that the concept of religious experience per se is part of the modern age. The earliest religious texts report visions, feelings of fear or trust in the transcendent, prophetic calling and a host of other phenomena that could readily be labeled religious. However, not all Western religious traditions have valued experience in the way many people appear to do today. Contemporary interest in e.g. mysticism can be seen as characteristic of our own epoch. As long as the religious tradition was guarded by a hierarchically organized priesthood, personal experience could even be viewed with suspicion. What could be a more efficient method of short-circuiting the hierarchy than to claim to have direct experience of the divine?' The first section of chapter 6 briefly discussed this historical background of the modern reevaluation of personal experience.

As the doctrinal positions of Christianity came under increased attack, one apologetic strategy was to defend experience over e.g. faith, ritualism or ethics. Building on a Kantian legacy, Friedrich Schleiermacher is the perhaps most influential representative of this view of religious experience as the "true essence" of religion. In his Reden ueber die Religion, published in 1799, Schleiermacher introduces the notion that true religion is neither belief in specific doctrines, as it is for the religious orthodoxy, nor moral conduct as it was for certain Enlightenment philosophers, but rather feeling, intuition and contemplation. A few of the post-Kantian and post-Enlightenment views of religion founded on an epistemology of experience were briefly reviewed in chapter 6. However, the largest part of that chapter reviewed some fundamental ways in which narratives of religion have been used in Esoteric movement texts. For heuristic purposes, narratives of experience in the Modern Esoteric Tradition have been divided here into three groups, according to the relationship between the protagonist of the narrative and the narrator.

Third person narratives are reports of what people have experienced, e.g. as the result of having recourse to complementary medicine, carrying out meditative exercises or consulting diviners. These are narratives of vicarious experience, spiritual insights and practices that somebody else has profited from. The present study has argued that such narratives serve a double purpose. Firstly, they are rhetorical exempla that support the doctrinal claims expounded in the text. By telling the story of a successfully healed client, spokespersons for a specific form of healing point to the validity of their preferred method. Secondly, they potentially cue the experiences of the reader.

Those who read the text on healing will be presented with a framework into which the symptoms of illness, processes of treatment and ensuing recovery or lack of recovery fit. Potentially, such narratives make use of practical examples to support the same discourse on illness, treatment and recovery that is theoretically explained through the doctrinal framework constructed in the text.

Almost by definition, first person narratives are narratives of privileged experience. The narrator, who claims, after all, to have something important to impart to his readership, is also the protagonist of biographical sections of his movement text. The narrative is at least partly aimed at impressing on his readers the fact that this claim is legitimate. Thus, the corresponding section of chapter 6 reviewed biographical data found in Esoteric texts, with the aim of exploring the way in which recipients of privileged experience are described. The experiences themselves are also claimed to have a variety of origins, which were also briefly reviewed. The latter topic again illustrates the fundamentally modern nature of these narratives of experience: the sources of privileged experience are variously claimed to be discarnate entities from other civilizations, space beings or metaphysical concepts such as the Higher Self.

Finally, second person narratives are directly addressed to the reader. The writer attempts to present experiences that the reader may have had, or may be able to have, thanks to the instructions given in the movement text. In the perspective adopted here, such textual passages fundamentally misconstrue what they actually accomplish. Whereas the overt goal of the text is to reveal the meaning of experience or to help the reader attain a spiritual state where certain experiences are possible, on a covert level, the narrative of experience can cue readers into reinterpreting considerably more mundane experiences in a new light. Thus, one's ordinary stream of consciousness becomes an object of attention by being provided with a label such as "channeled message".

If, as I have argued, second person narratives of experience embedded in Esoteric movement texts offer readers a structure through which to interpret their life histories, their everyday experiences and their patterns of inference, this, along with the discursive strategies of invented tradition and scientism, points to one reason for the success of many Esoteric doctrines: the cognitively grounded and socially reinforced predilections of the readers are elevated to the status of ancient wisdom and scientific truth.

Returning briefly to the reincarnation claims that headed this chapter, it is clear that Steiner, like his Esotericist colleagues, relies on all three strategies. The case study in chapter 7 illustrates how one single doctrinal claim, that we are born again in a new human embodiment after the death of our physical body, can be legitimized through a variety of means. Experience, science and tradition are all said to point in the same direction.

Without wishing to construct too heavy a case on the basis of a metaphor, religious systems could be said to exist in a kind of Darwinism of ideas. Hundreds of religious entrepreneurs are busy launching new doctrines and rituals in an untold number of movement texts. Only a few reach out beyond a small circle of enthusiasts. For those who do, half-life may be surprisingly short. In order to make more than an ephemeral impression on the cultic milieu, one of the necessary (but not sufficient) requirements is an ability to construct one's innovations on structural properties already familiar within that milieu.

Many of these structural properties were defined by the end of the Enlightenment. Most exact datings of cultural innovations should be taken with a pinch of salt. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to consider the last two decades of the eighteenth century as a period of major religious innovation in Europe. Science and faith were syncretized by the Marquis de Puységur and his followers from the mid-1780s. A non-Christian form of religiosity had become an increasingly available option by the end of the same decade. Finally, the rhetorical position of experience had been considerably strengthened after the appearance of Schleiermacher's essays in 1799. The preconditions of successful religious innovation had changed within just a few years. Since then, dozens of successful prophets have explained that their message is logical and accords with the latest findings of science; that their doctrines are not their own innovations but the fruits of ancient tradition; and that they can be experienced in the life of every person.

Esoteric literature provides its readers with a means of structuring their worlds; tells them that these structures are as ancient as the spiritual life of humanity itself; and explains in scientistic terms why this perennial philosophy is valid in a modern age. Nevertheless, a study of the substantive doctrines of the Esoteric Tradition reveals wide gaps between its central tenets and the oriental, scientific and other sources from which it culls its ideas, and with which it competes. How is it possible to construct a worldview that claims to be based on the wisdom of the East without adhering to those basic tenets that Eastern thinkers themselves follow? How can one claim to be in tune with the latest developments in quantum physics while receiving only scathing commentaries from the mainstream of academic physicists? Two main modes stand out in the construction of an Esoteric tradition from the most diverse sources.

The first is a massive disembedding of elements from their previous contexts. This mechanism clearly applies to the most diverse facets of modern Esoteric thought. Purportedly traditional elements such as shamanism or the chakra system are thoroughly detraditionalized and used for purposes far removed from those that prevailed in their pre-modern settings. Scientific terms such as energy, vibration or quantum are deployed in ways that bear little or no resemblance to usage in texts dealing with natural science. Even elements that originate from other positions of Western esotericism, e.g. the concept of archetypes, are used in ways that diverge, with varying degrees of subtlety, from the use intended by their founding figures.

The second is the adoption of a pragmatic emic epistemology, the proposition that "if it works, it is true". Descriptions of mental states are understood as direct reflections of underlying reality, a position commonly characterized in philosophical literature by the unflattering term "naive realism". Narratives are taken at face value. The step from professed belief to established fact is a small one. Although the epistemological roots of the Modern Esoteric Tradition lie squarely in the Enlightenment view of the world, the core values of the Enlightenment, especially critical rationalism, are eschewed. In a sense, the positions of the Esoteric Tradition studied here are the results of the Enlightenment gone astray.

If the New Age, as Wouter Hanegraaff persuasively argues, is a cultural critique, it is a critique of modernity phrased in terms that are in themselves the products of modernity. Indeed the Modern Esoteric Tradition as portrayed here, from the first writings of Helena Blavatsky in the mid-1870s, can be read as such an ambivalent critique of the modern condition. During the 120 years portrayed in this study, spokespersons have sought a form of gnosis inherent in the remote past as well as in the imminent future.

