The Occult

Ancient Esoteric Roots

History of the Occult · 11 min read

The Western esoteric tradition did not begin in the Renaissance, and it did not begin with medieval grimoires. Its deepest roots lie in the religious and philosophical cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, where temple priesthoods, mystery initiations, philosophical schools, and visionary texts established the patterns later esoteric movements would rework. To understand the history of the occult is to understand how Egyptian temple wisdom, the so-called Hermetic literature, Gnosticism, the mystery religions of Greece and Rome, Pythagorean number philosophy, and the Neoplatonic synthesis combined to create a reservoir of symbols, practices, and metaphysical commitments that the later West inherited, translated, and transformed. The most serious academic treatment of this material is Garth Fowden’s The Egyptian Hermes (1986), which traces the entire arc from pharaonic temple culture through the Hermetic texts to the closing of the Athenian school.

Mesopotamian Background

The single largest omission from most popular accounts of Western esotericism is the Mesopotamian contribution. Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian temple cultures developed a divinatory repertoire that fed both into later Greek practice and into the Hebrew Bible. Babylonian hepatoscopy — the reading of the livers of sacrificed sheep, treated as a cosmic diagram — is documented from the Old Babylonian period (early second millennium BCE) in the bārûtu omen compendia; the Mari letters (eighteenth century BCE) and the Neo-Assyrian Reports of the scholars (ṭupšar Enūma Anu Enlil) show that liver divination, astrological omen reading, and teratomancy (reading malformed births) were integrated into the apparatus of the state. The celestial omen tradition codified in Enūma Anu Enlil (composed c. 1600 BCE and edited for over a millennium) is the ancestor of horoscopic astrology. The Akkadian purification ritual Maqlû (“burning”), in which the client is purged of witchcraft by the burning of figurines, and the Šurpu incantation series, with its long list of unforgiven sins, are the technical ancestors of the grimoire tradition. As Francesca Rochberg has shown (Babylonian Horoscopes, 1998), the Babylonian scholar-priests were the first to treat celestial phenomena as a coherent symbolic language that could be read systematically.

Egyptian Temple Wisdom

The ancient Egyptian temple was a model of the cosmos, and its priesthood was a keeper of esoteric knowledge about the gods, the soul, and the maintenance of ma’at, the cosmic order. The temple was oriented to the stars, decorated with processional scenes of ritual significance, and staffed by priests who had undergone purification rites and training as temple personnel. The extent to which Egyptian temple practice involved a graded initiation system parallel to the Greek mysteries is debated; the later Hellenistic writers read back into pharaonic Egypt a structure of mysteria that may or may not be warranted (Assmann 2001). The most famous surviving funerary text, the Book of the Dead, is a collection of spells, recitations, and vignettes designed to guide the deceased through the underworld; it presupposes a sophisticated theology in which the heart is weighed against the feather of truth, in which the deceased must name the gate-keepers, and in which the soul’s survival depends on possessing the right words of power.

Beyond funerary practice, Egyptian temple wisdom included a medical tradition (later absorbed into Greek medicine), an astronomical tradition that combined observation with religious symbolism, and a body of ritual practice aimed at the gods of the city. The cult of Thoth at Hermopolis, the cult of Isis at Philae, and the cult of Imhotep-Asclepius at Memphis fed ideas about divine wisdom, divine healing, and divine mediation that later Greek, Hermetic, and Christian traditions would inherit. It was the figure of Thoth in particular, identified by Greeks with Hermes, that gave his name to the Hermetic tradition of later centuries.

Philo of Alexandria

Between the Egyptian temple tradition and the Greek philosophical tradition stands a figure too often missing from popular accounts: Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE). Philo, a Hellenized Jew, attempted to read the Hebrew Bible through the lens of Middle Platonism, treating the patriarchs and prophets as encrypted philosophers and developing a doctrine of the Logos as the intermediary between God and the world. His De Vita Mosis, Legum Allegoriae, and the longer Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres are the most articulate surviving attempt to fuse Greek metaphysics with Jewish scriptural interpretation. Philo was a contemporary of Jesus and a near-contemporary of the authors of the early Corpus Hermeticum; the affinities between the two corpora are now well established (Pearson 1984, Fowden 1986), and the older theory that Philo “borrowed” from the Hermetic texts is no longer defensible. Anyone trying to understand how Jewish and Greek esoteric thought first met must read Philo.

