CHAPTER 1: The Prisca Theologia
1. For some extraordinary insights into Gemistos, see Christopher Bamford, “The Time-Body of Western Culture,” Lapis 2 (1995), 41–45.
2. Humanists: students of the litterae humaniores, i.e., the (chiefly classical) literature that was not theological or vocational.
3. Ficino, in the preface to his Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, gives the following genealogy of the “ancient theologians”: Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus, Plato. In his Theologia Platonica, Zoroaster is added at the beginning of the list. See Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 14–15nn. See also the less famous but no less valuable (and readable) work of D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1972), 1–21.
4. There is no scholarly consensus about which millennium Zoroaster lived in, or even how many Zoroasters there were.
5. See Stephen Ronan, “Chaldean Hekate,” in Ronan, ed., The Goddess Hekate: Studies in Ancient Pagan and Christian Religion and Philosophy (Hastings, UK: Chthonios Books, 1992), 1:79–162; The Editors of The Shrine of Wisdom, The Chaldean Oracles Translated and Systematized with Commentary (Brook, Surrey, UK: The Shrine of Wisdom, 1979); W. Wynn Westcott, The Chaldean Oracles of Zoroaster (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, UK: Aquarian, 1983), with introduction by Kathleen Raine; The Chaldaean Oracles Attributed to Zoroaster as Set Down by Julianus the Theurgist (Gillette, NJ: Heptangle, 1978), containing Westcott’s translation (mainly based on Thomas Taylor’s) and Thomas Stanley’s translations of commentaries by Plethon and Psellus.
6. Proclus, in his commentary on the Timaeus, 3.63.24, states that “it is unlawful to disbelieve” Julianus the Theurgist. (Quoted from the title page of the Heptangle edition.)
7. Oracle 178; Aquarian edition, 60; Heptangle edition, 54.
8. Thomas Stanley, History of Chaldaick Philosophy (London, 1662), quoted in Chaldaean Oracles of Julianus, 76–77; commentary on Oracle 147.
9. The ascension of Enoch: Gen. 5:24; of Elijah: 2 Kings 2:11; of Jesus: Mark 16:19.
10. See the hair-raising account of a contemporary case in Namkhai Norbu, The Crystal and the Way of Light: Sutra, Tantra, and Dzogchen (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 124–29.
11. See Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth from Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran, trans. Nancy Pearson (Princeton: Princeton/Bollingen, 1977).
12. Shi’ite Islam, prevalent in Iran and Iraq, reveres a series of Imams (spiritual authorities) descended from the Prophet Mohammed. In this respect it differs from Sunni Islam, which prevails in the rest of the Muslim world. On Suhrawardi’s debt to pagan philosophy, see Peter Kingsley, “Paths of the Ancient Sages: A Pythagorean History,” Lapis 10 (1999), 63–68.
13. Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth, 87.
14. On this, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Muslim philosopher and MIT graduate, comments: “For our purpose it is important only to note that since there is, one might say, ‘open traffic’ between heaven and earth, all questions like miracles, magic, and the like, which in either Aristotelian or modern rationalistic schools are considered as either too absurd to discuss or too difficult to fit into ‘the system,’ can be easily placed within the possibilities inherent in the cosmos”: Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, rev. ed. (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1978), 91.
15. The Chaldean Oracles of Zoroaster, 63.
CHAPTER 2: The hermetic Tradition
1. See Antoine Faivre, The Eternal Hermes, from Greek God to Alchemical Magus, trans. J. Godwin (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1995); and Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
2. The standard English translation is Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Previous versions are by John Everard, The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus (London, 1650 and reprints); G. R. S. Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes: Studies in Hellenistic Theosophy and Gnosis, 3 vols. (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1906 and reprints); Walter Scott, Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings Which Contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926 and reprints).
3. See D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958), 40–44; Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 66–68.
4. “Poimandres” is sometimes translated as “shepherd of men,” but recent scholarship suggests that it is derived not from the Greek poimen, “shepherd,” but from the Egyptian pe-men-re, meaning “enlightened mind.” See Copenhaver, 95.
5. See Normandi Ellis, Awakening Osiris: The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1988), 87–94.
6. See Nick Kollerstrom, “The Star Temples of Harran,” in History and Astrology: Clio and Urania Confer, ed. A. Kitson (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 47–60.
7. See The Book of Creation, trans. I. Friedman (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1977).
8. John Michell, The Temple at Jerusalem: A Revelation (Glastonbury: Gothic Image, 2000), 60.
9. See Introduzione alla magia quale scienza dell’Io, 3 vols. (Genoa: Fratelli Melitta, 1987). A translation of the first volume into English has been published as Julius Evola and the Ur Group, Introduction to Magic: Rituals and Practical Techniques for the Magus, trans. G. Stucco, ed. M. Moynihan (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 2000); J. Godwin, “The Survival of the Personality According to Modern Esoteric Teachings,” in Ésotérisme, Gnoses & Imaginaire Symbolique, Mélanges offerts à Antoine Faivre, ed. R. Caron, J. Godwin, W. J. Hanegraaff, J. L. Viellard-Baron (Louvain, Belgium: Peeters, 2001), 403–14.
10. See Ea [Julius Evola], “The Doctrine of the ‘Immortal Body’,” in Introduction to Magic, 196–202.
11. H. P. Blavatsky, “Death and Immortality,” Collected Writings (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1969), 4:250–56.
CHAPTER 3: The Orphic Mysteries
1. See John Michell, The New View over Atlantis (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987).
2. Jean Richer, Sacred Geometry of the Ancient Greeks: Astrological Symbolism in Art, Architecture, and Landscape, trans. Christine Rhone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
3. Paul Broadhurst and Hamish Miller, The Dance of the Dragon: An Odyssey into Earth Energies and Ancient Religion (Launceston, UK: Pendragon Press, 2000).
4. John Michell and Christine Rhone, Twelve-Tribe Nations and the Science of Enchanting the Landscape (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991).
5. See The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook: Sacred Texts of the Mystery Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. M. W. Meyer (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987); Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
6. Notably in Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 11.
7. Scholarly, bilingual edition by Apostolos N. Athanassakis, The Orphic Hymns: Text, Translation and Notes (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977). For a poetic rendering, see The Hymns of Orpheus: Mutations by R.C. Hogart (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1993).
8. Odyssey, 11:601–4.
9. For the texts, see Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 5–7. A recent study: Hans Dieter Betz, “‘Der Erde Kind bin ich und des gestirnten Himmels’: Zur Lehre vom Menschen in den orphischen Goldplättchen,” in Ansichten griechischer Rituale für Walter Burkert (Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1998), 399–419.
10. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 11:1–85.
11. For an overview, see J. Godwin, Mystery Religions in the Ancient World (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981).
12. Friedrich Loofs, “Descent to Hades (Christ’s),” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. J. Hastings, (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1911), 4:654–63.
13. See William Stirling, The Canon: An Exposition of the Pagan Mystery Perpetuated in the Cabala as the Rule of All the Arts (first ed., 1897, reprinted London: Garnstone Press, 1974); John Michell, The Dimensions of Paradise: The Proportions and Symbolic Numbers of Ancient Cosmology, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988); David Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1993).
