by Marcus Katz
Lurhman wryly remarks that “entering magic is like entering a scholarly pursuit; the practitioner is impressed by the depth of knowledge, and dazzled by the learning of the leaders of the profession.”[127]
The Birth of Academic Studies of Western Esotericism
Frances A. Yates began a new revival of academic interest with the 1964 publication of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, where she developed the concept of magic (noted prior as influential on Bruno by Lynn Thorndike in his History of Magic and Experimental Science[128]) as belonging to a Hermetic philosophy.[129] Other scholars, such as D.P. Walker (1958), were already examining the Renaissance and highlighting the influence of a magic-based prisca astrologia, albeit one tempered by a Christian perspective:
They must have been divine, or taught by God, those men who have handed down to us these sympathies and antipathies, and names, of the stars.[130]
Yates’ 1975 work, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, set a staging post for Western esotericism at either side of the Thirty Years War, with the tracing of the current of thought through the Renaissance, cutting off after the publication of the Rosicrucian manifestos, to reappear in the Enlightenment. She acknowledges “groping in the dark” in some areas, and when discussing ‘secret societies’ emphasises:
... these groupings are intended only as hypotheses which might guide future investigators along a historical path which has not yet been trodden …[131]
Antoine Faivre puts the role of the scholar thus:
... those of us who study it [Western esotericism] are not only called upon to be scholars, but detectives who are able to follow its often elusive traces.[132]
The Dangers of Monolithic and Historic Analysis
In describing the content of the magical curriculum, we must be mindful of reducing the corpus to a monolithic structure. The whole of Western esotericism, as Idel writes of religion, is a “conglomerate of ideas, cosmologies, beliefs, institutions, hierarchies, elites and rites that vary with time and place,” even when one single religion or esoteric system is concerned.[133] The schisms of an order such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn result in a fragmentary assemblage of materials, rites, teachings, and artefacts. The identification and assessment of the permeation, given import and reception of these loosely connected assemblages, is a difficult task to comprehensively complete – if not impossible.
That we are performing a historical summary is also prone to interpretative misunderstandings. We might miss how the curriculum itself was developed, in what order, and in what way was it developed as a response-in-time (at the time) to its reception. Taking the whole as a simple historical artefact for analysis may disguise useful information as to the intentions behind its development.
The Insider/Outsider Problem
Mitchell suggests that any academic has to “reconcile the demands of scholarly caution and detachment with the need to develop and maintain a consistent ‘philosophy of life’.”[134] Donovan speaks of the difficulty of establishing, achieving or even imposing any form of neutrality in the field of religious studies.[135] I would argue that the same applies to Western esotericism, considered as an assemblage of teachings, rites and behavioural expectations much like religion. There must be a suspension of disbelief by any outsider to the ‘otherliness’ of the magical world-view in which – in part – it is possible for participants to comprehend fiction as reality. An example of this would be where contemporary Chaos magicians create a radical post-metaphysical form of spirituality from the fictional Lovecraft mythos.[136]
The Issue of Secret Knowledge
Two early forays into the contemporary Western esoteric domain make clear the issues inherent in the study of esoteric knowledge and those who practice esoteric systems. In the case of Lurhmann, she is expressly dismissive of the systems of correspondence, stating that:
The fantasy of a truly successful command of magic depends upon detailed symbolic knowledge and expertise in performance so complex that actual achievement is impossible ... The scholarship creates the secret of success as the unattainable end of eternal study.[137]
She talks of the interpretative drift of non-magicians into a “flamboyant instance of the conceptual cacophony of contemporary culture.”[138] Lurhmann, however, provides a useful list of works generally favoured by contemporary practitioners.[139]
A second anthropological analysis of contemporary practice is to be found in Greenwood who also acted as a participant in esoteric groups, but finds herself more sympathetic whilst her “cosmological framework was being slowly shifted” by her new studies. Her work draws on Frazer, Mauss and Malinowski as claiming that the logic behind magical thinking is rational.[140]
Later studies, such as Evans and Bogdan, demonstrate the case of “going native in reverse”[141] as both scholars were practitioners prior to their studies. However, even as late as 2007, Evans proposes that we “simply do not have the right tools (yet)” to study these areas.[142]
Definitions of Western Esotericism
The self-definition of groups promoting an esoteric curriculum varies between the use of occult and esoteric. These terms are often seen as synonymous. Academic debate tends to favour the term esoteric rather than occult. As Laurant has summarised, the two terms ‘esotericism’ and ‘occultism’ entered into Western culture in the second quarter of the 19th century.[143] Esoteric was first encountered as ésotérisme in 1828, whilst the Latin, occulta, occolto were in use from as early as 1120 A.D. and prominent in use in Bruno (1548-1600) and Agrippa (1533).[144]
Laurant traces the rise of institutionalised occultism, although curiously remarks that the “greatest impact” in this area was made by “Sar” Joséphin Peladin, which is arguable.[145] He concludes that occultism and esotericism separated between 1905 and 1914 with the growing gulf between science and faith, and that the history of the occult movement ends with René Guénon’s (1886-1951) denouncement of occultist initiation and “transposed materialism” in favour of an overarching “metaphysical tradition.”[146]
The complexity of the rise of esotericism in its broadest sense is termed by Faivre to be a “subtle history,” which must be read not only with “eyes of flesh but eyes of fire,” to reveal the “only history where meaning is unveiled.”[147]
Faivre has suggested that if esotericism is considered as a form of thought, then we can identify the presence of six fundamental components within an historical context.[148] The use of these components is to facilitate the sketching of a possible boundary – albeit a fluid one – around the field of study. It also allows the academic to distance the study from the self-defining presence of the term within the constraints of a particular group or individual being studied. However, we must also define such key concepts as gnosis, theosophy, occultism, and Hermeticism in much the same way.
