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1 Origins A L C H E M Y O F T H E W O R D To understand the origins of Western esotericism in all its various guises, we must begin in antiquity, specifically at the beginning of Christianity. Although many aspects of what actually happened during this time may always be shrouded or lost, still we can trace through this era the origin of the primary elements or currents in Western esotericism. Here, we are not so concerned with surveying the entirety of this period—a monumental task best left to others— but with the defining themes that will emerge again and again in later times. And to find these themes, we will look at representative or synecdochic writings , beginning with the ambience for and emergence of the Christian Bible and affiliated works. When we look at the emergence of Christianity from the welter of religious traditions at the time, one characteristic appears prevalent above all others: the emphasis upon the written word. From relatively early on, Christianity was centered around written accounts that took two primary forms. One is of course what we find in the canonical versions of the Bible, central to which are the gospel accounts of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. This, bolstered to some extent by apocrypha, remains central to what may be called conventional or exoteric Christianity—that is, Christianity based on faith or belief in a historical Christ, of whose life we know through the historical documentation of the gospels. The other kind of writing, however, is profoundly different, and of this there are only two examples in the canonical Bible: some elements of the Book of John, and, needless to say, the Book of Revelation. Here we have the fundamental division that has lasted throughout the subsequent history of Western esotericism: on the one hand, what we may call a 17 historicist emphasis, and on the other, an ahistorical, revelatory emphasis. When we consider the emergence of historicist Christianity in light of world religious traditions, we can see how anomalous it is, for on a worldwide scale ahistorical religious traditions predominate. Consider, for instance, the development of Buddhism, which resembles Gnosticism far more than historicist Christianity: here, as throughout world religious traditions, individual spiritual revelation is incalculably more important than simple belief in a historical series of events. The Johannine elements in Christianity owe a great deal to the various movements collectively known as Gnosticism in antiquity, and represent a central reference point for the subsequent reemergence of esotericism time and again. This division between exoteric and esoteric can, of course, be characterized according to people’s approach to language. Historicist Christianity has always taken a literal interpretation of the Bible, and insisted on an objectified historical Christ in whom one must have faith in order to be saved. Such an approach to language is particularly common in modern times, where the idea that language might convey multiple layers of meaning has been almost completely jettisoned in favor of objectified technical language, be it scientific, legal, or technological. The gnostics, on the other hand, by and large eschewed literalist views of language in favor of more complicated, multilayered approaches. Whereas the historicist Christians established a fixed canon of Biblical books that ended with the Revelation to John, gnostic Christians continued to generate revelatory scriptural works because in their view, the Word was not literal but spiritual, and hence revelation could take place today just as in antiquity. What mattered to them was inward or esoteric understanding, not only outward fidelity to fixed written words from the past. Perhaps most interesting about this dichotomy is how it centers around approaches to written language, in this respect being peculiar to Christianity. By contrast, the mystery religions of the time forbade writing about the mysteries: indeed, the very word mystery has the root meaning “silence.” And written accounts of the mystery traditions are very rare, so rare—in fact, that one can easily list them, the most moving and extensive undoubtedly being that in Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. Plato alluded to this question in Phaedrus, expressing a view characteristic of the mysteries more generally when he had Socrates say that writing is problematic at best because the written word cannot explain itself and is easily subject to misinterpretation. In Christianity, both esoteric and exoteric tendencies center on how to interpret written language: should it be multilayered or monotonous; should it be ahistorical, symbolic, and mythic, or historical, literal, and anti...

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