14. The nine Muses first appear in Hesiod, Theogony, 77–79. Their attributes and subjects appear in later sources and vary, but are usually: Calliope, epic song; Clio, history; Euterpe, lyric song; Thalia, comedy; Melpomene, tragedy; Terpsichore, dance; Erato, erotic poetry (or geometry); Polyhymnia, sacred song; Urania, astronomy.
15. See Michell and Rhone.
16. See P. Devereux, Stone Age Soundtracks: The Acoustic Archaeology of Ancient Sites (London: Vega, 2001).
17. See the Yueh Chi or Record of Music, part of the Li Chi: Book of Rites (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1967), 2:92–131.
18. See Anthony Aveni, “Astronomy in Ancient Mesoamerica,” in In Search of Ancient Astronomies, ed. E. C. Krupp (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 165–202.
19. In Plato, Republic 5, 473d.
20. Suzi Gablik, “The Unmaking of a Modernist,” Lapis 8 (1999), 25–27; here 26.
21. See Stephan A. Hoeller, Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1992), 168–76.
CHAPTER 4: Pythagoras and His School
1. These tales are reported by his biographers Iamblichus and Porphyry, whose lives of Pythagoras are collected, with much else, in The Pythagorean Sourcebook and Library, compiled and translated by K. S. Guthrie, ed. D. Fideler (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1987). Much insight can be gained from the modern retellings of Pythagoras’s life: Peter Gorman, Pythagoras: A Life (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); John Strohmeier and Peter Westbrook, Divine Harmony: The Life and Teachings of Pythagoras (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 1999).
2. That in a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.
3. If one takes musical strings of these relative lengths, assuming that their thickness and tension are equal, they will sound the intervals of an octave (12:6), a fifth (12:8 and 9:6), and a fourth (12:9 and 8:6), which are the perfect consonances of ancient and medieval music theory. All Greek and Western European scales are based on this matrix of consonances; hence these four numbers are the foundation of our music.
4. There is ample evidence for this in the writings of Ernest G. McClain, especially The Myth of Invariance: The Origins of the Gods, Mathematics and Music From the Rg Veda to Plato (New York: Nicolas Hays, 1976). In his later work, McClain shows that the mathematics of musical tuning systems was also understood by the compilers of the Hebrew scriptures in the sixth century BC, thus supporting the theory that Pythagoras learned it from the Babylonians at around the same time. See E. G. McClain, “A Priestly View of Bible Arithmetic: Deity’s Regulative Aesthetic Activity Within Davidic Musicology,” in Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S. J., ed. Babette E. Barach (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 2001), 429–43.
5. This was proved by the measurements and calculations of Alexander Thom. See his Megalithic Sites in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
6. See illustrations and analyses in Keith Critchlow, Time Stands Still: New Light on Megalithic Science (London: Gordon Fraser, 1979), 112–130; Michael Poynder, Pi in the Sky: A Revelation of the Ancient Wisdom Tradition (London: Rider, 1992), 133–65.
7. The most usual explanation for this setback is the eruption of the volcanic island of Thera (or Santorini) in about 1450 B.C. See J. V. Luce, Lost Atlantis: New Light on an Old Legend (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969).
8. There is a technical distinction between the well-known term “reincarnation” and the one used by the Pythagoreans: “metempsychosis.” The latter concerns the changing states of the psyche, commonly translated as “soul” but better envisaged as “soul-stuff,” a divisible substance released at death from its bond with the body. This substance can then animate another body, or bodies, human or animal. Reincarnation, on the other hand, is usually understood to mean the return of an individual soul to the human state. The classic treatment of this question in modern times is in chapter 6 of René Guénon, L’erreur spirite, 2nd ed. (Paris: Éditions Traditionnelles, 1952), 206–211. For an impartial clarification of the issues, see J. Godwin, “The Case against Reincarnation,” in Gnosis 42 (1997), 27–32.
9. This is the conclusion suggested by the studies collected in J. Godwin, “The Survival of the Personality, According to Modern Esoteric Teachings.” (See chapter 2, note 8.)
10. Many readers will recognize the same imagery, illustrating the same principles, in Buddhism.
11. See C. Kerényi, “The Secret of Eleusis,” in his Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Bollingen, 1967) 67–102; Walter Burkert, “The Extraordinary Experience,” in his Ancient Mystery Cults, 89–114. These two scholars go far in trying to penetrate the mysteries of Eleusis.
12. Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities (New York: American Book Co., 1896), s.v. “Eleusinia.”
13. The medieval Seven Liberal Arts included the Pythagorean curriculum in the Quadrivium: the four “arts” of Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. These succeeded the Trivium of verbal arts: Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic.
14. See J. Godwin, Music and the Occult: French Musical Philosophies, 1750–1950 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1994), for a survey of modern Pythagorean approaches to music; also Harmony of the Spheres: A Source-book of the Pythagorean Tradition in Music, ed. J. Godwin (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1993), which gathers the older evidence.
CHAPTER 5: Plato’s Cave
1. Credit for filling them is largely due to the work of Peter Kingsley, beginning with his study of Parmenides (c. 515–after 450 B.C.), In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center, 1999).
2. See Plato, Republic 6, 505–9.
3. This was developed in especial detail by Proclus in his various commentaries on Plato’s dialogues, and, following these, by Thomas Taylor in his “Apology for the Fables of Homer,” in his edition of Plato, Works (London, 1804), 1:133–199, especially 182–190; reprinted in Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper, eds., Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 449–520.
4. See e.g. Plotinus, Enneads 3.5; 5.8.
5. This is the mythical “Great Chain of Being,” celebrated by Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964).
6. See Republic 6, 510–11, for the simile of the “divided line” explaining the different modes of knowledge and their respective objects; Enneads 4.4.24–26 for some developments of the idea.
7. The Myth of the Cave is in Republic 7, 514–17.
8. Six academicians, including Simplicius, were protected by King Khosroes, who ensured through a treaty with the Byzantine Empire that the philosophers would not be molested when they returned to their homeland in 560.
9. As argued by the Emperor Julian in his Against the Galileans, and by Porphyry in a lost work of similar title. (They did not, of course, refer to Islam.)
10. Plato, Apology of Socrates, 21d.
11. Illustrated to perfection in Plato’s Laches.
12. E.g. the Myth of the Cave, already mentioned, and the Myth of Er in Republic 614–19: the Myth of the Charioteer in Phaedrus 246–49; the Myth of the True Earth in Phaedo, 107–114. Of course, Plato may have used Socrates as a literary device to convey myths of his own invention.
13. Plato’s Meno is dedicated to this thesis, demonstrating through the questioning of a slave boy that everyone possesses innate knowledge of the laws of geometry.
14. The definitive statement of this is in Socrates’s report of the wise woman Diotima’s speech in Plato, Symposium, 206–9.
15. Plotinus develops this further in Enneads 3.5.
16. The opening salvo was an attack on Plato in Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1947). Plato’s low opinion of democracy is voiced by Socrates in Republic 557–62. A political analysis of Socrates’s trouble as stemming from his support of the aristocratic party in Athens is I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (New York: Doubleday, 1989), esp. 140–56.
CHAPTER 6: The Power of the Egregore
1. On ancient Roman religion, beside works cited in chapter 3, see Robert Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 2001). I am also indebted to Italian sources, such as Julius Evola, La Tradizione di Roma (n.p: Edizioni di Ar, 1977), and many articles in the journal Politica Romana (1991–), on which see note 8 below.
