The Western Esoteric Traditions:A Historical Introduction

Cf. Marcello Truzzi, “Definition and Dimensions of the Occult: Towards a Sociological Perspective,” On the Margin of the Visible: Sociology, the Esoteric, and the Occult, edited by Edward Tiryakian (New York: John Wiley, 1974), pp. 243–255.

Jung offered a twentieth-century restatement of Paracelsus’s divine seals in nature, their discovery and application. In the New Age culture, Jungian ideas of synchronicity are now widespread in divination based on astrology, Tarot, and dream interpretation. Jung’s seminal influence on psychology, complementary medicine, and New Age forms of religiosity is a widespread phenomenon clearly representative of the “soulful” tendency of esotericism in the modern West, more receptive to spiritual than institutional forms of religious expression. 40

Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge, translated by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (London: Equinox, 2005), p. 3.

Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff presented his ideas in the form of a mythopoeic cosmogony involving a hierarchy of subordinate levels within a living universe and divides human history into two streams, conscious and unconscious, initiatic and profane. Gurdjieff regarded man as the prisoner of “identification,” whereby the sense of self is squandered in mechanical reactions to and false identification with external stimuli. The task of enlightenment, in his view, is to “awaken” to essential being and to achieve real self-knowledge.

Arthur Versluis, “What Is Esoteric? Methods in the Study of Western Esotericism,” Esoterica 4 (2002): 1–15, available at http://www.esoteric.msu. edu/VolumeIV/Methods.htm, pp. 2–3.