A first reason is quite straightforward: there is probably no greater threat to religious conviction than the practice of historiography.
If we wish to assess the claims of believers, it is not the natural sciences that provide the ‘hardest’ evidence and the most incisive critical arguments, but the careful study of historical sources as practiced in the supposedly ‘softer’ disciplines of the humanities.
Philosophical rationalists and natural scientists have come up with sophisticated strategies both for refuting and for protecting belief in the existence of God, and no end to such debates seems to be in sight. But the results of critical historiography and philological research are often final and conclusive, in the sense that they may render foundational beliefs of specific religious traditions impos-sible to maintain without sacrificing one’s intellect.1 This is true in such mainstream domains as biblical studies, and it is true for Western esotericism as well. The most famous case concerns the dating of the Corpus Hermeticum. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was believed to be among the most ancient and hence most authoritative sources of ancient Egyptian wisdom, so that it attained a status close to ‘holy scripture’ among believers in the prisca theologia or philosophia perennis. But doubts about its antiquity began to be raised in the decades before 1600; and in 1614, the great philologist and textual critic Isaac Casaubon dem-onstrated conclusively, on the basis of strict linguistic evidence, that it could not have been written earlier than the first centuries of the Christian era.2 This was a heavy blow to the intellectual credibility of Renaissance Hermetism, from which it never really recovered.
It is a perfect example of how a grand mnemohistorical narrative, with all its far-reaching implications concerning universal meaning and enduring truth, can sometimes be destroyed by strict historio-graphical research concerned with tiny textual details.
A second reason for the resistance against historicity is more general in nature. In the context of Eranos, where the foundations were created for the religionist study of Western esotericism after World War II, the destructive (or, if one prefers, deconstructive) potentials of ‘historicism’ were recognized as a major issue, and this legacy has kept influencing researchers up to the present day.
For scholars such as Eliade or Corbin, the problem was larger than
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just the fact that cherished esoteric beliefs may sometimes be under-mined by historical findings. On a more fundamental level, they were concerned about the necessarily antithetical relation between history and (metaphysical or esoteric) Truth. They understood that the relativism ingrained in strict historical thinking would ulti-mately undermine any belief in a deeper meaning or a more uni-versal dimension of human life.3 Perhaps no scholar has perceived this as sharply, or experienced it so painfully, as Mircea Eliade. If anything that happens – the worst tragedies of history as well as its most inspiring victories – might as well have happened differently, or not at all, then history ceases to be a ‘story’ with some kind of plot that lends significance to the human quest. Instead, it seems to be reduced (in a famous formulation of John Masefield quoted by Arnold Toynbee) to ODTAA, ‘One Damned Thing After Another’:
an apparently pointless series of random events without any deeper significance, goal or direction, beginning with nothing and lead-ing nowhere, for no particular reason at all. Eliade referred to this nihilist implication as ‘the terror of history’, and spent his life fight-ing against it. After World War II, his anti-historicism made great sense to a generation that grew up in the shadow of such horrors as the holocaust, the nuclear bomb and the Vietnam war: history as such seemed like a nightmare from which they yearned to escape.
The problem that Eliade saw is a real one, and it is certainly not surprising that in the study of Western esotericism as well, one still encounters quite some scholars who would like to find some antidote against historical relativism. Many of them feel that there must be some kind of ‘hidden hand’, some kind of providential design, some kind of purpose and direction, some kind of higher guidance, some kind of ‘plot’ that gives meaning to the events of history – or at the very least, they want to believe in some kind of universal or even eternal esoteric truth, some stable and enduring
‘Tradition’ that has survived the vicissitudes of history and time, remaining as valid today as it was in ancient times. But under-standable though such hopes and wishes may be, the sober truth – recognized implicitly by all the Eranos scholars – is that they find very little support (no support, really) in the evidence that histo-rians can produce. Whether we like it or not, no hidden designs or more-than-human influences are required to account for how esoteric currents and ideas have emerged and developed through time: straightforward historical interpretations and explanations
are more than sufficient. Moreover, as we will see, everything we know about these currents contradicts the essentially conserva-tive idea of a universal Tradition or an unchanging esoteric world-view – with its hidden implication, which tends to be overlooked by its defenders, that individual creativity is of no real importance and originality should be discouraged. On the contrary, what we see in the history of Western esotericism is what we see elsewhere too: continuous and mostly unpredictable change, transformation, renewal and creative invention, carried by human beings like our-selves, who keep revising and reformulating their ideas in response to the challenges of their respective intellectual, religious, cultural and social environments. If there is any divine or sacred presence at work in this history, then it does an excellent job of hiding itself.