2. Thus the old Roman religion formed part of the broader European family of polytheistic religions, later misnamed “paganisms” (=peasant religions). A sympathetic study in a phenomenological spirit is Ken Dowden, European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2000).
3. My book Mystery Religions in the Ancient World sought to remedy this by taking those religions on their own merits and showing their convergence with five universal paths of religious aspiration: those of the warrior, the ascetic, the magician, the devotee, and the philosopher.
4. Like paganus in Roman times, “occultist” is not usually a complimentary term. Current academic usage, reluctant to concede any validity to what the word represents, restricts it to those who used the term of themselves: nineteenth-century students and practitioners of the “occult sciences,” mostly French, and their successors, including many Theosophists. However, the term remains useful in other contexts, especially to distinguish occultists from esotericists. Esotericism usually presupposes a corresponding exotericism, i.e., a religion. Occultism does not depend on religious belief, but on the conviction that there are forces, properties of matter, human capabilities, and/or beings who are “occulted” or hidden from the normal senses. As Dowden’s book illustrates, much paganism is occultism far more than it is religion. Its aim is to work a system of cause and effect, rather than the “re-linking” (religio) of self with divinity. See also a recent study by an expert on new religious movements: PierLuigi Zocatelli, “Note per uno studio scientifico dell’esoterismo,” in G. Giordan, ed., Tra religione e spiritualità: Il rapporto con il sacro nell’epoca del pluralismo (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2006), 222–34.
5. On the concept of the egregore, which was most current in nineteenth-century French occultism, see the anonymous Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. R. A. Powell (Warwick, NY: Amity House, 1985), 419.
6. First published 1776–88.
7. A very well-illustrated book on Mithraism and its sanctuaries, written in the spirit of modern Italian Neopaganism, is Carlo Pavia, Guida dei Mitrei di Roma antica: Dai misteriosi sotterranei della Capitale; Oro, incenso e Mithra (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 1999).
8. This is not to say that they might not be revived, as might the other supposedly defunct nodes of collective energy mentioned here. For C. G. Jung, the archetypes were real entities, but an understandable avoidance of occultism kept him from speculation about their objective existence. Jung’s writings on the dormancy and resurgence of the Wotan archetype bear on this question. He wrote in these essays about the return of Wotan or Odin, the Germanic god of storm and initiation, first in the dreams of Jung’s German patients, then in the völkisch movements and in National Socialism. See his Essays on Contemporary Events, trans. E. Welsh et al. (London: Kegan Paul, 1947). A case is made for the partial revival of the pagan gods in the Renaissance in J. Godwin, The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 2002). In Italy after World War I there was a concerted effort to restore the ancient Roman religion, led by Arturo Reghini and supported, for a time, by the young Julius Evola, whose Imperialismo pagano (1928) is a forceful defense of pagan imperialism against its Christian supplanter. Evidence of more recent activities emerges from the journal Politica Romana, which serves as a forum for a number of distinguished scholars and thinkers including the late Marco Baistrocchi (a diplomat by profession), Piero Fenili (a judge), and the expatriate American Dana Lloyd Thomas. Roman religion appears there in a broad context of philosophical polytheism, keeping company with Mahayana Buddhism, Vedanta, and Neoplatonism. The feasts of the Roman calendar are commemorated, the gods and sacred sites of the city are honored, and the Italian Renaissance and the Masonically-inspired Risorgimento are celebrated as manifestations of the original spirit of Italy. An effort in a similar direction was the journal Antaios, edited by Mircea Eliade and Ernst Jünger. Avowedly polytheistic, Antaios aimed at a Europe of mutually respectful homelands rejoicing in their ancestral myths, their gods and goddesses, and in the earth from which, in the Greek legend, the giant Antaios derived his strength. A third example of a philosophically-based Neopagan enterprise is the Asatru movement, devoted to the revival of the Nordic gods, whose most active and erudite spokesman is Edred Thorsson (Stephen E. Flowers).
9. There is a distinction to be made between gods as egregores of human creation and gods as beings in their own right who have some relationship with humans. In the latter case, there is a further distinction of rank between what the Neoplatonists called the “deific” and the “daimonic” orders. As so often happens, light from the East helps to sort this out. Here is Marco Pallis, authority on Tibet and on comparative religion, on the subject: “The gods here [on the Buddhist Wheel or Round of Existence] referred to are not immortal and self-sufficient deities, but simply beings of an Order higher than ours, possessed of wider powers than man’s such as longevity, unfading beauty, and freedom from pain, except at the last when they are about to cease from being gods and turn into something lower; for then their charms begin to wither and their fragrance turns to stench so foul, that their goddess-wives flee from their presence.…‘Many long-lived gods are fools,’ said a lama to me.…It would have saved some confusion if we could have called these gods ‘supermen’ or ‘angels’ or some such name. Technically speaking, they should have their full denomination of ‘Gods of the Round’ (to worship whom is idolatry), to distinguish them from true Divinities, those who are free of the Round, Buddhas and high degrees on the road to Buddhahood.” M. Pallis, Peaks and Lamas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), 152.
CHAPTER 7: The Meddling God
1. For a survey that treats both the history of Gnosticism and the infusion of Gnostic ideas in popular culture, see Richard Smoley, Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy from the Gospels to The Da Vinci Code (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2006).
2. Republic, 6, 509–11.
3. The name for the image-making function is eikasia. Plato seems to include here both mental images and external ones that have no physical reality, such as shadows and reflections (ibid., 510a).
4. This is pistis, which takes the objects of sense (Plato names animals, plants, and manmade things) and forms opinions about them (ibid.).
5. This is dianoia, which also works with sense objects (including geometrical figures), but makes investigations and draws rational conclusions from them (ibid., 510d–e).
6. Plato uses the term noesis. His text is very obscure at this point (511b), but suggests that this function gives knowledge not of sense objects but of the Forms themselves. English translators do not agree on how to name the four functions. Thomas Taylor calls them “passions of the soul,” and names them from the top downwards: 1. Intelligence; 2. the Dianoëtic Part; 3. Faith; 4. Assimilation (Works, 1804, 1:356). Paul Shorey’s translation of 1930 calls them “affections occurring in the soul” and names them: 1. Intellection or Reason; 2. Understanding; 3. Belief; 4. Picture Thinking or Conjecture: in Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton: Princeton/Bollingen, 1961), 747. G. M. A. Grube’s version, much used in college teaching, has “processes in the soul” and calls them: 1. Understanding; 2. Reasoning; 3. Opinion; 4. Imagination. This shows how futile it is to conduct any serious study from translated sources.
7. I cite this locus classicus of the Jung mythology from Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney, Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions, rev ed. (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 2006), 19. The recent smear campaign against Jung by Freudians and other counter-Gnostics has succeeded in conformist academe, but Jung’s greatness will doubtless outlast them all.
8. See Douglas Harding, On Having No Head: A Contribution to Zen in the West (London: Buddhist Society, 1961 and reissues).
9. In 1995 the late John Wren-Lewis kindly let me read the manuscript of his book The 9:15 to Nirvana. One could not expect such a train to leave on time; publication was last announced for 2005.
10. And some get along very well with almost none. See the remarkable medical report: Robert Wesson, “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?” Science, 210 (1980), 1232; cited in William R. Corliss, Biological Anomalies: Humans II (Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1993), 265–66.