The Hermetic Texts

The so-called Hermetic texts — the Corpus Hermeticum, the Latin Asclepius, the fragments of the Stobaean Excerpts, and the Armenian and Coptic Definitions — circulated under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary sage combining the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The texts range across theology, cosmology, anthropology, ritual, and magic. The Poimandres, the first book of the Corpus (πρώτη λόγος, “first discourse”), describes a vision in which the seer contemplates a great Light, descends into nature, and ascends again to the Father. Other tractates, including The Divine Pymander and Asclepius, lay out a cosmology in which the visible world is a living statue animated by the divine, and a soteriology in which the soul rises through the planetary spheres to its origin.

The texts were composed in Greek, mostly in the second and third centuries CE, though they present themselves as translations of Egyptian originals. When Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum into Latin in 1471, he and his contemporaries took the claim at face value and treated Hermes as an ancient Egyptian sage, the teacher of Moses and Pythagoras. This Renaissance picture, though shattered by the chronologies of Isaac Casaubon in his De Rebus Sacris et Ecclesiasticis Exercitationes (1614), set the tone for the later reception of Hermeticism; as late as the early twentieth century, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn continued to take Hermes Trismegistus as a genuine figure of primordial wisdom.

Gnosticism

Gnosticism, in the broadest sense, designates a family of late antique religious movements that taught salvation through gnosis, experiential knowledge of the divine. The Gnostic texts recovered in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945, reveal a startling range of schools. The Valentinians, followers of the teacher Valentinus in the second century, taught a complex emanationist cosmology in which the highest God, the Bythos, generates a chain of aeons including a fallen Wisdom, Sophia, whose error produces the visible cosmos. The Sethians, the Basilideans, and the Manichaeans each had their own variants. Common features include a critique of the creator god (often identified with the Hebrew God of the Old Testament), a doctrine of the divine spark imprisoned in matter, and a redeemer figure from the Pleroma above who descends to awaken the sleeping spark.

Gnosticism was vigorously attacked by the early Christian church fathers — Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius — and was largely driven underground or absorbed into heretical Christianities. Its influence on later Western esotericism, however, is profound. The imagery of the spark, the Pleroma, and the ascending soul entered the Renaissance Hermetic vocabulary, the Kabbalistic tradition, and the writings of theosophists in the nineteenth century. Modern scholarship treats the categories “Gnostic,” “Hermetic,” and “Neoplatonic” as overlapping but distinct, but in the reception history of Western esotericism they have often been fused. Whether the modern use of the word “Gnostic” is even historically coherent is a question Michael Allen Williams (Rethinking “Gnosticism”, 1996) has pressed hard; the older Hans Jonas / Hans Leisegang picture of Gnosticism as a unified Religion des späthellenistischen Erlösungsbedürfnisses has been substantially dismantled.

Mystery Religions

The mystery religions of Greece and Rome were initiatory cults whose rites were kept secret from the uninitiated. The most famous, the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, were celebrated for nearly two thousand years at Eleusis near Athens. Initiates underwent rites of purification, fasting, and reenactment, and at the climactic epopteia they were shown — or shown through — a great symbol and reportedly entered a state of profound encounter with the divine. The secrecy of the rites was so closely guarded that no ancient writer discloses the central revelation; the famous profanation of the mysteries by Alcibiades in 415 BCE is one of the best-attested incidents of ancient Greek religion.

The mysteries of Dionysus, of Orpheus, of Cybele and Attis, of Isis and Osiris, of Mithras, and of Samothrace each had their own ritual forms, but they shared a family resemblance: a narrative of death and renewal, a ritual drama in which the initiate participated, and a promise of blessedness in the afterlife. Some scholars, including the great historian of Greek religion Martin Nilsson, regarded the mysteries as a formative influence on the Christian ritual of baptism and the Christian narrative of death and resurrection, though the degree of direct influence is contested. The Coptic and Syriac transmissions of these traditions — in the Pistis Sophia, in the Apocryphon of John, in the Macarian homilies — are the technical bridge between the pagan mysteries and the medieval esoteric inheritance.