All three discursive strategies reviewed here—scientism, traditionalism and reliance on experience are both a result of and a reaction against the broader Enlightenment project, just as the Romantic period was a result of and reaction against the Enlightenment proper. It is hardly surprising, then, that the views of Esoteric spokespersons on history, science and experience bear profound structural similarities to Romantic views on the same subjects. Like their Romantic predecessors, Esoteric spokespersons reject materialistic science in favor of a holistic vision of the nature of science, a kind of scientistic Naturphilosophie. Like them, Esoteric spokespersons decry the supposed shallowness and rootlessness of modern life and look back at a nostalgic past and its lost values. Like the Romantics, esotericists see personal experience as a privileged means of tapping the inner resources that will bring back the spiritual vision of that past epoch. The core insights of the spiritual past and the dawning holistic science can be experienced here and now by a vanguard of spiritually evolved individuals. Those who have progressed furthest along the path toward gnosis are the counterparts of the poet-prophets of Romanticism. If the term were not preempted by political discourse, it would be tempting to characterize this view as profoundly reactionary.

However, whereas the Romantic conception was capable of producing works of the greatest beauty, the literary, musical and artistic products of the New Age are sometimes indistinguishable from religious kitsch. A discussion of why this is so would entail deep engagement with the history of ideas of the post-Romantic age, and would require yet another volume.

Academic Revival

Western esotericism has at last found a thriving toehold in academia. After years of scorn and neglect, a marginalization where scholars from a variety of disciplines explained the behavior and ideation of cults and magical fashions based on the premises of the academic discipline in favor. The esoteric viewpoint thrived on the margins of the institutionally recognized religions and sciences. It's own perspectives and raison d'être ignored and mocked by commonsense culture.

Visionary histories and traditions of occult knowledge and theory flourished without any official recognition from the academic powers of mainline science or religious studies. Now with the recent maturation of religious studies, weaned from the stranglehold of seminary and church, and seeking a more empirical and phenomenological sophisticated model upon which to mold interdependent and interdisciplinary descriptions and explanations of the esoteric aspects religious experience and cosmological vision into a reasonably coherent and historically informed picture.

Esotericism is a cultural construct of the nature of consciousness that is intricately interwoven with the vision of human becoming that is inclusive of science, religion, art, and cosmology. As a folk psychology the esoteric can include various forms of meditation and inner experience as they develop in self-consciousness.

The New Age is an accommodation of American marketing and commodity reductionism, where visionary experience and understanding is packaged to be purchased as a experience or a product such as a book, DVD or audio disc. Beside the adroit use of consumer culture to promulgate and profit from the perennial curiosity people have about the nature of their own awareness, there is little new in the New Age.

A recent book by Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism, A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (Equinox) provides a useful introduction to the history of esotericism in Western history. The book should serve as a handy orientation to newcomers to the vast field of esoteric studies. Even though the academic study in recognition of esotericism is well underway, the field has always been fraught with controversy. Stuckrad attempts in good measure offer of an outline of the main trends in traditions of esotericism from ancient times until the near present. By keeping in mind that “secret knowledge” and its revelation is a hallmark of the traditions that support what we would nowadays call “consciousness studies,” Stuckrad traces out the historical reach of Gnosticism, hermeticism, alchemy, Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Rosicrucians, Freemasonry and Theosophy into the modern world. Like any book that is introductory, it manages to not falsify the data it looks at.

The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times by Florian Ebeling (Cornell University Press) covers of some of the same ground but with a more narrow focus. Hermeticism is one of the traditions of Western esotericism that has thrived under varying guises since its inception in late antiquity. Ostensibly Hermes Trismegistus antedated Christ, being identified with the man-God, Thoth, a Promethean figure who taught Egyptians to write, and whose revelations supposedly foretold the coming of Jesus and the essential tenets of the New Testament. This mythical formulation was accepted by Renaissance scholars in their early synthesizing of Christian scholasticism with the revival of classical learning especially with the completion of the Platonic dialogues as interpreted by the late antique Neoplatonic thinking. Ficino, the Medici’s house philosopher was instrumental in propagating this view. Ebeling’s unique twist to his history is his concentration on the German Renaissance, especially the hermeticism as it was developed by Paracelsus, which did not follow in the humanism of Ficino, but rather took up the alchemical understanding of hermeticism. Sebastian Frank’s hermetic theology is also discussed, as is the pietistic rejection of the hermetic and the adoption of hermetic symbolism in Freemasonry. Neither Stuckrad or Ebeling show the nuanced complexity of the esoteric traditions, in their history as well as in their ideology, as the works approach modernity.

Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esoteric Traditions by Arthur Versluis (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) is a concise overview, from antiquity to the present, of many of the major Western religious esoteric movements. Topics covered include alchemy, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy and the recent development of academic study of esotericism itself as distinct from marginalized religion or science. Until comparatively recently, there was very little scholarship on Western esotericism as a field. There were, of course, various articles and books on aspects of Western esotericism like alchemy or Rosicrucianism, but there was virtually no sense in the scholarly world that these disparate tributaries of thought formed a larger current of Western esotericism as such. Landmark studies in the mid-twentieth century by Frances Yates began to demarcate "Western esotericism" as a field for interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary study. More than anyone else, though, it was Antoine Faivre (1934-) who, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, with numerous major books and articles defined the field as an academic area.

Faivre's typology describes well what we may call the cosmological domain to which many currents of Western esotericism do belong, incorporating as it does such disciplines as practical alchemy, astrology, geomancy, and other forms of divination, as well as secret or semisecret societies as found in Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, various magical lodges or orders, and so forth. All of these draw on the doctrine of correspondences. What is more, a significant part of Bohmean theosophy belongs to the cosmological domain—one thinks of the doctrine of signatures, the triadic nature of the Bohmean cosmos, and so forth. Bohme too offers a profoundly esoteric view of nature. But to acknowledge the primacy of the cosmological dimension in what has come to be known as Western esotericism must not entail denying the presence of a metaphysical gnostic dimension at least in some of the same currents of thought. This said, the basic principle behind Faivre's methodology—a strictly historicist approach seeking primary definitive characteristics of esotericism—is a necessary one. We need definitions of terminology and of primary concepts, and the conceptual and historicist framework informing Faivre's perspective is of great value in construing the new field.

The contemporary academic study of esotericism began with Antoine Faivre, as cited below from his pioneering study and manifesto Access to Western Esotericism (State University of New York Press), who works historically and typologically. He defines six basic characteristics of modern Western esoteric thought (i.e., from the seventeenth century to the present), these being:

Correspondences. As the Hermetic dictum has it, "as above, so below," meaning that there are precise correspondences between all aspects of the universe, including between the human microcosm and the macrocosm.
Living Nature. Nature is not a collection of objects to he manipulated, but alive and connected via hidden, subtle forces that can he awakened and drawn upon through magia naturalis, natural magic.
Imagination and Mediations. Here imagination refers not to wild fantasy, but to a means of spiritual perception, insight into the mundus imaginalis or spiritual realm(s) that can he seen only by those with purified vision.
Experience of Transmutation. Transmutation here refers to metamorphosis, sometimes of natural substances (as of lead into gold via alchemical work) and sometimes of the individual (from ignorance to illumination).
Praxis of the Concordance. Essentially, Faivre refers here to the tendency of esotericists to see the parallels between various traditions, as when in antiquity one finds Hermetists who are also Gnostic Christians. It is very close to syncretism or syncrasis— the joining of various traditions in practice.
Transmission. An emphasis on the importance of the initiatic chain—the transmission of secret knowledge from master to disciple—a tendency found in traditions as disparate as alchemy and magic.

Faivre's typology emphasizes the cosmological dimensions of esotericism and focuses on the early modern and modern periods, whereas other scholars have sought to widen the scope of the field. Dutch scholar Wouter Hanegraaff argues, in a whole series of articles, for an empiricohistorical approach to a field that de facto ranges from antiquity to the New Age.

A German scholar as we made note of above, Kocku von Stuckrad, argues even more broadly from a perspective of discourse analysis that Western esotericism has two primary characteristics: claims to higher knowledge, and means of access to that higher knowledge. "Higher knowledge" is "a vision of truth as a master key for answering all questions of humankind," and the means to higher knowledge include primarily the mediation of revelatory beings like Hermes, and direct individual experience." My own approach here is a new, inclusive one that incorporates many aspects of these other perspectives and draws from a range of disciplines while remaining historically grounded.

