The Occult World

Christopher Partridge, Christopher Partridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317596752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This volume presents students and scholars with a comprehensive overview of the fascinating world of the occult. It explores the history of Western occultism, from ancient and medieval sources via the Renaissance, right up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and contemporary occultism. Written by a distinguished team of contributors, the essays consider key figures, beliefs and practices as well as popular culture.

Part I
Ancient and Medieval Sources

Chapter One
Ancient Esoteric Traditions

Mystery, Revelation, Gnosis

Dylan M. Burns

Gar das antike Leben! Was versteht man von dem,
wenn man die Lust an der Maske,
das gute Gewissen alles Maskenhaften nicht versteht!
Hier ist das Bad und die Erholung des antiken Geistes.

(F. Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, §77)

Introduction

Ancient esoteric tradition is a modern scholarly term useful for designating currents in Hellenistic and Late Antique Mediterranean culture that are concerned with the mediation of some kind of absolute knowledge via a dialectic of secrecy, concealment, and revelation (cf. ‘esotericism’—von Stuckrad 2010: xi; for a different approach, see Hanegraaff 2012). These currents often occupy the fault-lines between ancient ‘magic’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘religion’. It is efficacious to use the second-order, etic word ‘esoteric’ to describe these myriad literary and ritual elements of ancient religious life, such as Graeco-Oriental mystery-cults, Neoplatonic theurgy, Christian mysticism and Gnosticism, Jewish apocalyptic and Merkavah literature, and more. While the contours of esoteric discourse in the Renaissance, Modern, and contemporary eras are to a large extent defined by their marginalization in mainstream religious and academic institutions, many (although certainly not all) esoteric traditions occupied central, respected and publicly acknowledged places in ancient life.

Ancient Mystery-Cults, Pythagoreanism, and Orphism

Esoteric discourse has always played a role in religious life in the West (taken here to extend to the Mediterranean basin, including Egypt, Israel/Palestine, and Syria, regions deeply Hellenized following the conquests of Alexander the Great and afterwards usually ruled or contested by Greeks or Romans through the end of antiquity). Priests in ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian religion were highly trained specialists who formed their own elite scribal culture; the disparity between their education and that of the rest of society lent them and their craft an aura of mystery, enhancing their sense of power. The iconographic nature of their alphabets was highly regarded as mysterious, powerful and even dangerous (Lenzi 2008). Egyptian mythology also offered its own analogue to the later, transcendent God of the Platonists with its descriptions of a god ‘whose name is hidden’ and paradoxically unbegotten, although his shroud of secrecy was not bound to his role as source of divinity and unity until the later second millennium BCE (Assmann 1998: 12–25). Greco-Roman philosophers would later enshrine ‘barbarian’ speech, script and emphasis on the transcendence of the deity as ‘oriental’ wisdoms contributing to Greek wisdom, often phrased as secret, ‘esoteric’ doctrine.

Greco-Roman religious life, meanwhile, was full of traditions inundated with and governed by secrecy (Martin 1995). Primary amongst these were, of course, the ‘mystery cults’, which were widespread and diverse. Nonetheless, one can distinguish general features usually found amongst them (Burkert 1987; Johnston 2004). These cults enforced secrecy of one’s experience(s) in their rites, which (ostensibly) had positive effects upon one’s existence—both during and following life—through eliciting a special encounter with a deity. They did not challenge everyday civic religion as much as supplement it, and, since they were usually open to individuals of any class, ethnicity, age or gender, they occupied a significant and public role in ancient life.

Moreover, despite the injunctions to keep the rites secret, the content of the rites themselves appears to have been something of a public secret; divulging them was not itself illegal as much as was the ‘impiety’ of profaning them in public (Heraclid. Pont. Frag. 170; Thuc. 6.28, 6.61; Martin 1995: 109). Certainly the myths connected to them were usually well-known: the Eleusinian mysteries, for instance, appear to recreate for initiates the experience of Demeter’s reactions to Hades’ kidnapping of Persephone—descent into the underworld, grief, fasting, and eventual recovery, culminating in the presentation of a symbol of life to the initiates (Hipp. Haer. 5.8.39ff Marcovich), who obtained a ‘password’ to a happy afterlife. These transformative rites resemble more than anything what anthropologists term ‘rites of passage’, practices whose performance changes a child into an adult. Such rites are strangely absent from Greco-Roman life, so perhaps mystery-cults filled this gap (Johnston 2004: 106).