11. Quoted in Plato, Gorgias, 493a.
12. Plato has Socrates say: “Every seeker after wisdom knows that up to the time when philosophy takes it over his soul is a helpless prisoner, chained hand and foot in the body . . .” (Phaedo, 83e, trans. H. Tredennick; in Tredennick and H. Tarrant, The Last Days of Socrates, New York: Penguin, 1954).
13. The description of the ascent through the spheres is in the Poimandres, Corpus Hermeticum 1, 25–26a.
14. See Poimandres, 14, and works of Gnostic literature such as Pistis Sophia and the Hymn of the Robe of Glory. The works of G. R. S. Mead (who translated and edited the works mentioned) are a mine of valuable sources and reflections on these matters, with comparisons drawn from Eastern philosophy. While the latter is of no relevance to “pure” scholarship (hence the banishment of Mead from academic discourse), it is of considerable interest to those who think that these are literally matters of life and death. A vivid description of the soul’s obscuration and descent through the spheres is in the third–fourth century Neoplatonist Aristeides Quintilianus. See his On Music, in Three Books, ed. and trans. Thomas Mathiesen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 151–52.
15. “Everyone will see that [the Demiurge] must have looked to the eternal [for his model], for the world is the fairest of creatures and he is the best of causes” (Timaeus, 29a).
16. See, for example, “On the Origin of the World” in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. J. M. Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 163.
17. “Celsus [...] reports that the Gnostics—he considers them Christians—called the God of the Jews the ‘accursed God,’ since he created the visible world and withheld knowledge from men.” Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of an Ancient Religion (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1983), 73, with reference to Origen, Contra Celsum, 6.28.
18. Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic, 2000; part 3 of the trilogy His Dark Materials).
19. Poimandres, 24, trans. Scott. Pullman’s Gnosticism however only goes halfway, because his ultimate reality is not transcendent but pantheistic. See J. Godwin, “Esotericism without Religion in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” forthcoming in Tyr 3 (2007).
20. In “The Second Treatise of the Great Seth,” Jesus laughs at the Demiurge’s pretensions: “And then a voice—of the Cosmocrator—came to the angels: ‘I am God and there is no other beside me.’ But I laughed joyfully when I examined his empty glory.” Nag Hammadi Library in English, 331.
21. Thanks to Henry Corbin and his translators, this tradition has been made accessible in modern Europe. See chapter 2, note 8, and, in the present context, Corbin’s The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, trans. Nancy Pearson (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1978).
22. This summary draws on Fred. J. Powicke’s “Bogomils” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 2:784–85, and on standard encyclopedic sources.
23. On Gnosticism since the nineteenth-century occult revival see Massimo Introvigne, Il ritorno dello gnosticismo (Carnago, Italy: SugarCo Edizioni, 1993), unfortunately not yet translated.
24. Author of Chariots of the Gods?, first published 1968, trans. M. Heron (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970), and many subsequent books on the same theme. The unsubtlety of this author and his imitators consists partly in their crass materialism, and, even given that constriction, in the poverty of their imaginations, which are unable to go beyond the limits of early human space travel. Thus, for instance, von Däniken’s spacemen wore helmets and needed to have their landing strips marked out for them by the Stone Age inhabitants of earth. In this as in many other fields of “rejected knowledge,” the treatment by popular writers and by the media has given the kiss of death to any serious investigation.
25. This is written with a sympathetic nod to those who long to find spiritual guidance, and who either find none, or fall into the hands of self-deluded or cynical “masters.” Even genuinely wise and illuminated persons can sometimes be hopeless as psychologists and advisors; see the examples in Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus (New York: Free Press, 1996). There is no easy solution, as witness the Buddha’s parting words: “Be a light unto yourselves.” On spiritual mentorship in original Gnosticism and Hermetism, see Peter Kingsley, “An Introduction to the Hermetica: Approaching Ancient Esoteric Tradition,” in From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme: Gnosis, Hermetism and the Christian Tradition, ed. R. van den Broek and C. van Heertum (Amsterdam: in de Pelikaan, 2000), 17–40.
26. A superabundance of anti-Darwinian evidence is presented in Michael Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, Forbidden Archaeology: The Hidden History of the Human Race (San Diego: Bhaktivedanta Institute, 1993).
27. The archaeologist and psychical researcher T. C. Lethbridge made a tentative start in his last book, The Legend of the Sons of God: A Fantasy? (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972). A serious investigation would have to take into account the copious writings on this subject by H. P. Blavatsky, especially The Secret Doctrine (London: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1888), vol. 2, “Anthropogenesis.” There are several separate hypotheses to be considered: 1. That the mutation which brought homo sapiens sapiens into being was deliberately introduced by an entity or entities unknown. (This is a major theme of Zechariah Sitchin’s books, beginning with The Twelfth Planet, New York: Stein & Day, 1976.) 2. That early man was educated by superior beings from elsewhere, later commemorated as “gods” (a pioneering treatment is Brinsley le Poer Trench, Men Among Mankind, London: Neville Spearman, 1962; see also Lethbridge, op. cit., and Robert K. G. Temple, The Sirius Mystery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 3. That the motivation of such beings may not have been in mankind’s best interests (see for instance Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles of Time, London: Frederick Muller, 1980, and, more amusingly, Pierre Gripari, Histoire du méchant Dieu, Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 1979); 4. That they are still engaged with us, perhaps as the “unknown superiors” of occult groups, perhaps as the aliens who perform abductions (see Valdemar Valerian, The Matrix, 5 vols. (Yelm, WA: Leading Edge Research Group, 1992–2006). The mythos of Scientology is also relevant here.
CHAPTER 8: The Negative Theology
1. In the Middle Ages, three different persons named Dionysius were believed to be a single one: 1. The author of the Celestial Hierarchies, who was probably a Christian pupil of Damascius, the last teacher of the Athenian Academy, hence active around 500; 2. The Athenian convert mentioned in Acts 17:34: “Some men joined [Paul], among them Dionysius the Areopagite.” 3. St. Dionysius or Denis, the patron saint of France, who probably lived in the early third century. Hence the mystical author is traditionally referred to as “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.”
2. Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology and the Celestial Hierarchies (Brook, Surrey, UK: Shrine of Wisdom, 1965), 10.
3. Ibid., 9.
4. Ibid., 11, translation adapted.
5. Ibid., 10.
6. The orders are, from the top down: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominions, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels.
7. I.e., the gods and daimons of Neoplatonism. For insights into the process, and a much-needed defense of the Neoplatonic philosopher and theurgist Iamblichus, see Leonard George, “The Teachings of Iamblichus: Between Eros and Anteros,” Lapis 13 (2001), 61–66. George argues that Dionysius “recast the invisible hierarchy personifying the circulation of Eros as nine angelic choirs” (66).
8. The edition cited, 70–73, gives examples from later mystics who echoed Dionysius.
9. See Christopher Bamford’s introduction to John Scotus Eriugena, The Voice of the Eagle: Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne, 1991), 8–9.
10. Ibid., 26.
11. A recent study is Reiner Schürmann, Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 2001).
12. Franz Pfeiffer, Meister Eckhart, trans. C. de B. Evans (London: Watkins, 1924), 1:291. Notice the imagery of the golden chain suspended from the highest God (ultimately derived from Homer, Iliad, 9.27), and the strong flavor of Neoplatonic cosmic hierarchy and harmony.