The six components identified by Faivre as identifying esoteric thought are:
Correspondence
Living Nature
Imagination and Mediations (intermediaries and levels)
Experience of transmutation
The practice of concordance (social equality)
Transmission (of the teaching)[149]
It is intended in this volume to work from the corpus itself, in order to generate a taxonomy which may or may not accord with Faivre’s components. A hierarchical structure may not be possible between the practices and teachings of a particular group and the components of esotericism, for, as Faivre admits, these components are “distributed in varying proportions” across the “vast, concrete, historical context.”[150]
The Contemporary Milieu
The publication of the journal Aries (2001-) marks a watershed in the academic appreciation of the Western esoteric tradition.[151] In 2003, the Journal for the Academic Study of Magic also began to provide a peer reviewed publication for the development of academic consideration of modern magic.[152] The European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) was founded in 2005 as a learne
d society to advance the academic study of the field.[153] Three University Chairs of Western esotericism exist; Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Paris, France; University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and University of Exeter, United Kingdom.
Recent works tracing the history of Western esotericism have further identified key contributors to the academic recognition of esotericism, including C.G. Jung (1875-1961), Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) and Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). In the light of our present study, and as a necessary basis of the ascent narrative which we will come to discern, von Stuckrad comments that “what is special about esoteric traditions is their tendency, not only to regard the human soul in a Neo-Platonic sense as the ‘true centre’ of man, but to grant this effectively divine status.”[154]
Conclusion
We might conclude, then, that the task before us – not as a practitioner seeking to defend the very construct in which the materials are delivered, but as an academic seeking to understand the nature of those materials to determine the construct itself – is to be sympathetic to the ideas, wonder at the complexity and determine the nature of the engagement of these materials to the human experience. As Faivre summarises:
The task of the scholar of esoteric studies is not to prove that such an invisible ‘Tradition’, hidden behind the veil of the history of events, did or did not exist as such before the Renaissance; rather, the task consists of trying to grasp and to describe the different facets of the emergence of this idea as it appears in the imaginary and the discourses of the last centuries.[155]
The Ascent Narrative
In describing a master narrative as a “global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience,” Stephens (1998) also notes that the usage of traditional materials brings with it “predetermined horizons of expectation and with their values and ideas about the world already legitimized.”[156] Whilst avoiding the unnecessary unpicking of contradiction in the Western esoteric schema presented through the magical curriculum, we can attempt to discern the presence of a “grand cultural narrative” which is larger than the sum of its parts.[157]
The Ascent Narrative in Christian Mysticism
In the Plotinian exercise of ascent, it is to Augustine (354-430 A.D.) we will turn to discern what Louth (1981) deems a “uniquely important” contribution to the West – that is, a new dimension of psychological engagement lacking in the mystical theology of the Eastern and Greek Fathers.[158] In addition to this contribution, we will also focus upon the graduated nature of the ascent, which forms an essential component of the ascent narrative as it permeates into the esoteric grade system via an appropriation of kabbalistic notions of an emanative creation.
In Confessions IX we see Augustine’s personalised account of the ascent experience:
Rising as our love flamed upwards towards that Self-same, we passed in review the various levels of bodily things, up to the heavens themselves ... And higher still we soared ... and so we came to our own souls, and went beyond them to come at last to that region of richness unending ...