One of the most striking future areas for investigation lies in comparative religious studies. Many Western esoteric traditions parallel Asian religious traditions in various ways—there are, for instance, Asian alchemical traditions that correspond strikingly to some forms of European alchemy; just as there are some interesting parallels between Vajrayana Buddhism and Christian theosophy, or between Asian and European astrological or magical traditions. These are all comparative fields that remain largely unexamined and that could shed much light on the traditions concerned. But investigations of this nature require great sophistication of knowledge in a range of fields and languages, as well as extensive general knowledge of various eras. In many respects, only now are such comparisons even possible.

In short, it appears we stand on the brink of a new era for scholarship in esotericism. The aim of Versluis' Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esoteric Traditions is to orient readers and potential scholars to this particular field and to its possibilities, but also to provide a new, more integrative approach. Some authors have warned against bringing esotericism into the academy, and there are indeed dangers in doing so. However, by approaching these esoteric figures and traditions historically and empirically, working integrative rather than by approaching them with any particular ideological axe to grind, we may well discover much of value that had too hastily been jettisoned or ignored in the past several centuries. What follows is a new, historically grounded approach to esotericism that focuses on the twin themes of magic and mysticism, of cosmological and metaphysical gnosis. One enters into the field with a sense of adventure, and that this sense of adventure both pervades this study and will continue in the future, for that above all is the sign under which investigation in this field necessarily proceeds. This theoretical enthusiasm offers more insight into the deeper rationale for the esoteric that does Florian Ebeling's study or Kocku von Stuckrad survey.

Versluis asserts that as we look over Western esotericism from antiquity to the present, we can discern one characteristic that emerges as central throughout the entire period: gnosis. The word gnosis here refers to assertions of direct spiritual insight into the nature of the cosmos and of oneself, and thus may be taken as having both a cosmological and a metaphysical import. Indeed, one may speak of these as two fundamental but related kinds of gnosis: under the heading of cosmological gnosis we may list such traditions as astrology and the various forms of -mancies such as geomancy, cartomancy, and so forth, as well as numeric, geometric, and alphabetic traditions of correspondences and analogical interpretations, traditions of natural magic based on these correspondences, and so forth. Cosmological gnosis illuminates the hidden patterns of nature as expressing spiritual or magical truths; it corresponds, more or less, to the via positiva of Dionysius the Areopagite. Metaphysical gnosis, on the other hand, represents assertions of direct insight into the transcendent; it corresponds, more or less, to the via negativa of Dionysius the Areopagite and is represented by gnostic figures like Meister Eckhart and Franklin Merrell-Wolff, to offer two historically disparate examples.

Versluis chooses to define esotericism primarily in terms of gnosis because gnosis, of whatever kind, is precisely what is esoteric within esotericism. Esotericism describes the historical phenomena to be studied; gnosis describes that which is esoteric, hidden, protected, and transmitted within these historical phenomena. Without hidden (or semihidden) knowledge to be transmitted in one fashion or another, one does not have esotericism. Alchemy, astrology, various kinds of magical traditions, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Jewish or Christian visionary or apophatic gnosis—under the rubric of Western esotericism are a whole range of disparate phenomena connected primarily by one thing: that to enter into the particular arcane discipline is to come to realize for oneself secret knowledge about the cosmos and its transcendence. This secret or hidden knowledge is not a product of reason alone, but of gnosis—it is held to derive from a suprarational source.

Gilles Quispel, the scholar of ancient Gnosticism, has argued that European tradition may be demarcated into a triad of faith, reason, and gnosis, with gnosis being the third and hidden current of Western thought. While Versluis does not agree with some of Quispel's Jungian premises, he seems fundamentally right in proposing this triad, and further think that we cannot investigate European, American, or other categories of comparatively recent esotericisms without reference to their historical antecedents at least as far back as late antiquity. One cannot fully understand the triad of faith, reason, and gnosis without considering the full range of European history in which it manifests itself. What is more, we cannot adequately investigate, singly or comparatively, variants of esotericism without an awareness from the outset that we are entering into unfamiliar territory for the strictly rationalist or scientific mind, and that in order to understand it in any genuine way, we will have to learn at least imaginatively to enter into it.

There have already been some limited or preliminary efforts by a few scholars to begin a comparison of Gnosticism in late antiquity with Vajrayana Buddhism, with Bohmean theosophy, or with Persian Sufism, to give several examples. And such efforts are bound to suggest new insights into these disparate but sometimes apparently parallel traditions or spiritual currents. But what we are discussing here is no simple matter. For while the conventional historian must work with rather straightforward historical data—dates, events, major figures—to this the historian of esotericism must also confront an entirely new additional dimension that we may as well describe from the outset as gnosis. This dimension cannot be addressed by conventional history alone, precisely because gnosis represents insight into that which is held to transcend history. A visionary revelation, for instance, occurs in time, but according to the visionary that which is revealed does not belong to time alone. As eighteenth-century visionary Jane Leade wrote, to enter into the visionary realm, one must cast off from the "shoar of time." So must the historian of esotericism attempt to do, at least imaginatively if not in fact, or his or her history may well devolve into mere reductionism and even denigration due to a failure of understanding. And this imaginative effort is all the more difficult if one is attempting to deal with not one but two culturally disparate forms of esotericism.

But this imaginative effort is critical if one is to truly begin to understand one's esoteric subject from within as well as from without. It is here that the work of Henry Corbin reveals its importance. Here Versluis not referring to the accuracy or lack thereof of Corbin's work— Versluis is not a scholar of Persian spirituality—but to the effort to enter into the perspective one is studying. This is the adventure the study of esotericism offers the scholar that few other fields can present. In the future, comparative esotericism will take its place as a subspecialty, but for now the field as a whole is in its infancy, with vast primary research yet to be done, whole histories yet to be written. Before we can compare European alchemy with that of South India, we must first have a firm grasp of European alchemy itself! And that is a goal as yet not attained; one that will require not only a wide range of knowledge, but also the imaginative capacity to interpret it.

While it may not always be easy to chart a course between the extremes of wholly embracing and wholly rejecting esotericism, this is what is necessary if we are to come to understand this complex and subtle field. An investigator must attempt to understand the world in almost certainly unfamiliar ways, and this requires a sympathetic approach to various figures, writings, and works of art, open to the unexpected, yet also retaining some sense of critical distance. Western esotericism as it is outlined in this book is a vast and profound area for research, one that could perhaps best be characterized as a long series of different investigations into the nature of consciousness itself. It is entirely possible that an investigation into it will discover in its various forms of cosmological or metaphysical gnoses unexpected insights into hidden aspects of nature, of humanity, and of spirituality.

Central to these insights is the relationship between self and other, or subject and object. In an article published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Versluis argues that Western esotericism tends to see and use language in a fundamentally different way than many of us are familiar with—here, language is used not for conventional designation in a subject-object relationship, but in order to transmute consciousness or to point toward the transmutation of consciousness through what we may term 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. Hieroeidetic knowledge can be understood in terms of a shift from an objectifying view of language based on self and other to a view of language as revelatory, as a via positiva leading toward transcendence of self-other divisions. It is here, in their emphasis on the initiatory, hieroeidetic power of language to reveal what transcends language, that the unique contribution of Western esoteric traditions to consciousness studies may well be found.

Near the end of this article, Versluis’ remarks that “The massive edifice 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 edifice. Still, for the first time now there are numerous scholars examining both Western esotericism as a general concept, and particular currents within esotericism, and it may well be that such studies will eventually offer unexpected insights into the historical origins of the modern era, as well as further insight into the relationships between Western esoteric traditions and consciousness.”

It is important to recognize how different are the premises of Western esoteric traditions from modern ways of thinking and understanding, and how by entering into these currents of thought we may indeed see our own world in new ways.