In sum, the relativist and potentially nihilist implications of critical historiography are real enough, and it is easy to under-stand or sympathize with the emotional resistance against them.
But respect for evidence and the force of arguments – in short, for demonstrable truth – is the sine qua non of scholarship, and must prevail whether or not one likes the conclusions to which it leads. Moreover, if it is true that historicity comes at a price, its denial comes at a price as well. Critical historiography and philo-logical research are not just instruments of destruction but have been potent forces of emancipation and liberation from established power and blind authority: we owe them much of our freedom from theological dogmatism and ecclesiastical control. Moreover, it is only by being open to the evidence for continuous change and innovation in Western esotericism that we can even begin to appreciate the creativity and originality of its best representatives.
Whether we see them as genuinely inspired or deluded (or both), they had at least the courage – sometimes at great personal costs, from public ridicule to death – to think for themselves and follow their own lights.
In the rest of this chapter we will not try to revisit all the historical transformations that Western esotericism has gone through, because most of them should already be evident from the overviews in Chapters Two and Three. We began our story in the ‘pagan’ Hellenistic culture of late antiquity, but its compli-cated further development resulted from the successive impacts of a long series of new events. A very incomplete list will at least include the emergence of Christianity; the theological campaign
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against pagan idolatry and other forms of ‘superstition’; the flour-ishing of the natural sciences in medieval Islam; philosophical innovations such as the rise of nominalism; political factors such as Islamic expansion or the expulsion of the Jews from Spain; new cultural and intellectual developments such as Italian human-ism; the dawn of printing; the advent of the Reformation and Protestant sectarianism; the exploration of the world and encoun-ter with non-Wesencoun-tern cultures; radical new philosophies such as Spinozism, Cartesianism or Kantianism; the so-called Scientific Revolution (or revolutions); the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; the separation of church and state, leading to a ‘reli-gious supermarket’; industrialization and the expansion of tech-nology; Romanticism in literature, art, philosophy and religion;
colonialism and the discovery of oriental cultures and religions;
the rise of historical consciousness and evolutionist philosophies;
the emancipation of women; the emergence of academic psychol-ogy; the study of ‘primitive’ cultures by yet another new disci-pline, anthropology; the horrors of antisemitism and political totalitarianism; the ascendency of neoliberal market capitalism and globalization and most recently, the rise of information tech-nology, virtual realities and the internet. Literally each of these innovations (and it bears repeating that the list is not complete!) has had a radical impact on Western esotericism, causing it to take on new forms and directions that would have been impos-sible to predict beforehand. This fact alone, even without any additional arguments, should be sufficient to discard any idea of a universal esotericism or an unchanging Tradition.
But even if change and transformation have always been the rule, some revolutions are more radical than others. As we already saw in Chapter One, the complicated process of ‘modernization’
(which encompasses a whole series of transformations listed above) is generally highlighted, implicitly or explicitly, as the most deci-sive of all. This is why some scholars have defined ‘esotericism’
as the prototype of pre-modern enchantment, others see it as an essentially modern phenomenon, while yet others seem to see in it a way to escape from the modern world to a timeless reality of the spirit. In the rest of this chapter, we will take a closer look at the historical processes of transformation by which pre- and early modern forms of esotericism have given way to modern and even postmodern ones.