Louth sees in this a clear and fundamental sympathy with Plotinus. That the nature of this ascent is graduated is made apparent. Augustine writes:
I shall mount beyond this power of my nature, still rising by degrees towards Him who made me. And so I come to the fields and vast palaces of memory …[159]
The iconography of the ladder to represent this ascent, which will be traced in the Western esoteric schema, is made most explicit in the work of the Sinai Monk John Climacus (525-607 A.D.), The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Climacus developed the ladder icon beyond the brief analogous form commented upon by earlier contemplatives such as St. Gregory of Nazianzus and St. John Chrystom during the 4th century, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus in the 5th century.[160] Whilst describing himself as a “second-rate architect” with regard to the structure of the ladder, it is apparent that this icon and underlying structure became a significant influence on the Christian East.[161]
The Ascent Narrative in Kabbalah
Moshe Idel writes of Johann Reuchlin’s (1455-1522) integration of the Christian concept of the ladder as spiritual progress with the addition of a ‘golden chain’ from Psuedo-Dionysus, within the speech of a kabbalist, as an assumption of a philosophia perennis alluded to by Pico. Reuchlin wrote, through the words of Simon, a kabbalist:
For our frailty we fall short of the good which is called God, and cannot climb there except with steps and ladders. You customarily refer to the Homeric chain. We Jews look to the holy scripture and talk about the ladder our father Jacob saw, from the highest heaven stretching down to earth, like a cord or rope of gold thrown down to us from heaven, a visual line penetrating deep within nature.[162]
Curriculum Studies Applied to Western Esotericism
In this section I consider selected elements of Western esotericism as an essentially educational project, with particular highlighting of several curricula of that project within selected occult orders and with further case studies of individuals as both delivering and receiving that curriculum. It is proposed that in making this consideration – one to which little academic attention has yet been placed – I will highlight the importance of content within Western esotericism and make the case for the various curricula as embodying a spiritual ascent narrative that has been progressively excluded from mainstream Western religion since the Reformation.
Neither educational specialists nor academic studies of Western esotericism have approached this study. It is far more common to approach the practices and taught content of the field through the lens of anthropology (Greenwood, 2009) or sociology (Hanegraaf, 1996). This has been described as two parallel paradigms of esotericism – as a ‘form of thought’ (Faivre) and as ‘gnosis’ (Hanegraaff) – but both applying to the rituals and initiatory structure of the occult orders rather than the taught content or curricula.[163] This present study of content as curricula through the lens of curriculum studies breaks new ground in the appreciation of the educational project of Western esotericism.
It is not possible here to elaborate entirely upon all aspects of curriculum studies – a field in its own right – or all aspects of the development of Western religious ideas over the past few centuries. I will draw from these fields in order to provide a lens on Western esotericism which has hitherto been unexamined, and use concepts and comparisons to better provide an analytical framework of taught content, student experience and the development of teaching within occult orders.
The central questions that I will address include:
In what way can Western esotericism as taught within magical orders be considered as an educational project?
What were the aims of this project?
As an educational project, how did esoteric teaching differ from and overlap secular teaching?
What are the specific challenges in teaching an esoteric curriculum?
How did selected groups respond to these challenges?
What is the content and structure of the curriculum of Western esotericism?
How did the structure reflect the concerns of the group?
Are there unalterable landmarks (‘signposts’ in Guénon) in the curricula?
How was esoteric knowledge, skill and experience graduated?
What authority was attributed to the source of the curriculum and content?
What value was placed on particular elements of the content?
How was this content taught and received?
Were teachers trained to be teachers of this material?
How did students self-assess their progress?
What training methods were used?
How was this content evaluated and assessed?
Did the project meet its aims?
In short, I shall essentially argue that the Western esoteric teaching we are examining – when considered as an educational project – demonstrates a clear curriculum with defined aims, specifically contextualised as an ascent narra
tive. In answering these questions, we will examine the structure and development of the curriculum in particular groups, considering notions of hierarchy, elitism, presuppositions of merit, the notion of valuable knowledge, and marginalisation.
We will specifically assess the issues arising from the notion of education as having relevance to normative society. If there is a consensual expectation that education should fit contemporary social requirements – a sine non qua of secular education and curricula planning – how does Western esotericism transcend this boundary? What function does this curriculum fulfil?
A parallel will be drawn between the adult education movement, and issues of teaching adults – andragogy (Knowles[164]) – which applies to the delivery of Western esotericism. It is of note that as with other forms of working class adult education, during the same period of the Golden Dawn order, there was a rapid jump in participation of adult schools in the period up to the First World War. By 1909-1910 there were some 1,900 schools in the United Kingdom alone involving more than 114,000 adults (this was the peak of participation).[165]