If Western esotericism is to fully develop as a field of scholarly inquiry, its unique nature must be recognized. Most unique about it is not its transdisciplinary nature alone, but the fact that its manifold currents are each concerned with new ways of knowing, with the transcendence of the self-other dichotomy, be it through initiatory literature, alchemical or magical work, visionary experience, or apophatic gnosis. While purely historical research obviously has its place in this field, the most important works may be those that suggest new ways of seeing and knowing. Perhaps some of the most vital and profound contributions of this fascinating field will be in areas like consciousness studies, but in any case, we can be sure that there is much more yet to be discovered.

Obviously good introductory histories of esotericism are a necessary preamble to theoretical exploration of its various branches are important. However of greater importance will be the monographs that deal with the various branches of esoteric knowledge as it developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Aspects of this history have been approached as for example in the various studies of the Hermetic Order of Golden Dawn.

But there is much more than still needs to be done.

Histories of esotericism become part of esoteric lore, though many esoteric works themselves approach their history mythically rather than critically. Another aspect of esotericism is the deliberate cultivation of magick (the k being emblematic of the mystical and ritual aspects of the practice, rather than merely trickery and sleight-of-hand of the stage magician).

The Book of Abramelin: A New Translation by Abraham Von Worms (Ibis) comes to us in a new edition, complete with some probable backstory about the true history of the famous magick manual and the amateur sleuthing by Georg Dehn that uncovered its true province.

The Book of Abramelin is the first modern translation of this magical work since Golden Dawn Meister Mathers’ original translation over 100 years ago. Not only is the language updated, but Georg Dehn, the compiler and editor, has sourced his work from all extant manuscripts, while Mathers used just one.

The result is a stunning new translation that has already set the occult world abuzz. It includes voluminous important material left out of Mathers’ work, including an entire Part 2 filled with magical recipes, important distinctions in the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel ritual, and complete word grids that were only partially completed by Mathers. This is an essential work for any serious practicing magician or student of occult history.

The underpinnings remain the same. The ultimate goal of Abramelin's Art is to gain direct conversation with your Holy Guardian Angel. There is also the book Abraham writes to his son, as an explanation of how the Treasure and the Art came into his hands. Anyone familiar with the Mathers version will also recognize the last book. It consists of magical squares that produce sundry effects by way of the spirits that are bound to them.

If it sounds like too much is the same to bother purchasing this book, let me counter by listing the things that are different.
There is a fourth book, in addition to the three Mathers translated from the French edition. This book deals with what Abraham calls the "mixed kabbalah". It is in effect a formulary of folk cures, charms, and nostrums that are not to be found at all in the Mathers edition.
Instead of six months, the operation detailed here, is a much more complex 18 months.
The squares from the final book that mesmerize so many students are completely different in the original German, than they are in the manuscript Mathers had worked from. Instead of 242, mostly incomplete squares, the German manuscripts show 251 squares, and every single one of them is completely filled in. That is to say, the Mathers version gave not only an incomplete list of squares, but out of the ones that are listed, two thirds are not completely filled in. What lines in the squares are filled in, you quickly discover, are misspelled, out of order, and almost wholly in disagreement with the original sources the present author uses.
In addition to the above, the author goes to great lengths retracing the steps of Abraham, making a case for his historical reality, as well as the hermitage of Abramelin the "old father" himself.
If you are familiar with the original Mathers translation, you owe it to yourself to take a second journey with Abraham to Egypt, and look anew at the teachings of Abramelin the Mage.

This Art takes a loftier place in Western Tradition than most tomes of its time and kind. Rather than idols, pentacles, and barbarous names, the Operation draws its power from the exorcist being virtuous. That is, god-like power is granted on the condition of piety. It is important to note that there is an 18 month initiation involving fasting, prayer, study of the Holy Books, and doing good deeds, culminating in a union between the prospective Magus and the Divine, completing both in the process.

The Alphabet of Nature by Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont, translated with an introduction and annotations by Allison P. Coudert, Taylor Corse (Brill Academic) Van Helmont was the son of the famous Paracelsian chemist Jan Baptista van Helmont (1579-1644). He was born in October, 1614, shortly after his father claimed he had successfully transmuted base metal into gold. Hence the name Mercury, hardly common, but redolent with alchemical associations, for mercury was an essential agent in transmutation and brought to mind the reputed founder of alchemy, Hermes, or Mercurius, Trismegistus. Like the wandering planet, whose name he bore, the younger van Helmont appeared to follow an erratic path. Born a Catholic, he was accused in middle age of "judaizing" and of becoming a Jew, for which the Inquisition duly imprisoned him. Later he joined the Quakers, but soon left when George Fox, their founder, rejected his kabbalistic brand of Christianity. Van Helmont was a reformer who so insistently sought to foster the best in human nature and society that one cannot but have sympathy with his ideals. He tended the sick and tried to reform the medical profession; he wove his own clothes and developed weaving projects to employ German peasants left destitute by the Thirty Years' War. He invented a chair to straighten crooked backs, and along with his good friend Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) drew up designs for a more efficient wheel barrow, better cooking pots, and even shoes with springs for "fast get-aways." Van Helmont must have been a most attractive and engaging character. The thought of his goodness once brought tears to the eyes of his good friend Henry More (1614-1687), a key figure among England's Cambridge Platonists. Only a pint of ale and a glass of canary wine could calm More's "passion," as he described it, and he excused himself by saying that as a chemist van Helmont could draw moisture from flint. Leibniz shared More's respect and admiration. When van Helmont died, he wrote his epitaph and said in the last two lines, "If such a man had been born among the Greeks, He would now be numbered among the stars."

The unifying motif behind van Helmont's activities came from his untiring effort to find a comprehensive reform of the Christian religion in an age of bitter and bloody religious controversy. He was convinced that a union of the mystical teachings of the Jewish Kabbalah and Christianity offered the foundation for a truly universal religion that would embrace Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Moslems, and pagans. This conviction is very much in evidence in his book on the natural Hebrew alphabet.

Van Helmont was not entirely happy with his orthodox education. In the preface to the posthumous edition of his father's works, which he edited and published in 1648, he describes himself as 'not content', desiring “thorowly to know the whole sacred Art, or Tree of Life, and to enjoy it.” To this end he taught himself Latin and German by reading the New Testament many times in both languages and traveled throughout Europe seeking enlightenment from a variety of unorthodox sources, which included mystics, followers of Jakob Boehme, Kabbalists, Collegiants, and Quakers. Between 1644 when he left home after his father's death, and 1648 he became acquainted with members of the Palatine family, becoming especially close in later years to the two eldest sons, Karl Ludwig (1617-1680) and Rupert ( 1619-1682). Van Helmont received a patent of nobility from Emperor Leopold in 1658 in recognition of the diplomatic and practical services he performed for these members of the German aristocracy.

Beside his father, another major influence shaping van Helmont's mature thought were the teachings of the Jewish Kabbalah. How he became acquainted with the Kabbalah is unknown, although it is probable that he came into contact with Jewish and Christian Kabbalists in Amsterdam. By the time he published his first book, The Alphabet of Nature in 1667 his kabbalistic philosophy was formulated in a way that would never change throughout his long life. He was convinced that the Kabbalah represented the prisca theologia granted by God to Adam and that it consequently offered profound insights into the natural and supernatural worlds. Through the Kabbalah mankind would come to share a single religion and obtain the philosophical basis for a complete understanding of the natural world. Van Helmont collaborated with Christian Knorr von Rosenroth in the publication of the Kabbala denudata (1677, 1684), a collection and translation of the largest number of kabbalistic texts (particularly Lurianic kabbalistic ones) available to the Latin-reading public until the 19th century.

Van Helmont's role as advisor to Prince Christian August of Sulzbach led to his arrest by the Roman Inquisition on the charge of "judaizing" in 1661, which suggests that his kabbalistic philosophy was already in place six years before the publication of his first book. Christian August's ardently Catholic cousin Philip Wilhelm, Duke of Neuburg, was convinced that van Helmont was undermining Christian August's Catholic faith by encouraging him to study Hebrew and the Kabbalah and by advocating the settlement of Protestants and Jews in the Sulzbach territories. He persuaded the Inquisition to imprison van Helmont on the grounds that van Helmont's judaizing had led him to reject the Sacraments, to interpret Christ's death and resurrection allegorically, and to claim that anyone could be saved in his own faith. Van Helmont was released after a year and half probably due to the intervention of Christian August.

