Western esotericism has now emerged as a tutorial learn in its personal correct, combining spirituality with an empirical remark of the flora and fauna whereas additionally bearing on the humanity to the universe via a harmonious celestial order. This advent to the Western esoteric traditions deals a concise evaluation in their old development.
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke explores those traditions, from their roots in Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, and Gnosticism within the early Christian period as much as their reverberations in state-of-the-art medical paradigms. whereas the learn of Western esotericism is generally constrained to the historical past of rules, Goodrick-Clarke examines the phenomenon even more widely. He demonstrates that, faraway from being a strictly highbrow flow, the unfold of esotericism owes very much to geopolitics and globalization. In Hellenistic tradition, for instance, the empire of Alexander the nice, which stretched throughout Egypt and Western Asia to provinces in India, facilitated a blending of japanese and Western cultures. because the Greeks absorbed rules from Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia, they gave upward push to the 1st esoteric movements.
From the past due 16th to the eighteenth centuries, post-Reformation spirituality came across expression in theosophy, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. equally, within the sleek period, dissatisfaction with the hegemony of technology in Western tradition and a scarcity of religion in conventional Christianity led thinkers like Madame Blavatsky to seem East for non secular idea. Goodrick-Clarke additional examines sleek esoteric notion within the mild of latest clinical and scientific paradigms in addition to the analytical psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. This booklet lines the entire heritage of those hobbies and is the definitive account of Western esotericism.