13. In Platonism the three are nous, psyche, and soma. A single echo of this remains in St. Paul, who commends his readers “pneuma, psyche, and soma.” (1 Thess. 5:23). Why he preferred pneuma to nous is a question for experts to argue over.
14. For instance, in the copious writings of Marsilio Ficino about the spiritus and its cultivation.
15. This was the subject of Jung’s last book, Mysterium Coniunctionis, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton/Bollingen, 1963).
16. Perhaps it would be truer to say that those who laid down the path, for the better control of their flocks, strayed from the original, unestablished, gnostic Christianity.
17. “They say: ‘God has begotten a son.’ You have uttered a grievous thing, which would cleave the skies asunder, rend the earth, and split the mountains, for they have attribute a son to Ar-Rahman, when it does not behove the Merciful to have a son.” Qur’an 19:88–92 (Sacred Writings: Islam, The Qur’an, trans. Ahmed Ali, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, 265).
18. Efforts to fit the universe into rational systems and schemata are doomed to provinciality, none agreeing with any other. At the present stage of human intelligence, we have no more chance of success than an ant with a theory about human society. When the rational mind is bypassed by gnosis, the result is “ineffable” (inexpressible in words), and paradoxically most certain; but that has nothing to do with categories of thought, molded as those are by genetics, language, and the senses.
CHAPTER 9: Cathedrals of Light
1. The following summary is based on chapter 4 of Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names, trans. Editors of the Shrine of Wisdom (Brook, Surrey, UK: Shrine of Wisdom, 1957), 30–34.
2. The association of Gothic architecture with light mysticism is one of the main themes of Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (New York: Bollingen, 1962), esp. 52–55. Von Simson’s was one of the many works of “inspired scholarship” published in the Bollingen series, which was financed by the Mellon family and named after the village in which Carl Jung’s retreat was located. See also the sometimes exasperating but suggestive work of Louis Charpentier, The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral, trans. R. Fraser (London: Research into Lost Knowledge Organization, 1972), esp. 137–43.
3. Von Simson, 119n.
4. See the oft-reproduced illustration from a thirteenth-century French Bible moralisée now in Vienna, e.g. in von Simson, pl. 6a. William Blake echoed this theme in his watercolors The Ancient of Days and Isaac Newton.
5. Thierry of Chartres, cited in von Simson, 27.
6. On gematria, see the references in chapter 3, note 14.
7. See John James, Chartres: The Masons Who Built a Legend (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 108.
8. See Charpentier, esp. 86–87; R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, The Temple in Man: The Secrets of Ancient Egypt, trans. R. & D. Lawlor (Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1977), 39–41; the Schwaller-influenced Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, Philosophy and Practice (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982), 23–37; also the Theosophically based L. Gordon Plummer, The Mathematics of the Cosmic Mind (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1970), 179–88.
9. There had been rich traditions of polyphony before the Notre-Dame school and its first named composer, Magister Leoninus (or Léonin), e.g. in Winchester, in the Aquitaine region, and in Santiago de Compostela, to say nothing of the oral traditions that are lost to us. See any standard history of music, but especially Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1:147–68.
10. Notably the motet, which, as its name (from French mot) indicates, originated from the putting of sacred or secular words to the liturgical pieces of the Notre Dame school. The motet became the primary vehicle for thirteenth-century polyphonic composers, and the laboratory in which they developed new resources of rhythm and harmony.
11. For example, taking any note C as 1, this would give the chord above it of C, G, C, and E. Taking the numbers in the opposite direction, with string ratios of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, gives the minor triad: C, C, F, C, A-flat.
12. Composers like César Franck, Louis Vierne, Gabriel Pierné, Louis Widor, and Olivier Messiaen, whose brilliant figurations and quick harmonic changes become blurred in a resonant church.
13. This was first brought to general attention in the 1970s by David Hykes and his Harmonic Choir, who used Tibetan or Mongolian vocal techniques to focus the harmonics naturally occurring in song, and recorded Hykes’s compositions in the Abbey of Le Thoronet, a smallish but acoustically extraordinary church. One should also mention Karlheinz Stockhausen’s six-voice piece Stimmung, based on harmonics, and what must have been a most memorable performance in 1969 in the Jeita Cavern, Lebanon. See Stockhausen’s Texte zur Musik 1963–1970 (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1971), 360.
14. Beginning with Henry Adams, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904).
15. It is significant that churches and cathedrals were built on sites already hallowed by pagans, who had chosen sites at which the energies of the earth were particularly strong or beneficial. A convincing and, in its way, scientific test of this principle is Paul Broadhurst and Hamish Miller, The Dance of the Dragon (see chapter 3, note 2). The authors traveled in stages from Skellig Saint Michael, off the west coast of Ireland, to the island of Delos and eventually to Armageddon (Megiddo, in northern Israel), following an alignment of sacred sites and plotting its underlying currents. The major sites in France included Mont Saint-Michel, the cathedrals of Le Mans, Bourges, and Nevers, the shrine of Paray-le-Monial, and the abbey of Cluny.
16. The first version of the present book (see preface) was titled Annals of the Invisible College, referring to the belief that there is a group of sages or “Unknown Superiors” who oversee civilizations and care for the spiritual welfare of humanity. The Rosicrucian movement makes the most explicit use of this idea, which is easily projected back into the past, and to the cathedral builders as Freemasons avant la lettre.
CHAPTER 10: The Arts of the Imagination
1. See Marsha Keith Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Boston: Brill, 2002).
2. See Abraham Abulafia’s system, as explained in Aryeh Kaplan, Meditation and Kabbalah (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1982).
3. See Nasr, 50–51, which gives the letter-number correspondences as used by the tenth-century Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity) and other Sufi sects for scriptural interpretation.
4. See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 113–23 et passim.
5. Specifically from the account of the building of the Temple of Solomon (1 Kings 5–9), to which Masonic mythology adds an apocryphal tale of the slaying of Hiram Abiff (the Temple’s architect) by three “ruffians,” and the discovery of his burial place through the sprouting of an acacia.
6. See Howard Rollin Patch, The Other World, According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). See also the early work by a scholar later known for his Tibetan studies, W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911). The fairy folk, it is explained, are the angels who remained neutral in the great war in heaven that concluded with the defeat of Lucifer and his fall to earth. They were condemned to expiate their neutrality by remaining on earth until the Last Judgment.
7. John Keats, Prometheus Unbound, act 1.
8. For a profound study, see Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, trans. R. Manheim (Princeton: Princeton/Bollingen, 1969), 184–220.
9. Hosayn Mansur Hallaj (857–922) was crucified for blasphemy. Henry Corbin (The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 127) reports the fourteenth-century Sufi Semnani as establishing “a connection between the trap into which the Christian dogma of the Incarnation falls by proclaiming the homoousia [identity of substance with God the Father] and by affirming that Isa ibn Maryam [Jesus son of Mary] is God, and the mystical intoxication in which such as Hallaj cry out: ‘I am God’.” Suhrawardi (see chapter 2) was executed for trying to teach the principles of his “Philosophy of Illumination” to young members of the ruling class; the parallel with Socrates is evident.
10. For a translation and analysis, see Antonio T. de Nicolas, Powers of Imagining: Ignatius de Loyola. A Philosophical Hermeneutic of Imagining through the Collected Works of Ignatius de Loyola, with a Translation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).