While imprisoned van Helmont began work on his first book, The Alphabet of Nature. In this work, which now appears in English for the first time, van Helmont argues that Hebrew was the Ur-speech, the divine language of creation in which words exactly expressed the essential natures of things. While time and ignorance had led to the corruption of Hebrew, van Helmont contended that he had rediscovered its original written form, which corresponded to the tongue movements made while pronouncing individual letters. In this work he argues that Hebrew was not only the original language, or Ur-speech, but that it is also a "natural" language inasmuch as Hebrew words exactly mirror things. He further argues that the very naturalness of Hebrew enabled him to construct "a method for teaching those born deaf not only to understand others speaking but to speak themselves," Van Helmont was convinced this discovery would lead to the correct understanding of the biblical text and consequently provide the basis for an ecumenical religion rooted in the Jewish Kabbalah and capable of uniting Christians, Jews, and pagans. Furthermore, because it was the Ur-speech Hebrew provided access to both the divine and natural worlds. Studying it would therefore lead to a better understanding of the natural world and to the advancement of learning in all fields, including natural science.

Excerpt: While van Helmont's book offers a practical method for teaching the deaf to speak, it is primarily a philosophical work arguing that Hebrew was the divine language of creation in which words exactly expressed the essential natures of things. But as we shall see, the two themes were intimately connected in van Helmont's mind. Van Helmont contended that while time and ignorance had led to the corruption of Hebrew he had rediscovered its original form. He expected great things from this, believing it would bring an end to the religious controversies that had precipitated the Reformation and embittered its aftermath. He envisioned a natural Hebrew alphabet that would enable men to converse without rancor and solve disputes rationally.

Like many philosophic works, ancient and modern, van Helmont's The Alphabet of Nature is cast in the form of a dialogue between two speakers, who drive the argument forward by questioning and answering each other. The dialogue form was especially common in the early modern period. It was a favorite of van Helmont, and he made frequent use of it in his subsequent works. It fit well with his approach to knowledge and method of inquiry He was not didactic but preferred to make his points by leading his reader on with questions and answers.

Dialogue is inherently dramatic, a literary fact that van Helmont clearly appreciated. His countryman Erasmus wrote brilliant dialogues; and his English friend and colleague, Henry More, used the same format for many of his treatises. Dialogue can give the impression of an actual conversation taking place between two or more people; it can create tension and suspense, as well as convey a sense of informality and immediacy. Since van Helmont's great theme is the power of speech, he needed effective speakers to advocate his cause: the revival of ancient Hebrew as a "living" language.

Although the speakers in this treatise do not come to life as fully realized literary characters, van Helmont does individuate them in certain ways. For example, he designates one as H, the other as M. These, of course, are the author's own initials, and it is likely that van Helmont intended for H and M to represent different aspects of his personality, as well as different sides of his inquiry into the origin and nature of language. Generally speaking, H plays the role of the cautious but curious skeptic, who poses questions ("How do infants learn to speak?"), raises objections ("I am not satisfied with these remarks"), and asks for further clarification ("Can this be more clearly explained with a more concrete example?"). M, on the other hand, supplies all the answers and explanations, as, for instance, in the long Sixth Conversation which describes the various motions of the tongue and mouth in forming each and every letter, consonant, and vowel, of the Hebrew alphabet. M has other qualities: we find him praising the pioneering work of some scholars (such as Hutterus on Hebrew roots), quarreling with other authorities (such as Kircher and Walton), telling anecdotes (including the horrific story about two soldiers who copulate with a corpse), relating personal experiences (his striking success in teaching a deaf musician how to read and speak Hebrew), promoting concord between Jews and Christians, and everywhere displaying his dazzling erudition about different subjects (modern science, comparative linguistics, biblical and classical scholarship, ancient history, and so on).

Throughout his dialogue, van Helmont employs a "vitalist" rhetoric that matches his vitalistic views on language, human society, and the natural world. No descriptive term occurs more frequently than the Latin word vis (which we render sometimes as "force," sometimes as "power"). In one typical sentence, we are told that "the tongue, driven upwards with force, also descends with force to a lower position." On another page, we read about the tongue rebounding "forcefully from the palate," striking "violently in its descent," cleaving "strongly to the palate," and falling "swiftly back again."' Speech is an energetic activity that requires constant exertion and conscious vigilance; nothing about it is simply passive or receptive. Time and again, we hear about the "power" of individual letters to produce unique effects, such as the letter Jod, which gives "a living sense of the pain of childbirth," or the letter Schin, which "carries the sound of a silent man ruling with authority" Richly figurative, van Helmont's dialogue shows the influence of the ancient rhetorical idea of enargia, a generic name for a variety of techniques aiming at lively description. The vivid and energetic style of A Short Sketch also reflects van Helmont's belief in a cosmos that is fully animated and interconnected. Central to this doctrine is the notion that "every man radiates from himself his entire vital power without stop." Hence the many fascinating digressions on such topics as the secret power of the human hair, "the menstrual blood of the moon," or the sorry fate of a transplanted nose. Nothing is irrelevant. Thus the various organs of speech (breath, tongue, lips, mouth, palate, epiglottis, and windpipe) cooperate vitally and instrumentally with every other organ and faculty of the human being, the natural world, and God.

Van Helmont wrote The Alphabet of Nature under rather unusual circumstance, during the eighteen months he was imprisoned by the Inquisition in Rome." His isolation and lack of books left him with nothing to do but think. Given this situation, he embarked on a train of thought that began with musing about living on an island inhabited by deaf mutes and concluded with the conviction that Hebrew is a "natural" language:

“This, among other things, is what a plain and simple meditation suggested to me when I was in a certain place, where I was deprived of all the help necessary for an accurate elaboration of this matter [of a natural language], and the only relief left to me was thinking. For I had the opportunity to consider by meditating with myself what I would do if I had to live on an island inhabited only by people born deaf in order to lead a most pleasant life with the best conversation. So now I wish to deliver all this to the freest judgment of everyone, and I give infinite and eternal thanks to God, who has placed the mouth and tongue in man.”

Francis mercury van Helmont

From the frontispiece in the, we can see that the "certain place" was van Helmont's cell. Van Helmont sits at a table in a dark, vaulted room, the stone walls and metal bars illuminated by the light of a single candle. In elegant dress and comfortable slippers, he stares into a mirror, calipers in one hand and pen in the other. Clearly his dreamy speculations about his island adventure have taken a more practical turn. He realizes that a deaf person is not mute, except in rare cases, because of any physical deformity of the speaking organs, and he knows that deaf people can learn to understand words by lip-reading. These general considerations led him to the mirror and calipers. As one of the speakers in the dialogue reasons, if a deaf mute can learn to read words merely in the course of being spoken to, how much more quickly might he learn to understand and speak words from diagrams, especially since diagrams have been used to teach people all kinds of things from violin playing to food carving:

Surely, if it is possible for someone to learn to play the violin by seeing the finger movements illustrated on the strings of a violin, the art of dancing through depictions of the order and placement of the feet, the art of flag waving through illustrations of gyrating flags, and finally, if the art of jousting, gunnery, and building and other similar things can be learned in this way, is it not possible for someone to learn and teach human speech through the various configurations of the tongue and mouth?'

His alter ego concurs, "I have no doubt whatsoever about these things." In fact, he somewhat surprisingly says that he has used precisely this method with great success on a "deaf musician ... suffering from weak vision and trembling limbs."' What is even more surprising is that there was actually such a person at Sulzbach, the composer Peter Meyer."