Pythagoras and the Pythagorean Tradition

Pythagoras of Samos, active in the sixth century BCE, founded a community in Croton in southern Italy that combined philosophical, religious, and political commitments. The community was governed by strict rules about diet, silence, and daily practice, and it is credited with developing the doctrine that “all is number,” the conviction that the underlying structure of reality is mathematical and harmonic. The Pythagoreans discovered or codified the harmonic ratios of the musical scale, the theorem that bears Pythagoras’s name in its abstract mathematical form (distinct from the empirical 3-4-5 triple that the Babylonians knew a millennium earlier and that is recorded on Plimpton 322, c. 1800 BCE), and a series of numerical symbolisms that fed later Western numerology and the Western tradition of sacred geometry, now discussed in Sacred Symbolism and Geometry.

The Pythagorean community was destroyed in the fifth century BCE by political upheaval, but the tradition continued in various forms, and Pythagorean ideas were absorbed by Plato, by the Neoplatonists, and by the Renaissance magi. The figure of Pythagoras, like that of Hermes Trismegistus, became a founder of Western esoteric wisdom, claimed by every later esoteric current as a predecessor. Charles Kahn’s Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans (2001) is a reliable short treatment; the older W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy vol. 1 (1962), is still the most readable.

Neoplatonism

Neoplatonism, founded in the third century by Plotinus and developed over the next three centuries by Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Damascius, is the most important philosophical school of late antiquity for the history of Western esotericism. Its basic scheme is emanationist: from the One, beyond all description, emanates the Nous or divine Mind; from Nous emanates the World Soul; from the World Soul emanates matter, the last and lowest level of being. The human soul is a fragment of the World Soul fallen into matter, and its task is to ascend by contemplation, virtue, and ritual back to the One. Plotinus’s student Porphyry wrote the life of Plotinus and an introduction to the Categories that became standard in medieval schools. Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis defended theurgic ritual — the use of statues, hymns, and invocations to invoke the gods — as a necessary part of the soul’s ascent. Proclus’s commentaries on Plato, especially the Platonic Theology and the Commentary on the Timaeus, supplied the systematic framework that the Florentine Academy would later revive.

The closing of the school of Athens by the emperor Justinian in 529 is sometimes read as the symbolic end of the ancient world. In fact, the Neoplatonic tradition survived in Syriac, Arabic, and Latin translations; it was transmitted to the Latin West through the partial translations of the Liber de Causis (itself derived from Proclus), through the writings of the Christian Augustine (who was a Neoplatonist before he was a Christian), and through the great Arabic philosophers al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. When the Florentine Academy under Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned Ficino to translate the dialogues of Plato, the Enneads of Plotinus, and the Corpus Hermeticum in the late fifteenth century, the full force of the Neoplatonic inheritance returned to the West.

How These Currents Fed Later Western Esotericism

By the late antique period, then, the West had inherited an unusually rich set of resources: the omens and ritual incantations of Mesopotamia, the temple wisdom of Egypt, the Philo-Judaic synthesis of Alexandria, the Hermetic texts of the Roman Empire, the Gnostic and Valentinian schools, the mystery initiations, the Pythagorean communities, and the Neoplatonic synthesis. These currents did not all survive intact into the Christian Middle Ages; the mysteries were suppressed by the Christianization of the Empire, the Gnostics were condemned as heretics, and the pagan temples were closed. But their texts, their symbols, and their metaphysical commitments survived in translation, in quotation, in the work of the church fathers, and in the underground of popular and folk practice. When the Renaissance recovered them — Ficino’s translations, Pico della Mirandola’s synthesis, the Catholic Kabbalists’ readings — it set the table for the centuries of Western esotericism that followed, including the esoteric revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Hermetic tradition of the Golden Dawn, the modern practice of ritual and ceremonial magic, and the origins of modern witchcraft.

Sources and further reading

  • Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton, 1986).
  • Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2013).
  • Kocku von Stuckrad, Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (Equinox, 2005).
  • Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton, 1996).
  • Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (Cornell, 2001).
  • Francesca Rochberg, Babylonian Horoscopes (American Philosophical Society, 1998).
  • Birger A. Pearson, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and the Christian Tradition (originally published as The Pneumatikos-Psychikos Terminology in 1 Corinthians, 1973; his later work on Hermetism and Sethian Gnosticism remains essential).
  • W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1: The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (Cambridge, 1962).
  • P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Occult in Early Modern Europe: A Documentary History (Macmillan, 2012).