11. See Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution, ed. R. Wittkower and I. B. Jaffe (New York: Fordham University Press, 1972).
12. Kircher’s first description of the magic lantern is in his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (Rome: Hermann Scheus, 1646); he developed it further in the second edition of 1671. For an evaluation, see W. A. Wagenaar, “The True Inventor of the Magic Lantern: Kircher, Walgenstein or Huygens?”, Janus 66 (1979), 193–207.
13. On Swedenborg in his context of time and place, see the collective volume Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision, ed. R. Larsen (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1988).
14. On Swedenborg’s initiation and its later repercussions, see Marsha Keith Schuchard, Why Mrs. Blake Cried: Swedenborg, Blake, and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (London: Century, 2006).
15. No less a philosopher than Henry Corbin took them quite seriously: see his Swedenborg and Esoteric Islam, trans. Leonard Fox (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg Foundation, 1995).
16. After the model of the Miradj or “night journey” of Mohammed, in which the Prophet was transported by the Angel Gabriel from Mecca to Jerusalem and thence through the seven heavens. The point of his ascent is marked by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, thus the sanctity of the place to Muslims.
17. The Kabbalistic book called The Greater Holy Assembly, forming part of the Zohar, devotes a chapter to the hair of Macroprosopus (the “Great Face,” i.e., the Almighty), and thirteen chapters to his beard.
18. Such as Catholicism (Roman, Anglican, High Episcopalian, etc.), or the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches with their reverence for icons. I here record my gratitude for such an upbringing, which began at the Anglican monastic church of the Cowley Fathers in Oxford and continued as a choirboy in Christ Church Cathedral, in the same city. Half a century later, defying all the trends of the times, there are still cathedrals and churches, even in America, which maintain the traditional rituals, music, and the time-hallowed languages of Latin and Elizabethan English.
19. With consequences mercilessly pinpointed by Robert Bly in The Sibling Society (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1996).
CHAPTER 11: The Pagan Renaissance
1. The themes of this chapter receive fuller treatment in my book The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 2002).
2. But see James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), on how Christianity changed, in the process, into a world-accepting, hierarchical, ethnically reinforcing folk religion.
4. This state of order, once almost universal, is evoked in Michell and Rhone, Twelve-Tribe Nations (see chapter 3, note 4).
5. Dante was probably on the mark in blaming the popes of his time, and the French king Philip the Fair, who were responsible for crushing the Knights Templar. See Inferno, Canto 19, for the pope he encounters in hell, and those who are expected to follow.
6. In the Hindu system, presented in the Puranas, earthly time is subject to a repeating cycle of four ages (yugas), of which the Kali Yuga is the last, the shortest, and the worst. Even so, by the traditional reckoning it lasts 432,000 years, a duration that some modern enthusiasts for the concept have sought to modify. For instance, René Guénon allows the Kali Yuga a length of only 6,480 years, and suggests that it began in 4461 B.C. See Guénon, Formes traditionnelles et cycles cosmiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 22–24, 48n. The Greek system has four ages of descending merit (Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron), between the last of which a fifth “Heroic” age is sometimes interpolated (e.g. in the earliest documented scheme: Hesiod, Works and Days, 108–202).
7. Despite the best efforts of Gemistos Plethon (see chapter 1) and Nicolas of Cusa (see chapter 12) to reconcile the churches, as soon as the Eastern representatives returned to Constantinople the union was anulled. The Byzantines had agreed to it chiefly in the hope that the West would save them from the Turks, and this was tragically not to be the case: Constantinople fell in 1453.
8. “Dismal,” from dies mali, evil or unpropitious days. “Soulless,” because the worlds of Darwin, Marx, and Freud have no place for the souls of men or of stars.
9. See Titus Burckhardt, Siena, City of the Virgin, trans. M. McD. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 65.
10. See Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, 60–63.
11. Ficino was a familiar presence to readers of Lapis, which published an extract from a letter of Ficino “On Divine Frenzy,” Lapis 4 (1997), 57–59; Thomas Moore, “Precious Stones,” Lapis 7 (1998), 4344; Valery Rees, “Philosophy and Politics: Reconciling the Irreconcilable with Marsilio Ficino,” Lapis 13 (2001), 71–75.
12. The essential text is Ficino, De vita coelitus comparanda. Two English translations exist: Three Books on Life, trans. C. Boer (Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications, 1980); Three Books on Life, trans. C. V. Kaske & D. J. R. Clark, (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989).
13. The complete Picatrix has not yet been translated into English. A bibliophile’s edition of single books in English translation has been announced by the Ouroboros Press in Seattle. There is a scholarly edition: Picatrix: The Latin Version of the Ghayal al-hakim, ed. D. E. Pingree (London: Warburg Institute, 1986).
14. This is the subject matter of the first two books (“Natural Magic” and “Celestial Magic”) of Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy.
15. This is the subject of Agrippa’s third book (“Ceremonial Magic”) and of the spurious “Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy.” English translations: Books 1–3 (published 1651, reprinted Hastings, UK: Chthonios Books, 1986); Book 4 (published 1655, reprinted Gillette, NJ: Heptangle Books, 1985; new translation by Robert Turner, York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 2005).
16. The image is from Phaedrus, 251.
CHAPTER 12: The Philosopher’s Dilemma
1. See chapter 7 on this knowledge or gnosis.
2. St. Catherine of Siena (1347–80) persuaded the pope to return from decades of exile in Avignon to Rome. Nicholas of Cusa went to Constantinople to attempt the reconciliation of the Eastern and Western churches (see chapter 11).
3. They would face schism in their turn with the appearance of the messianic claimant Sabbatai Sevi (or Zevi) in the year 1666. See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, the Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblonsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
4. For instance, in Bohemia; see Jean Bérenger, A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1273–1700, trans. C. A. Simpson, (London: Longman, 1994), 227.
5. The best all-round study is Christopher McIntosh, The Rosicrucians: the History, Mythology, and Ritual of an Esoteric Order (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1997). The latest state of Rosicrucian studies is represented by two collective works: Rosenkreuz als europäisches Phänomen im 17. Jahrhundert (papers from the 1994 Wolfenbüttel conference in German, English, French; Amsterdam: Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, 2002); The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited, ed. R. White (papers from the 1995 Cesky Krumlov and the 1997 Prague conferences; Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne, 1999).
6. Modern English translation: Johann Valentin Andreae, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz, trans. J. Godwin (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1991).
7. Modern English translation: Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. J. Godwin (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999).
8. Dee has become a popular subject nowadays. Still the best all-round study is Peter French, John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976).
9. Paracelsus is less well served in English. A good digest of his obscure thought is Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus: Speculative Theory and the Crisis of the Early Renaissance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).
10. Unlikely to be made redundant is the groundbreaking work of R. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
11. Ashmole still awaits an interpretive biography, but the groundwork has been done by C. H. Josten in Elias Ashmole (1617–1692): His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, His Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to His Life and Work, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). A stimulating chapter on “Elias Ashmole and the Dee Tradition” appears in Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 193–205.
12. See Christopher McIntosh, The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason: Eighteenth-Century Rosicrucianism in Central Europe and its Relationship to the Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
13. See McIntosh’s book for accounts of such powerful figures. The “enlightened despots” referred to include Catherine the Great of Russia, Frederick the Great of Prussia, and Joseph II of Austria.