By proving he could teach the deaf and dumb to read and speak Hebrew through pictures, van Helmont attempted to discredit the arguments brought against the concept of a "natural" language. Thomas Erastus (1524-1583), the Swiss doctor and forceful critic of Paracelsus, was one of many who maintained that language was wholly a matter of convention. To prove this he cited the case of deaf mutes. Erastus reasons that if language is natural, meaning that if words and things are intimately connected, then deaf mutes could speak from birth. They would automatically know the names of things and hearing would be of no importance in learning a language.' By showing that deaf mutes could easily learn to speak Hebrew, van Helmont thought that he could demonstrate the two premises on which his theory of the natural alphabet was based: first, that there were such things as innate ideas in the human mind that had only to be activated to come into consciousness, and second, that the Hebrew language perfectly represented these innate ideas. Thus the case of deaf mutes was used by both those arguing for and against the conventional nature of language. The topic continued to generate endless debates in the following centuries.

The first conversation ends with van Helmont's contention that he could teach the deaf to speak. The second leaves the subject of the deaf and dumb and turns to van Helmont's great interest and the main subject of the dialogues, the Hebrew language. There is, however, a continuity between the two dialogues, for the second opens with the provocative question: "does the most holy script of the Hebrews have any similarity to the motions of the human tongue?" The protagonist in the dialogue answers with a forceful affirmative: "In itself it is nothing other than the artificial representation of the various motions of the human tongue.... And certainly if it were not for this fundamental fact, would it not be just as arbitrary, vain, and changeable as every script of every other language without exception?"" There are two interesting points in this statement. First, it implies that there is an exact correspondence between the movements made by the tongue sounding Hebrew letters and their written form. The written symbol is thus a picture of the tongue movements, and simply by reading the picture one can make the sound. Van Helmont actually draws the Hebrew letters as concatenations of tongues. Secondly, for some reason not yet apparent, this aspect of the Hebrew language places it above all other languages, which are "vain" and "dumb" in comparison.

Van Helmont was not a cautious man. At the very time he was in the dangerous position of a suspected heretic, he sat down to write a book reiterating the unorthodox opinions for which he was being held. Truth was more important to van Helmont than life, and the truth he thought he had discovered went something like this: if Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Moslems agree in accepting the Hebrew Bible as the revealed word of God, why do they disagree so fundamentally and murderously about its meaning? For van Helmont the only possible explanation was that the text had been corrupted and people no longer understood it.

Ignorance had led to disagreements, disagreements to divisions, and divisions to intolerance, persecution, war, and bloodshed. These would vanish, van Helmont believed, once the bible was understood according to the principles of his natural Hebrew alphabet.

But this was not all that van Helmont expected from his discovery. Like many people he was convinced that Hebrew was the divine language of creation. After all, when God said, "Let there be light," there was light. In both the Old and New Testaments speech is a powerful creative force. It "comes," it "abides," and as Psalm 33 clearly says, "by the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth." The idea that the Hebrew language was a powerful creative force is reiterated in the prologue to the Gospel of John with the concept of Christ as the logos or "word" of God, through whom the world was created. To van Helmont these statements were the literal truth. In his opinion creation was a process that began with the thoughts in God's mind and ended with the articulation of these thoughts. This explains why he retranslated the first sentence of Genesis to read, "In the Head Aelohim created the Heavens and the Earth," instead of the usual "In the beginning," on the plausible grounds that bereshit, the meaning of which has always puzzled translators, was derived from the Hebrew word rosh, which means "head."

Because Hebrew was the language of creation, it was also a "natural" language in which words indicated the essential nature of the things they both produced and represented. To substantiate this, van Helmont, like many other authors, referred to the passage in Genesis where Adam names the animals. He did not believe the animals existed until Adam named them; before that time they were simply ideas in his mind. By imposing names on the thoughts in his mind, he brought the animals into physical existence, "because," as van Helmont says, "to call Things by their Names is to give them their Nature." Thus, for example, when a horse was brought before Adam and he said sus (the Hebrew word for horse), he expressed the essence of "horseness."

(Some premeditate and considerate thoughts on the first four chapters of the first book of Moses, called Genesis) provides a good example of the use to which he put his natural alphabet. In this passage he discusses the Hebrew name for God (Aelohim, in van Helmont's spelling). He was convinced that the shapes and sounds of the individual letters, when correctly understood, contributed qualities and characteristics that perfectly describe God. For example, the first letter Aleph signifies (both by its shape and sound) infiniteness or multitude; the second letter Lamed (because it is a tall letter) signifies virtue and power; He (undoubtedly because it is a spirant) signifies respiration, breath, life, vegetation, growth, and fruitfulness; Yod because it "has a Sharp or Shrill Sound" "signifies the strong Life that produces the manly Member"; the final Mem (because of its closed shape) signifies a womb, hence birth and multiplicity. Thus, the essence of God lay in the shapes and sounds of the individual letters that made up his name. What is remarkable about this passage is that it comes from a book that was actually ghosted for van Helmont by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz." Leibniz's authorship emphasizes how much more complex early modern thought was than appears in the conventional division of thinkers into progressive rationalists and empiricists (Leibniz) versus benighted mystics and occultists (van Helmont).

In The Alphabet of Nature van Helmont describes each Hebrew letter in terms of the significance the shape and sound have for its intrinsic meaning. He was certain that once people really understood the letters in this way, they would gain "a living" understanding of the Scriptures. Such an understanding was crucial for several reasons: not only would it lead to religious peace and unity, but it would provide a key to unlock the secret wisdom, arts, and sciences that van Helmont, like many of his contemporaries, believed were encapsulated in the biblical text. The author of the preface to van Helmont's book, his friend and collaborator Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636-1689), emphasizes this point:

If we examine the writings of the Old Testament, what do we find in them but a gold mine of all good arts and knowledge and a treasure chest in which all the gems of philosophy, all the riches of the Divine Law, and, what is most excellent, all the treasure of Divine and Holy wisdom are hidden.'

Like van Helmont, von Rosenroth was convinced that the key to unlock this treasure-chest lay in van Helmont's natural alphabet. With this key Eden could be recovered and Babel restored.

Van Helmont offers an example on the contribution made by heterodox and esoteric thinkers to ideas that became the hallmark of Enlightenment thought, namely a belief in scientific progress and a commitment to religious toleration. Van Helmont's published work advocates an ideal of toleration that makes inspiring reading to this day, especially towards the Jews. His philosemitism was unique because he accepted Jews as Jews and not simply as potential Christians converts. Through the process of tikkun anyone could and would be saved, whatever his faith. Furthermore, human beings were responsible for restoring the world to its prelapsarian perfection. Experimental science was therefore a laudable occupation and the key to progress.

When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening by Jan Frazier (Weiser Books) This is a popular account of how she woke up to become enlightened and what she had to unlearn and learn anew. These self-help titles by the newly awakened, brim with a primordial universality of joy and wonder and fearlessness. They also may encourage some quirky ideas about just what the supreme human state might be. Frazier’s account is more her own experience with a few confirming bows to authors past and in vogue. Still even with the necessity of reading with a critical eye the nature of her account rings true. And her prophetic call to others to fall awake by merely asking isn’t too far from the primordial truths espoused by lore and sacred esoteric tradition.

In August 2003, virtually overnight, Jan Frazier experienced "a dramatic falling away of fear" —not just the immediate fear of her annual medical test but, as she learned as time went on, her fear of everything.

When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening is a firsthand account of the spiritual liberation of a contemporary American woman. A widely-published writer, Jan Frazier experienced a radical transformation of consciousness at the age of 50 that resulted in a life free of fear. With a poet's eye for telling detail, the author portrays how she changed, virtually overnight, from being at the mercy of fear, to living in a state of causeless joy at the mercy of nothing. In language both lyrical and precise, the day-by-day record shows her awakening as it unfolds over the course of eighteen months, enabling the reader to witness the flowering of freedom as it is under way. Frazier describes with startling clarity what she came to understand about suffering: that it originates not in events and circumstances, but in our response to them. As the narrative progresses, she arrives at a seasoned understanding of the nature of suffering that proves highly instructive to the reader.