In themselves the Eleusinian mysteries (like those of Mithras, Isis, the ‘Great Mother’, etc.) are of little importance for the history of ‘Western Esotericism’, because their institutions and myths perished along with other Greco-Roman cults during the rise of Christianity. The same is true of their religious competitors, Orphism and Pythagoreanism. Plato’s Socrates refers to cryptic ‘books’, associated with the primaeval musician Orpheus, invoked by wandering soothsayers to support their exhortations to a life governed by ritual purity and vegetarianism (Resp. II 364a ff). Much later, the ‘Neoplatonists’—a movement of systematizing readers of Plato, starting with Plotinus (mid-third century ce)—would quote cosmogonic poetry referred to as ‘Orphic’, the oldest body of which could go back to the sixth century BCE (West 1983). Modern reconstructions of this poetry portray an ‘Orphic’ mystery-religion whose initiates came to learn of a secret myth concerning the dismemberment of Dionysus and the birth of humankind from the blood of the evil Titans. However, the same evidence may rather indicate a family of disparate but related myths that were marketed by itinerant ritual specialists (Brisson 1995; Radcliffe 1999).

Nonetheless, even in antiquity the adjective ‘Orphic’ connoted secret teachings about salvific knowledge regarding the cosmos and human life. Archaeologists have unearthed funerary texts that interpret Orphic poetry in the context of the afterlife, or even provide instructions for successful descent into the underworld—the Derveni Papyrus and ‘Orphic’ Golden Tablets (Betegh 2004; Radcliffe 2011). Yet most cosmological poetry associated with Orpheus would not have survived but for the importance placed upon them by the Neoplatonists, who adopted him as one of their Hellenic culture-heroes. The same is true of thinkers who devoted themselves to the teachings of the mathematician Pythagoras, adopting vegetarianism, communal life, and a vow of silence (Cic. Nat. d. 1.74; Burkert 1972: 178ff). While few of their writings survive, their teachings about geometry and lifestyle exerted enormous influence over the Neoplatonists, who even composed hagiographies of Pythagoras. The incorporation of Orpheus and Pythagoras into the ranks of the Platonic authorities, not any particular ‘esoteric’ teaching, made them attractive to admirers of the Greeks in later eras. Similarly, the content and rites of the ‘mysteries’ themselves may have been lost, but the accounts of their salvific importance and esoteric trappings provided ample fodder for later, ‘esoteric’ thinkers who sought to ‘revive’ what they thought ancient, Pagan wisdom to be.

Magia, Superstitio, Theurgia

The concept of ‘magic’, too, obtained part of its ‘esoteric’ valence in the modern world by virtue of its association with ‘Paganism’, yet some forms of ancient private ritual life can be aptly described as ‘esoteric’ in the same sense as the secret rites of salvation we find in the mystery-cults. Private ritual practices aimed at alleviating disease, cursing enemies, or obtaining one’s desires by supernatural means were commonplace in the ancient world. However, thanks to the rise of new ways of organizing knowledge (like ‘philosophy’ and ‘medicine’) in the sixth century BCE, Greeks began to use the set of terminology that we would commonly translate today as ‘magic’ (magia, goeteia, etc.) to denote and distance these competing ritual specialists (Graf 1995). Meanwhile, Greek ‘religion’ was largely a public, civic affair. Rituals were usually carried out as part of greater festivals that reinforced the bonds between a local municipality, its greater political sphere, and the gods. Even at home, worship remained decidedly exoteric—a public custom shared with the community. This religious exotericism was based in part upon the depth of belief in supernatural powers: prayers and rites that were uttered or conducted in secret were assumed to be motivated by selfish, or even anti-social concerns.