14. See Schuchard, Restoring the Temple of Vision.
15. This has been part of Rosicrucian teaching since Robert Fludd (1574–1637), who explained the cosmos in terms of the intersection of light and dark “pyramids,” whose respective expansive and contracting qualities are experienced by us as good and evil; yet metaphysically speaking, they are simply complementary functions of the Creator. For a concise explanation, with Fludd’s diagrams, see J. Godwin, Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979, reissued by Phanes Press), 42–51.
16. The majority of the signers of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 (but not Thomas Jefferson) were Freemasons. French Freemasonry included many freethinkers in the tradition of Diderot and Voltaire, who wished for the downfall of the ancien régime. However, this does not make Freemasonry responsible for the “Terror” that ensued, in which Freemasons such as the Duc d’Orléans were guillotined along with the rest.
17. This is not a value judgment. A fragile equilibrium may deserve to be upset. It was on the whole the most conservative elements that were responsible for banning both Jesuits and Freemasons. Pope Clement XIV suppressed the Society of Jesus in 1773, yet it was Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia who refused to promulgate the order of suppression, and allowed the Jesuits to continue in their domains.
18. The best established of these are Max Heindel’s Rosicrucian Fellowship, H. Spencer Lewis’s Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), R. Swinburne Clymer’s Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, Jan van Rijkenborgh’s Lectorium Rosicrucianum, and the Societas Roscicruciana in Anglia (“Soc Ros”), which is an order within Freemasonry. See McIntosh, The Rosy Cross Unveiled, for an impartial account of these often rival movements.
19. This refers to the tradition that after the Thirty Years’ War, the Rosicrucians left Europe and took up residence in Asia. See René Guénon, The Lord of the World, trans. A. Cheke (Ellingstring, North Yorkshire, UK: Coombe Springs Press, 1983), 48. On the consequences, see chapter 15.
CHAPTER 13: Inner Alchemy
1. The two principal scholars of Christian theosophy today are Antoine Faivre and Arthur Versluis. Among their writings, see especially Faivre’s two-part work, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), and Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, trans. C. Rhone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), and Versluis, Theosophia: Hidden Dimensions of Christianity, (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne, 1994). The academic movement they represent distinguishes “theosophy” and “theosophers” of Boehme’s type from “Theosophy” and “Theosophists” stemming from H. P. Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society (see chapter 15). My knowledge of Boehme is drawn from these authors and from John Joseph Stoudt, Jacob Boehme: His Life and Thought (New York: Seabury, 1968; originally entitled Sunrise to Eternity, 1957).
2. See especially the works of Antoine Faivre cited above.
3. Jacob Boehme, Aurora, trans. John Sparrow (London: Watkins, 1914), 103.
4. Basarab Nicolescu, Science, Meaning, & Evolution: The Cosmology of Jacob Boehme, trans. R. Baker (New York: Parabola, 1991).
5. These are some of the principles behind the “Transdisciplinary Movement” of which Nicolescu is the founder.
6. This is one of Faivre’s six characteristics of esotericism, which have become a sort of canon for the movement to define esotericism and to establish its study as an academic discipline. The first four are “intrinsic” or essential, without which a “discourse” cannot be called esoteric: 1. the idea of correspondence; 2. living nature; 3. imagination and mediation; 4. the experience of transmutation. A further two are “secondary” characteristics, often but not always present: 5. the practice of concordance; and 6. transmission. See his Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, xxi–xxv. The reader may notice the influence of these characteristics on the present work.
7. Boehme was much concerned with Lucifer as the author of the misery of the world. Thus in his terms, ignorance would be “Luciferic” when it opened a door to the activities of this being.
8. On the Behmenist tradition, see Arthur Versluis, Theosophia (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne, 1994) and Wisdom’s Children: a Christian Esoteric Tradition (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). The American branch of the tradition has long attracted local historians and genealogists who have done invaluable archival research, among whom see Julius Friedrich Sachse, The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania (New York: AMS Press, 1970; original ed. 1895).
9. In historical times, alchemy seems to have arisen in the last centuries B.C. in Alexandria and, perhaps independently, in Han dynasty China. See John Read, Prelude to Chemistry: An Outline of Alchemy, Its Literature and Relationships (London: G. Bell, 1936), 5.
10. The engraved illustrations of Khunrath’s Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae (1602) are accessible in Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 31–41, but they form only part of a long book, not yet reprinted, much less translated. No easier of access for English language readers is Cesare della Riviera, Il mondo magico de gli heroi (1605), ed. J. Evola (n.p.: Edizioni Arktos, 1982); but much of its substance is included, in more comprehensible form, in Julius Evola’s The Hermetic Tradition: Symbols & Teachings of the Royal Art, trans. E. E. Rehmus, (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1995). For Vaughan, see The Works of Thomas Vaughan, Mystic and Alchemist (Eugenius Philalethes), ed. A. E. Waite (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1968).
11. This description owes much to my reading of the Gruppo di Ur’s work (see chapter 1, note 8).
12. This expression comes from the forgotten multifaceted genius Charles Henry (1859–1926), who is quoted as saying: “Death is merely a physiochemical event of no importance,” and adding, “it is only after my death that I will begin to amuse myself seriously.” Quoted in Godwin, Music and the Occult, 117.
13. In C. G. Jung, Collected Works, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton: Princeton/Bollingen, 1960–76). The relevant volumes are 12, Psychology and Alchemy; 13, Alchemical Studies; and 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis.
14. See Fulcanelli, Le Mystère des Cathédrales: Esoteric Interpretation of the Hermetic Symbols of the Great Work, trans. M. Sworder (London: Neville Spearman, 1971), and The Dwellings of the Philosophers, trans. B. Donvez and L. Perrin (Boulder, CO: Archive Press, 1999).
15. See Frater Albertus, The Alchemist’s Handbook: Manual for Practical Laboratory Alchemy (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1974); Jean Dubuis’ work was accessible through The Philosophers of Nature and their journal The Stone, now ceased.
16. For a practical introduction to spagyric alchemy in the tradition of Frater Albertus and Dubuis, see Mark Stavish, The Path of Alchemy: Energetic Healing and the World of Natural Magic (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2006).
17. See J. Godwin, “Mentalism and the Cosmological Fallacy,” Alexandria: The Journal of the Western Cosmological Traditions 3 (1993), 195–204, and the criticisms of Michael Hornum, “Knowledge, Reason, and Ethics: A Neoplatonic Perspective,” Alexandria 4 (1995), 131–55. My mentalistic position is not based on any academic training in philosophy, but on the common-sense teachings of Paul Brunton, especially his two-part work The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga (New York: Dutton, 1941), and The Wisdom of the Overself (New York: Dutton, 1943). Since discovering Brunton’s works in the 1960s I have found no reason to discard their philosophical principles.
CHAPTER 14: The Religion of Art
1. Thus the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. The word must have carried much the same charge as “fundamentalism” does today.
2. Among them one could list the English Gothic novel (Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis); the “Gothick” revival in architecture, especially as practiced by Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill and by William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey (now collapsed); Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe; the German school of painters called the Nazarenes; the medievalism of the Biedermeier period, e.g., Schloss Hohenschwangau, decorated by Moritz von Schwind; then on to the Pre-Raphaelites, Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Viollet le Duc’s restorations, the architecture favored by the Oxford Movement, etc.
