From Gnostics to the New Age: the West's long tradition of rejected knowledge
Hermeticism, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Theosophists, Wicca and the New Age look like unrelated oddities. Scholars group them as Western esotericism: currents that sit apart from both mainstream Christianity and Enlightenment reason. Serious academic study of that tradition only began in the late 20th century.
Defining the field is itself contested. Some scholars borrow the insiders' view of a single hidden wisdom running through history. Others see a family of movements clinging to an enchanted worldview as society grew disenchanted. A third camp treats esotericism as the West's rejected knowledge, accepted by neither scientists nor church authorities. Frances Yates and Antoine Faivre pioneered the academic approach.
The roots lie in the eastern Mediterranean of Late Antiquity, where Hermeticism, Gnosticism and Neoplatonism grew up apart from what became orthodox Christianity. Renaissance thinkers blended pagan philosophy with Jewish Kabbalah and Christian theology, producing Christian Kabbalah. The 17th century brought initiatory societies such as Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry; the 19th brought occultism, with bodies such as the Golden Dawn and the Theosophists. Modern paganism, including Wicca, grew out of that milieu, and esoteric ideas fed the 1960s counterculture and then the New Age of the 1970s.
The vocabulary has a history of its own. The Greek adjective esoterikos, belonging to an inner circle, first turns up in a satire by Lucian in the 2nd century. In ancient philosophy the esoteric and exoteric split often meant internal teaching versus public lectures rather than secrets. Aristotle spoke of his exoteric speeches but never used the word esoteric, and Strabo and Plutarch report that the Lyceum's internal texts circulated privately until Andronicus of Rhodes compiled them.
The noun esotericism, in French, first appeared in 1828 in a history of Gnosticism by the Protestant scholar Jacques Matter. The magician Eliphas Lévi popularised it in the 1850s and coined occultism too, and the two words were used interchangeably until scholars later separated them. Plato's influence runs deep; the scholar Kocku von Stuckrad argues esoteric thinking would hardly exist without Platonic philosophy.
Source: Western esotericism