This extraordinary story of an ordinary woman confirms the claim of Eckhart Tolle, the Dalai Lama - indeed, of spiritual teachers of every age and tradition: that beneath all torment and restlessness lies a pool of joyful well-being that is not subject to harm, that waits patiently to be stirred to life. The commonplace belief that enlightenment is for saints comes apart at the seams. When Fear Falls Away shows that the answers to the big questions - Why was I born? Who am I? -are to be found not in achievements, relationships, or belief systems, but within the quiet of human consciousness.

Frazier's message is simple and profound: this state of constant peace and joy is possible for any of us to achieve. This rare and beautiful account puts Jan Frazier solidly in the tradition of enlightened teachers from J. Krishnamurti to Byron Katie.

From Publishers Weekly: The summer she turned 50, Frazier suddenly lost the nearly crippling fear that had plagued her for decades. In its place came love, tears, laughter, ecstasy, delight, bliss, understanding and, eventually, an unshakable "undercurrent of fundamental contentment." This book, she says, is not self-help but a "testimony to a life transformed" and a promise that her experience is open to all. Frazier, a poet, knows how to turn a phrase, but her dated commentary, covering 18 months beginning in August 2003, often evokes the self-absorption and inchoate emotion of an adolescent's diary: "Every single thing I do is a total blast. It's like being stoned, only it's entirely clearheaded." Interspersed with celebratory journal entries are lyrical descriptions of her worshipful encounters with Gurumayi, the controversial "perfected master" whose Siddha Yoga mantra is translated "I bow to my inner Self, who is God." Some readers may find Frazier's unremitting attention to her emotional state tedious, if occasionally worrisome ("I expend a lot of energy to keep from whirling in circles with my arms out to the sides"), while others will perceive deep wisdom in her awakened realization "that being released from fear was independent of being released from bad things happening."

AS Ellis' book, Curious Emotions, suggests the emotional awakening is much more complex that Frazier's personal and introspective account would have us believe.

Curious Emotions by Ralph D. Ellis (John Benjamins Pub Co) Emotion drives all cognitive processes, largely determining their qualitative feel, their structure, and in part even their content. Action-initiating centers deep in the emotional brain ground our understanding of the world by enabling us to imagine how we could act relative to it, based on endogenous motivations to engage certain levels of energy and complexity. Thus understanding personality, cognition, consciousness and action requires examining the workings of dynamical systems applied to emotional processes in living organisms. If an object's meaning depends on its action affordances, then understanding intentionality in emotion or cognition requires exploring why emotion is the bridge between action and representational processes such as thought or imagery; and this requires integrating phenomenology with neurophysiology. The resulting viewpoint, "enactivism," entails specific new predictions, and suggests that emotions are about the self-initiated actions of dynamical systems, not reactive "responses" to external events; consciousness is more about motivated anticipation than reaction to inputs. More

The Nature of Magic : An Anthropology of Consciousness by Susan Greenwood (Berg Publishers) (Hardcover) examines how and why practitioners of nature religion--Western witches, druids, shamans--seek to relate spiritually with nature through "magical consciousness". Greenwood develops a new theory of magical consciousness by arguing that magic ultimately has more to do with the workings of the human mind in terms of an expanded awareness than with socio-cultural explanations. She combines her own subjective insights gained from magical practice with practitioners' in-depth accounts and sustained academic theory on the process of magic. She also tracks magical consciousness in philosophy, myth, folklore and story-telling, and the hi-tech discourse of postmodernity.

On one occasion at Beltane (1 May) on Old Winchester Hill, an Iron Age hill fort on the South Downs in Southern England, a gathering of ten New Age practitioners attuned to the natural energies of the earth. Using a combination of chanting, walking, singing, dowsing, and dancing around a maypole, the aim was to bring healing and balance to each person as well as to the environment by the alignment of inner energies with the ley lines and chakras' of the earth. Up and down the country assorted groups of witches celebrated the coming of summer in various ways, some as the rebirth of the young King of the Greenwood and his union with the Goddess as the embodiment of nature; while other Pagans were encamped in a wood in Kent to prevent it being turned into a leisure centre. During the same period in the same county, a group of local school children, guided by shaman environmental educators, created an imaginative world of animals, plants and fairies in a bluebell wood for a May Fair. What motivates and connects these events is a spiritual revaluing of the natural world and the regaining of a sense of unity with nature. One well-known Pagan said to me: 'For modern people the world has been intentionally deprived of significance, and so you have to reconnect.' Connection with the natural world is thus the basis of nature spiritualities.

How is it that the human mind comes to 'disconnect', to 'renounce its sensuous bearings isolating itself from the other animals and the animate earth' (Abram, 1997: 261)? Historian Catherine Albanese, in her study of nature religion in America, observes that historically religious reflection in Western cultures, which has been primarily conducted through the `Judeo-Christian tradition', has been preoccupied with three symbolic centres: God, humanity, and nature. God has been paramount, and humans and nature, as creatures of God, have shone – but only in reflected light, leaving nature as a symbolic centre largely unnoticed. By contrast, what she terms 'nature religion' focuses on nature as source of the sacred (1991:7-9). Disconnection is largely due to the fact that in Western history there has been a progressive withdrawal of divinity from the natural world accompanied by a devaluation of human experience. This started in the period of Late Antiquity between the accession of Marcus Aurelius and the conversion of Constantine to Christianity (Dodds, 1990:37). Aided by Copernicus's transferral, in 1543, of many astronomical functions previously attributed to the earth to the sun, a fundamental change was made regarding human relationships to the universe and to God, creating the transition from a medieval to a modem Western view (Kuhn, [1957] 1974:1-2). The Copernican revolution facilitated the seventeenth — century mechanistic conception of nature developed by philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) who separated the thinking mind from the material world and thus laid the ground for an objective science; this contributed to the view that human relationships to the world were in opposition to nature.

It has been suggested that the notion of nature as a mechanical inanimate system may be comforting for some, giving the idea that human beings are in control of nature and confirming the belief that science has risen above primitive animistic beliefs (Sheldrake, 1990:3). However, this view comes at a cost. A superior sphere of reason was constructed over a sphere of inferiority; the former was a privileged domain of the master, while the latter, which formed a category of nature, comprised a field of multiple exclusions created by racism, colonialism and sexism. Racial, ethnic and sexual difference were cast as closer to the animal and the body, a lesser form of humanity lacking full rationality or culture. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries discourses on the animality of negroes, American Indians, the Irish, infants, women, the poor, the ignorant, the irreligious and the mad prevailed.

The mechanistic conception of the world was combined by some philosophers with a particular Protestant rationalized belief system that viewed God as an omnipotent clockmaker standing outside and apart from his creation. The element of design in mechanistic philosophy did not arise from 'the "natures" of things but from the properties with which God endowed them' (Hooykaas, 1977:14). A divine creator implies a dependence of the created on a creator, and also a differentiation between creator and created. Human beings had a special role to play due to being made in God's image; this further emphasized their separation from the rest of creation. The development of capitalism promulgated the view that nature was a commodity or a resource to be used. Although mechanistic theories did not go unchallenged, particularly by Vitalism, a radical analysis by Paracelsus of the activity in nature whereby matter and spirit were unified into an single, active, vital substance, and also by the academic disciplines of botany and zoology, Descartes' views have been influential. Historian Keith Thomas notes that Descartes' explicit aim was to make men lords and possessors of nature; other species were inert and lacking any spiritual dimension and this created an absolute break between man and the rest of nature, a 'transcendent God, outside his creation, symbolized the separation between spirit and nature'. Indeed, Thomas goes further by saying that 'Man stood to animal as did heaven to earth, soul to body, culture to nature'. The result has been described as a spiritual alienation from the natural world. This work is not a history of this alienation, rather it seeks to examine nature religion as a spirituality that seeks to find a unity in Nature; it has emerged as a 'backlash' to the general historical and philosophical context that has separated mind from nature. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz has noted, our brains are in the world, 'And as for the world, it is not in our brains, our bodies, or our minds: they are, along with gods, verbs, rocks, and politics, in it.'

