A final transformation is grounded in political and economic rev-olutions since the eighteenth century. In Europe and the United States of America, the legally enforced separation between church and state made it possible for religious minorities to establish them-selves as new organizations or communities next to the traditional Christian churches. The result was a new situation of religious competition in the context of an emerging ‘free market’ of larger and smaller religions, with citizens in the role of religious consum-ers who are at liberty to follow their pconsum-ersonal preferences in pick-ing and choospick-ing what they like. Moreover, the expandpick-ing range of available options did not remain limited to more or less stable religious organizations alone, whether big or small. The emergence of a fluid ‘cultic milieu’ of spiritual seekers and consumers (or per-haps many overlapping cultic milieus) is based upon the fact that people may now make highly individual choices in matters of reli-gion, combining elements of belief or practice taken from different sources and traditions that happen to appeal to them, without a need to commit themselves to any single group or community to the exclusion of others.
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To get an analytic grip on this situation, it may be helpful to distinguish between ‘religion’, ‘religions’ and ‘spiritualities’, as follows:
Religion
Any symbolic system which influences human action
by providing possibilities for ritually maintaining contact between the everyday world and a more general
meta-empirical framework of meaning
A Religion
Any symbolic system embodied in a social institution
which influences human action by providing possibilities for ritually maintaining contact between the everyday world and a more general
meta-empirical framework of meaning
A Spirituality
Any human practice which maintains contact between the everyday world and a more general
meta-empirical framework of meaning by way of the individual manipulation
of symbolic systems
This framework is a further development of the famous defini-tion of religion proposed by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz in 1966.43 For our present concerns, the point is that it allows us to clarify a major transformation of religion under secular condi-tions, and of esotericism more specifically. All esoteric systems are examples of ‘spiritualities’: for example, Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Christianity or Jacob Böhme’s Christian theosophy are the result of their own personal, creative manipulation of available symbolic systems (mainly Platonic Orientalism and Roman Catholicism in Ficino’s case; Paracelsianism, alchemy, Christian mysticism and Lutheran theology in Böhme’s case). But before the separation of church and state, any such spirituality had to be grounded in a specific religion, in this case a Christian one: Ficino was a Catholic with his own peculiar understanding of Christianity, Böhme was a bible-based Lutheran with quite a different way of interpreting the Scriptures. In other words, ‘religion’ as such took the form of
‘religions’, or churches; and esoteric forms of religion (‘spirituali-ties’) were necessarily embedded within them.
This situation was changed dramatically by the separation of church and state in secular societies. For the first time, it became possible for esoteric spiritualities to detach themselves from organized religions and set up shop for themselves: as competing organizations invested entirely in their own esoteric belief system.
But moreover, and even more importantly, a more radical perspec-tive now began to dawn as well. It became possible for spiritu-alities to exist as entirely individual forms of syncretism without any organizational structure at all: spiritualities independent from any religions (while still recognizable as forms of religion!). The sociologist of religion Emile Durkheim had begun to perceive that trend in the early twentieth century, and understood that it cre-ated problems for his own understanding of religion as a social phenomenon. He mentioned the notion of ‘individual religions that the individual institutes for himself and celebrates for himself alone’, and even predicted that this new phenomenon might turn out to be the religion of the future: ‘Some people today pose the question whether such religions are not destined to become the dominant form of religious life – whether a day will not come when the only cult will be the one that each person freely prac-tices in his innermost self’.44 Although religious organizations or
‘churches’ have in fact remained significant factors in Western soci-ety, Durkheim’s prophecy was largely correct: it is exactly in this direction of radical individualization that religion has developed in the context of the emerging ‘spiritual supermarket’ after World War II. Much of contemporary esotericism has become entirely independent of any established religion (including esoteric reli-gions such as the Theosophical Society, Rosicrucian Orders, etc.), and manifests itself in the form of ad hoc spiritualities created by individual consumers from whatever they happen to encounter on that market.
In terms of the framework presented above, the current esoteric landscape can therefore be described in terms of three dimensions:
(1) Esoteric religion, that is the sum of all esoteric ideas and practices that are currently available for people to pick and choose from,
(2) Esoteric religions, that is larger or smaller organizations based upon some specific esoteric doctrine,
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(3) Esoteric spiritualities, that is individual mixtures of esoteric and other elements that are fine-tuned, so to speak, to the personal needs and interests of the religious consumer.
The supermarket analogy is close and instructive. There has been a time when only one or a few large Internationals monopolized the religious food market: Roman Catholicism provided white grain, Lutheranism brown wheat, and so on, but the choices were very limited (and whatever was available depended largely on the coun-try or city where one happened to be born). Enterprising individu-als might bring some variety to the menu by adding ingredients of their own, but they still baked their bread with the flour that everyone was using. Nowadays, in sharp contrast, a stunning vari-ety of foods is available on the new religious supermarket. Much of it comes ready-made for consumption: all kinds of bread are available for us to pick and choose from (we do not need to bake them ourselves, unless we want to), and it may be difficult or even impossible to find out the original ingredients from which they are made. Many kinds of spiritual food are offered with the promise that they are good for our health, will satisfy our hunger and will sustain us through the day. Some of them claim to come from old and hence reliable companies, but others advertise their novelty, or attract customers by promising exotic taste sensations. In any case, no matter how rich or confusing the supply may be, the bottom line is that it is up to us to decide what we put in our trolley at any given time.
This autonomization and individualization of esoteric spiritu-alities, in contrast to their traditional embeddedness in established religions, is a final innovation that has radically changed the land-scape of Western esotericism. Nothing eland-scapes from this new phe-nomenon, which has been referred to as the ‘heretical imperative’
(referring to the original Greek meaning of haeresis: choice),45 for even the most traditional and well-established churches are no longer self-evident foundations for how one lives one’s life: they, too, have become an optional choice among others, and even many orthodox churchgoers feel free to play with ideas (e.g. reincarnation) that are officially rejected by their community. Finally, the ‘supermarket’
metaphor is obviously more than just that: it also refers to the fact that esotericism has literally become a multi-million ‘market’ in the
real-world economy. Once again, this is something new for which no parallels exist before the nineteenth century.
As a counterweight against the tendency of seeing Western eso-tericism as one coherent and unchanging worldview or spiritual perspective, we have been looking at five radical aspects of mod-ernization: the rise to social dominance of instrumental causal-ity, the expansion of the geographical horizon of esotericism, the new theories of evolutionism, the impact of psychology on eso-tericism and the emergence of a religious supermarket of esoteric religions and spiritualities. Due to all these changes, Western eso-tericism has changed almost beyond recognition from its pre- and early modern manifestations to its modern and postmodern ones.
Nevertheless, as has been argued in Chapters Four and Five, there is still a recognizable pattern of coherence to esoteric worldviews, approaches to knowledge and practices. But as argued in Chapters One and Three, what ultimately keeps the field together as one field of study, in spite of its enormous variety through space and time, is the status of ‘rejected knowledge’ that it acquired in the wake of the Enlightenment. The modern study of Western esotericism must preserve a delicate balance between interest in what all its manifestations have in common and recognition of the many ways in which they are different from one another.