3. This idea was of signal importance to the worldviews of the Traditionalists, especially René Guénon and Julius Evola. See two books first published in 1929: Guénon’s Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power, trans. Henry D. Fohr (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2004) and The Esoterism of Dante, trans. Henry D. Fohr (Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2005). See also Evola’s The Mystery of the Grail, trans. G. Stucco (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1997).
4. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst,” in Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt a.M., Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 18:110–18.
5. This is not my flippant opinion, but the considered verdict of one of the Muse’s most faithful companions, the late British poet Kathleen Raine. In her obituary for The Tablet of fellow-poet David Gascoyne (December 2001), she wrote that the last real poet of the twentieth century had now departed.
6. Some titles: Novalis, The Disciples at Saïs; The Blue Flower; E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Golden Pot; Gérard de Nerval, Aurélia; Honoré de Balzac, Séraphîta, Louis Lucas; George Sand, Consuélo, The Countess of Rudolstadt; Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni: A Strange Story.
7. To these should be added the overdue respect paid to Haydn in his later years, especially after The Creation (1804), which was seen by some critics as evidence of the divinely creative nature of the composer, and by others compared with the Gothic cathedrals themselves. See Michael Embach and J. Godwin, J. F. H. von Dalberg, 1760–1812: Schriftsteller, Musiker, Domherr (Mainz: Gesellschaft für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte, 1998), 336–38.
8. The one Buddhist among the Traditionalist group, Marco Pallis, had a lifelong love of Wagner’s music dramas, expressed in his very last article, “Hands Off Wagner!” in Temenos 5 (1984), 81–88.
9. H. C. Robbins Landon, 1791: Mozart’s Last Year (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 10.
CHAPTER 15: Wise Men from the East
1. See chapter 12, note 19.
2. Hence the two volumes of her first book, Isis Unveiled (New York, 1877), were subtitled Science and Theology. Writings about Blavatsky were long divided between hagiographies from within the Theosophical movement, and hatchet jobs from outside it, the latter often at a puerile level that would not be tolerated in the case of historical and literary figures of far less significance. At last in 1985, with the foundation of the journal Theosophical History by Leslie Price (refounded by James A. Santucci with the New Series, 1990), a forum opened for impartial research on the Theosophical movement. The new trend is evident in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s introduction to his anthology Helena Blavatsky (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2004; Western Esoteric Masters series).
3. See James A. Santucci, “Does Theosophy Exist in the Theosophical Society?” in Mélanges offerts à Antoine Faivre, 471–89.
4. On this as on all points of biographical fact, see Boris de Zirkoff’s “Chronological Survey,” which prefaces most volumes of Blavatsky’s Collected Writings (Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1966–91).
5. The Mahatmas’ versions of the teachings are in The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (New York: Frederick P. Stokes, 1924 and reissues). Blavatsky enlarged greatly on them in The Secret Doctrine and in her essays.
6. A short book dedicated to presenting the evidence for this is David Reigle, The Books of Kiu-Te, or The Tibetan Buddhist Tantras: A Preliminary Analysis (San Diego: Wizards Bookshelf, 1983).
7. K. Paul Johnson, The Masters Revealed: Madame Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).
8. See Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965).
9. Romain Rolland, The Life of Ramakrishna and The Life of Vivekananda and the Universal Gospel (both published at Almora, India: Advaita Ashrama, 1931).
10. See Arthur Osborne, Ramana Maharshi and the Path of Self-Knowledge (London: Rider, 1970).
11. See Maha-Yoga or The Upanishadic Lore in the Light of the Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana, by “Who” (Tiruvannamalai, India: Sri Ramanasramam, n.d.)
12. If Ramana’s renunciation of the world is thought too impractical an example, an alternative model might be his contemporary Atmananda (Krishna Menon, 1883–1959) who taught the Advaitic philosophy while holding a job as district superintendent of police. See Nitya Tripta, Notes on Spiritual Discourses of Sree Atmananda (of Trivandrum), 1950–1959 (Trivandrum, India: Reddiar Press, 1963).
13. See especially his comparative work, Shiva and Dionysus, trans. K. F. Hurry (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1984), and his critique of the modern West, While the Gods Play, trans. B. Bailey et al. (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1987).
14. Material on and by Bennett is scattered in rare journals, but some of it is gathered in J. Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 369–76.
15. See especially Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon/Bollingen, 1959), and the three volumes of Essays in Zen Buddhism (London: Rider, 1949–53).
16. Among a copious literature, see the work of an early German convert, Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds (London: Hutchinson, 1966), and, for the Dzogchen school, Namkhai Norbu, The Crystal and the Way of Light.
17. The expression “personal equation” was a favorite of Julius Evola (1898–1974), perhaps influenced by his early training as an engineer. It suggests that each person comes into the world with a unique character and program, which it is the duty of a lifetime to “solve.”
CHAPTER 16: The End of the Thread?
1. Blavatsky did not understand race in modern terms, but as the coming into incarnation of humans with a new set of physical and spiritual characteristics. For a brief summary, see Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 1:xliii.
2. These are the closing words of H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy (London: Theosophical Publishing Co., 1889), 307.
3. See chapter 12, note 18.
4. Transpersonal psychology, a loosely defined movement, is most closely associated with the name of Roberto Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis, who was a disciple of a Tibetan Mahatma channeled by Alice A. Bailey.
5. This is amply demonstrated by Wouter J. Hanegraaff in his seminal book, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996).
6. Official science, preferring the chimera of progress to the wisdom of its own forefathers, missed the boat after World War I. Until then, psychical research and the investigation of mediumship had occupied scientists of the eminence of John Logie Baird, Sir William Barrett, Sir William Crookes, Camille Flammarion, William James, Sir Oliver Lodge, Cesare Lombroso, Charles Richet, and Alfred Russel Wallace.
7. On the Hindu doctrine of the yugas, see chapter 11, note 6. The only general study of the Traditionalists, or “Perennialists” as they are sometimes called, is Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For a measured approach to the most influential of them, see Robin Waterfield, René Guénon and the Future of the West (n.p.: Crucible, 1987). Readers of Spanish should consult the many writings of Federico González, especially his Esoterismo siglo XXI: En torno a René Guénon (Seville: Muñoz Moya Editores, 2000) and the journal Symbolos, which he has edited since 1990.
8. See Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, trans. Lord Northbourne (London: Luzac, 1953), especially the chapter on “The Degeneration of Coinage.”
9. This was the conclusion of Evola’s late book (1961), Cavalcare la tigre; English translation by J. Godwin and C. Fontana, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for Aristocrats of the Soul (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003).
10. For an evaluation of this movement by a prominent historian of Freemasonry and Christian philosopher, see R. A. Gilbert, Casting the First Stone: The Hypocrisy of Religious Fundamentalism and Its Threat to Society, (Shaftesbury, Dorset, UK: Element, 1993).
11. See the examples of invective by Peter Dawkins and others collected in Richard Milton’s Shattering the Myth of Darwinism (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2000), or the infamous review of Rupert Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life in Nature, 293 (5830), 245–56, entitled “A Book for Burning?”
12. See the analysis of the Hermetic roots of the U.S. in Hoeller, Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society; also in Robert Hieronimus, America’s Secret Destiny: Spiritual Vision and the Founding of a Nation (Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1989).
13. William Blake’s term for the angry, personal God; see his poem “When Klopstock England defied.”