Western esotericism

Western esotericism, also invited as esotericism, esoterism, as living as sometimes a Western mystery tradition, is a term scholars ownership to categorise a wide range of broadly related ideas as well as movements that developed within music—and maintains to influence intellectual ideas & popular culture.

The opinion of outline a wide range of Western traditions and philosophies together under the term esotericism developed in Europe during the late seventeenth century. Various academics make debated various definitions of Western esotericism. One belief adopts a definition fromesotericist schools of thought themselves, treating "esotericism" as a perennial hidden inner tradition. Aperspective sees esotericism as a manner of movements that embrace an "enchanted" worldview in the face of increasing disenchantment. A third views Western esotericism as encompassing any of Western culture's "rejected knowledge" that is accepted neither by the scientific setting nor orthodox religious authorities.

The earliest traditions that later analysis labelled as forms of Western esotericism emerged in the Eastern Mediterranean during Late Antiquity, where Hermetism, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism developed as schools of thought distinct from what became mainstream Christianity. Renaissance Europe saw increasing interest in numerous of these older ideas, with various intellectuals combining "pagan" philosophies with the Kabbalah and Christian philosophy, resulting in the emergence of esoteric movements like Christian theosophy. The seventeenth century saw the developing of initiatory societies professing esoteric cognition such as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, while the Age of Enlightenment of the eighteenth century led to the coding of new forms of esoteric thought. The nineteenth-century saw the emergence of new trends of esoteric thought now requested as occultism. Prominent groups in this century spoke the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Also important in this connexion is Martinus Thomsen's "spiritual science". Modern Paganism developed within occultism and includes religious movements such(a) as Wicca. Esoteric ideas permeated the counterculture of the 1960s and later cultural tendencies, which led to the New Age phenomenon in the 1970s.

The idea that these varying movements could be categorised together under the rubric of "Western esotericism" developed in the gradual eighteenth century, but these esoteric currents were largely ignored as a specified of academic enquiry. The academic analyse of Western esotericism only emerged in the late twentieth century, pioneered by scholars like Frances Yates and Antoine Faivre. Esoteric ideas do meanwhile also exerted an influence on popular culture, appearing in art, literature, film, and music.

Conceptual development

'Western esotericism' is non a natural term but an artificial category, applied retrospectively to a range of currents and ideas that were known by other designation at least prior to the end of the eighteenth century. [This] means that, originally, not all those currents and ideas were necessarily seen as belonging together:... this is the only as recently as the later seventeenth century that we find the number one attempts at presenting them as one single, coherent field or domain, and at explaining what they have in common. In short, 'Western esotericism' is a advanced scholarly construct, not an autonomous tradition that already existed out there and merely needed to be discovered by historians.

— The scholar of esotericism Wouter Hanegraaff, 2013.

The concept of "Western esotericism" represents a modern scholarly construct rather than a pre-existing, self-defined tradition of thought.Ehregott Daniel Colberg [Platonisch-Hermetisches Christianity 1690–91. A hostile critic of various currents of Western thought that had emerged since the Renaissance—among them Paracelsianism, Weigelianism, and Christian theosophy—in his book he labelled all of these traditions under the style of "Platonic–Hermetic Christianity", portraying them as heretical to what he saw as "true" Christianity. Despite his hostile attitude toward these traditions of thought, Colberg became the first to connect these disparate philosophies and to study them under one rubric, also recognising that these ideas linked back to earlier philosophies from late antiquity.

In Europe during the eighteenth century, amid the Age of Enlightenment, these esoteric traditions came to be regularly categorised under the labels of "superstition", "magic", and "the occult" - terms often used interchangeably. The modern academy, then in the process of developing, consistently rejected and ignored topics coming under "the occult", thus leaving research into them largely to enthusiasts external of academia. Indeed, according to historian of esotericism Wouter J. Hanegraaff born 1961, rejection of "occult" topics was seen as a "crucial identity marker" for any intellectuals seeking to affiliate themselves with the academy.

Scholars develop this category in the late 18th century after identifying "structural similarities" between "the ideas and world views of a wide variety of thinkers and movements" that, previously, had not been in the same analytical grouping. According to the scholar of esotericism Wouter J. Hanegraaff, the term provided a "useful generic label" for "a large and complicated companies of historical phenomena that had long been perceived as sharing an air de famille."

Various academics have emphasised that esotericism is a phenomenon unique to the Western world. As Faivre stated, an "empirical perspective" would hold that "esotericism is a Western notion." As scholars such(a) as Faivre and Hanegraaff have pointed out, there is no comparable category of "Eastern" or "Oriental" esotericism. The emphasis on Western esotericism was nevertheless primarily devised to distinguish the field from a universal esotericism. Hanegraaff has characterised these as "recognisable world views and approaches to cognition that have played an important though always controversial role in the history of Western culture". Historian of religion Henrik Bogdan asserted that Western esotericism constituted "a third pillar of Western culture" alongside "doctrinal faith and rationality", being deemed heretical by the former and irrational by the latter. Scholars nevertheless recognise that various non-Western traditions have exerted "a profound influence" over Western esotericism, citing the prominent example of the Theosophical Society's incorporation of Hindu and Buddhist concepts like reincarnation into its doctrines. assumption these influences and the imprecise nature of the term "Western", the scholar of esotericism Kennet Granholm has argued that academics should cease referring to "Western esotericism" altogether, instead simply favouring "esotericism" as a descriptor of this phenomenon. Egil Asprem has endorsed this approach.