The subversive nature of ‘magic’ was twofold, insofar as it appeared to come from the east and to reside in the private, and therefore potentially criminal, sphere—indeed, ‘magia’ is a Persian word, and ‘goetia’ initially referred to Persian funerary laments, which were imagined by the Greeks to possess necromantic efficacy (Aesch. Pers. 684–88). Thanks to Greek influence, the Romans, too, stigmatized private ritual practice. While the mystery-cults were generally not seen as magical sects, they could be targeted when it was politically convenient, as with the crackdown (186 BCE) on a cult of Bacchus in Rome, on charges of secret orgies, cannibalism, magic, and conspiracy against the state (Liv. Hist. 39.8–19). In the following century, Romans began using the term superstitio to denote foreign or private religions in Rome, in juxtaposition to the civic cult (Martin 2004: 130ff), replicating the double stigma of magic in Greek culture as alien and secret. One of these was Christianity, a barbarous ‘superstition’ shrouded in the mystery of its closed meetings in house churches (Plin. Ep. 10.96). Christians would be accused of secret, conspiratorial activity in charges recalling those leveled against the Bacchants of Cicero’s day (ibid.; Min. Fel. Oct. 8; Orig. Cels. 1.1, 1.3). Apologists replied that the Christian churches were innocent political clubs (collegia)—private, but safe (Ter. Apol. 39).

Nonetheless, mystery-cults grew in popularity under the Roman Empire, as worship of ‘oriental’ deities—most famously, Isis, the ‘Great Mother’, and Mithras—spread far and wide. Our knowledge of these mysteries is slight, but the paradigm of a ritual drama plunging the initiate into darkness before a restoration to new, greater life, as we saw at Eleusis, held enough currency to be used by Apuleius of Madaura in our only first-person (albeit fictional) description of (Isiaic) initiation (Metam. 11). Nor did private ritual specialists cease operations; some went corporate, as when an Egyptian priest accompanied Emperor Marcus Aurelius on a German campaign (Cass. Dio 72.8.4).

The sands of Egypt have preserved spells used during the Hellenistic and Roman periods which offer a window into the ancient marketplace of private ritual life (Betz 1992; Meyer/Smith 1994). Many charms possessed an esoteric force through their use of the medium of the written word. While estimates of the degree of ancient literacy in everyday society vary widely (anywhere from .5 per cent through 10 per cent, before allowing for the ‘semi-literate’—Humphrey 1991), the culture of writing, largely limited to the aristocratic and priestly strata of society, possessed an iconographic beauty and mystery to the unlearned. The allure of letters was particularly intense in Egypt and Mesopotamia, where scribal culture was doubly sacred and whose alphabets were seen as unintelligible but potent symbols even to educated Greeks and Romans (e.g. Plot. Enn. 5.8.6). The efficacy of many spells is therefore premised upon the power of decorative arrangements of letters in shapes, strings of vowels to be chanted (Dornseiff 1925), and especially so-called nomina barbara (PGM III.1–164, IV.3007–86)—foreign or nonsensical words simulating the powerful holy tongues of Egypt, Syria and Israel (Corp. herm. 16.1–2). Other spells could be regarded as ‘esoteric’ insofar as they do not grant practical benefits, as much as abstract knowledge of or a mystical confrontation with the transcendent God (PGM IV.1115–66, VII.756–94; Betz 1995), which can even bestow immortality (as in the so-called ‘Mithras Liturgy’—PGM IV.475–829).

The Neoplatonists drew from this wellspring of Graeco-Egyptian magic and the fetish of ‘oriental’ wisdom in formulating a ritual culture premised on the practice of ‘divine works (theurgy)’. Iamblichus of Chalcis (ca. 300 CE) theorized these practices aimed at facilitating the ascent of the soul by adopting the pose of an Egyptian priest in an exchange of letters with his elder contemporary, Porphyry of Tyre (Shaw 1995; Clarke et al. 2003). Porphyry, following his teacher Plotinus, believed that the soul communed with the divine intellect, and therefore needed to avoid engagement with the world in order to practice contemplation; Iamblichus responded that the soul had fully descended into matter, and must navigate and master the cosmos by means of proper symbolic manipulation of objects (Iamb. An. 6–7; Damasc. Comm. Phaedo 105). His admixture of Neoplatonic metaphysics, valorization of Hellenic culture (particularly Pythagoreanism and Orphism), and ‘orientalizing’ ritual trappings (drawn from the Middle Platonic hexameter poetry of the Chaldean Oracles) proved to be popular and effective at a time when Hellenic philosophers sought to define themselves against Christianity. Julian the Apostate (361–63 CE) attempted to institutionalize theurgic cult during his brief reign (O’Meara 2003: 120–24), and the Neoplatonic school persisted in rituals like the animation of statues up through its closing by the Emperor Justinian in 529 CE (Proc. C...