Not surprisingly, the term 'nature' has a history. In early Greek philosophy, nature was the essence of a thing that made it behave the way it did. This oldest meaning of the term was dominant into the thirteenth century when it denoted an essential quality, an innate character. A century later it came to mean a vital or inherent force that directed the world of human beings. At the time of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nature was viewed as a physical power causing phenomena of the material world. The changing meaning of nature reflected the changing structure of society, and in the seventeenth century nature was observed and studied as the work of God. By the eighteenth century, with the establishment of a scientific world-view, nature was seen to be governed by laws; nature became increasingly synonymous with the material world and science was involved in interpreting its universal laws. At this time, nature was a clear authority: the laws of nature were the laws of reason. Nature had become rationalized. Inevitably, there was a reaction to scientific rationalism and it took the form of the Romanticism movement with its view of nature as pastoral landscape and immanent mysticism. More recently, four contemporary discourses on nature have been outlined: the first is as a science where nature is seen in objective and abstract terms; the second is as an economic resource — nature is a source of productive wealth; the third views nature as a source of emotional identification, relationship and tradition; and the fourth is through nature mysticism whereby nature has spirit and is worthy of reverence and awe. Nature spiritualities draw on the last two discourses: nature is viewed as a source of emotional identification and spirituality; practitioners immerse themselves in nature.

Catherine Albanese calls the immersion in nature a 'quantum dance of religious syncretism' in which the different movements 'move freely together, mixing and matching, bowing to new partners'. The centrality of nature, Albanese observes, provides a language to express cosmology and belief; it forms the basis of understanding and practising a way of life; supplies material for ritual symbolism, as well as drawing a community together. Nature religion does not exist as a definite and identifiable religious tradition such as Buddhism or Christianity, but, as Peter Beyer notes in his sociological analysis, the term refers to a range of religious and quasi-religious movements, groups and social networks in which practitioners consider nature to be the embodiment of divinity, sacredness, transcendence, or spiritual power. Beyer, who analyses nature religion in terms of globalization, points out that nature religion comprises a counter-cultural strategy – a religious critique of institutionalized social structures and normal consciousness. He is concerned to show how nature religion fits into a global context through the use of 'nature' as a powerful counter-structural symbol representing resistance to dominant instrumental systems. Using anthropologist Victor Turner's analysis of the anti-structural components of religious ritual, Beyer argues that nature religion is counter-structural – stressing oppositional aspects – rather than being anti-structural. He notes certain critical features that characterize nature religion: a comparative resistance to institutionalization and legitimization in terms of identifiable socio-religious authorities and organization; a distrust of politically oriented power; a faith in charismatic and individual authority; a strong emphasis on individual path; a valorization of physical place; a this-worldly emphasis with a search for healing, personal vitality, and transformation of self; a strong experiential basis; a valuing of non-hierarchical community; a stress on holistic conceptions of reality; and a conditional optimism regarding human capacity and the future. This is certainly the case in radical Pagan protest against the destruction of nature for road development etc. However, magical consciousness is not necessarily counter-structural. Some movements within nature religion – such as the New Age – are alternatives to Christianity, incorporating many mystical elements of Christianity, and may be said to be supportive of mainstream social structure, particularly regarding capitalistic enterprise.

Also viewing nature religion in terms of globalization, anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, in a comparison of Sora shamanism in tribal India and ethnic revival shamanism in Arctic Siberia, claims that indigenous knowledge loses its holistic world-view when appropriated by New Age neo-shamanists; when transplanted it becomes global rather than local cosmological knowledge. An alternative approach is to see nature religion not as a counter-cultural movement, or as an expression of a form of global knowledge, but as an expanded form of consciousness that is common to all humans. I shall argue that if nature religion is studied in terms of magical consciousness then holism, a central defining feature of indigenous knowledge, is not lost but just expressed in a different cultural and physical context.

Magical Consciousness

So, a connection with nature concerns less a form of counter-cultural resistance – although this may be the case in more radical forms of Pagan protest – and more a development of magical consciousness. Using the term 'magical consciousness' creates a definition that is doubly ideologically loaded – both 'magic' and `consciousness' are broad concepts that are notoriously difficult to define. Facing a similar dilemma over a definition of 'globalization', the historian A.G. Hopkins notes that holistic concepts may be a source of confusion as they invariably carry conflicting ideological messages, but abolishing them would not remove the difficulty. He recommends that when using general terms to describe broad issues, definitions should be explicitly stated and framed to match the purpose in hand. With this in mind I shall define magical consciousness as a specific perception of the world common to practitioners of nature religion. Before that, however, it will be necessary briefly to consider both consciousness and magic.

Although consciousness has been of modern philosophical concern since Descartes' cogito 'I think therefore I am' shifted the focus from the cosmos to the individual human being, a single definition of consciousness is evasive. The study of consciousness is problematic, not only for neuroscience and psychology due to its subjective and constantly changing character, but also for anthropology, which has only belatedly come to find consciousness relevant, having taken it 'largely for granted, neglecting – even, perhaps, denying – its significance and relevance'. As John and Jean Comaroff have pointed out, anthropologists usually study consciousness and its transformations by examining its effects or expressions; its social and symbolic manifestations as conscience collective. Rarely is the nature of consciousness in the making, or its historicity examined. Consciousness itself is seldom scrutinized:

Sometimes it is regarded as the mere reflection of a reality beyond human awareness, sometimes as the site of creativity and agency. But, almost invariably, 'consciousness' is treated as a substantive 'mode of or 'for' the world, as so much narrative content without form.

The classic work of psychologist William James (1890 [1950]) indicates why consciousness has been seen to be so formless and so difficult to pin down. James's notion of mind as a 'theatre of simultaneous possibilities' views consciousness as a process that compares, selects and suppresses data, much as a sculptor works on a block of stone, extricating one interpretation from the rest. He writes that my world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttlefish, or crab!'. Consciousness, says James, is also like a stream or river; it is a continuous and always changing process. The work of neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, in Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, draws on and develops James's ideas: consciousness depends on unique history and embodiment, it is constructed through social interaction, and meaning takes shape in terms of concepts that depend on categorizations. The picture that emerges from these views is that there is a multiplicity of consciousnesses, or aspects of consciousness, rather than a single state. The notion of consciousness as a stream of possibilities both overcomes the Cartesian emphasis on mind and reflective reasoning aspects, and opens up possibilities for alternative views of consciousness as process that is inclusive of body, as well as being more expansive to include other beings in nature, and even perhaps being an intrinsic quality of a wider universe.

Notwithstanding, anthropologist Michael Hamer, who explored South American Indian shamanism and developed 'Core Shamanism' as a method that synthesized shamanic techniques for Westerners, differentiates between what he terms an 'ordinary state of consciousness' (OSC) and a `shamanic state of consciousness' (SSC), referring to 'ordinary' and `nonordinary' reality respectively. The shaman can move between states of consciousness at will. Harner's distinction of OSC and SSC for Westerners belies the complexities of consciousness - such as aspects arising from imagination, emotion, cognition, and perception - and that people, whether shamans or not, are constantly shifting effortlessly from awareness to awareness or aspect to aspect; it is not always so easy to categorize consciousness in this manner.' This is not to deny that a shaman is nonetheless a specialist in one part of this process as a mediator of different realities.

Turning to magic we will see that it means many different things to different people. Magic, as anthropologist Ariel Glucklich points out, can refer to a moon-swept landscape, love, music, the occult, the extraordinary that defies the laws of nature, and gross superstition among many other things. It is, he claims, a 'decadent hodge podge of ideas from many sources'. We use the term so much, Glucklich argues, that it means too much and therefore hardly anything at all; we need a clear and definite understanding. Historically, magic had a negative association in Roman times being viewed as a system that utilized powerful forces to control nature. Seen to be outside the ordinary course of nature in the fifth century, it was rehabilitated in an exa

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Esotericism

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Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences

Esotericism

Academic Revival

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Essays