Magic and Mysticism

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

As we look over Western esotericism from antiquity to the present, we can discern one characteristic that emerges as central throughout the entire period: gnosis. The word gnosis here refers to assertions of direct spiritual insight into the nature of the cosmos and of oneself, and thus may be taken as having both a cosmological and a metaphysical import. Indeed, one may speak of these as two fundamental but related kinds of gnosis: under the heading of cosmological gnosis we may list such traditions as astrology and the various forms of -mancies such as geomancy, cartomancy, and so forth, as well as numeric, geometric, and alphabetic traditions of correspondences and analogical interpretations, traditions of natural magic based on these correspondences, and so forth.

is rather difficult to outline Gurdjieff’s teachings as a whole, not least because he himself was not exactly systematic as a teacher, but also because he was something of a trickster and raconteur who was entirely capable of salting truth with what we may charitably call jokes. But at heart is the idea, common to many esoteric traditions, that humanity is for the most part “asleep” and needs to be awakened. This awakening of others is best encouraged by someone who himself is already “awake,” and Gurdjieff and his disciples certainly saw him as having precisely that function of awakening. He is notorious for his confrontational style, for his ordering disciples to do humiliating or painful work, for his sometimes apparently erratic behavior—in short, for his playing the role of the peremptory and all-knowing guru. He did leave a real legacy in the West, no doubt of that, one with a powerful impact on the arts, not only in the dances supervised by Jeanne de Salzmann, his official successor, but also in popular music and the other fine arts.34 Yet Gurdjieff’s influence often remains hidden, for the groups he inspired do not operate publicly—they remain, in the strictest sense of the word, esoteric. One lesser-known example of Gurdjieff’s influence is to be found in Taliesin, the school of architecture founded by Frank Lloyd Wright—whose third wife, Olgivanna, had been a dancer at Gurdjieff’s school in Paris. Gurdjieff himself visited Wright at Taliesin in 1934.35

New Age religion cannot be characterized as a return to pre-Enlightenment worldviews, but is to be seen as a qualitatively new syncretism of esoteric and secular elements. Paradoxically, New Age criticism of modern western culture is expressed to a considerable extent on the premises of that same culture.20
Put even more succinctly, his primary conclusion is this: “The New Age movement is characterized by a popular western culture criticism expressed in terms of a secularized esotericism.” If Hanegraaff is right, then the New Age movement is at bottom a secularizing current of thought that nonetheless shares common origins with Traditionalism itself.
For both Traditionalism and the New Age movement have common antecedents in the nineteenth century, antecedents so extensive that we can here only allude to a few. Probably the most important antecedents for both are to be found in German Naturphilosophie and European Romanticism, in the late nineteenth century New Thought movement, in the various syncretizing “occult” or esoteric figures and lodges of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as in pivotal figures like Emanuel Swedenborg, William Blake, and above all, Ralph Waldo Emerson. All of these various currents of thought have in common tendencies toward individual syncretism and synthesis, toward joining together apparently disparate perspectives in a more general overview that takes on a universalist flavor. One sees the emergence of syncretic universalism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in figures as diverse as Rudolph Steiner, Frithjof Schuon, and Ken Wilber, each of whom presented himself as a surveyor of the entire human religiocultural inheritance, figures differing not least in their degree of incorporation or rejection of scientific-evolutionist premises.

If Traditionalism tends toward the arguably pessimistic view that the modern world represents the latter stages of a descent into the Kali Yuga, or degenerate time cycle—the view expressed in Guénon’s The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times or in Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World—the congeries of very different figures and groups under the rubric of “New Age” represent in general the opposite, optimistic view that modern society is on the brink or cusp of a new era in human “evolution” or progress, that just around the corner is a literal New Age sometimes associated with the Zodiacal precession from Pisces to Aquarius (the so-called Age of Aquarius). But while Traditionalists in general tend to be harshly critical of New Age figures and movements, seeing them as more or less demonically inspired, the fact is that however opposed in many respects they might be, these two movements do share tendencies toward syncretism and universalism. Like Traditionalism, the New Age movement is peculiarly modern and to some extent reactionary in its origin and nature.

Nonetheless, Traditionalism does represent a uniquely modern phenomenon, an antimodern, explicitly esoteric intellectual approach that presents a coherent and powerful critique of much that usually remains unexamined in the modern world. As a result, regardless of one’s personal reaction to Traditionalism, it remains an important development in the history of esotericism, one whose significances are only now beginning to be explored.