Spirituality and the Occult

Brian Gibbons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134541485
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Spirituality and the Occult argues against the widely held view that occult spiritualities are marginal to Western culture. Showing that the esoteric tradition is unfairly neglected in Western culture and that much of what we take to be 'modern' derives at least in part from this tradition, it casts a fresh, intriguing and persuasive perspective on intellectual and cultural history in the West. Brian Gibbons identifies the influence and continued presence of esoteric mystical movements in disciplines such as:
* medicine
* science
* philosophy
* Freudian and Jungian psychology
* radical political movements
* imaginative literature.

1 Introduction

The term ‘occult spiritualities’ may be misleading to the modern reader. It popularly conveys a notion of devil-worship, a misperception which is not fortuitous. Esoteric thought represents a heterodox theology which orthodox thinkers demonised because they sincerely, but mistakenly, believed it to be demonic. A spurious justification could be found for this mistake in the fact that occult thinkers tended to believe not only in the possibility, but also in the legitimacy, of various forms of magic. Early modern occultism flourished at a time when magic was being redefined as a heresy constituted by the renunciation of God in favour of the Devil.¹ The archetypal image of the occult philosopher is Faustus, the semi-legendary German magus who sold his soul to the Devil in order to gain ‘a world of profit and delight’.² Marlowe's English version of the Faust legend may in fact have involved a conscious attack on one of the earliest and most popular of Renaissance occult philosophers, Agrippa von Nettesheim.³

Most of the victims of the early modern repudiation of magic had only a tenuous link with the occult philosophy as such. The popular mentality involved what has been called an ‘untutored Spinozism’ or ‘a simple, unintellectual type of neo-Platonism’.⁴ The village wisewomen who were condemned as witches may have shared much of the world-view of esoteric thinkers, since the underlying principles of magical practice are identical to those of occult thought in general. Magic, as Marcel Mauss argued, depends on the laws of contiguity, similarity and opposition,⁵ which also happen to be the structural principles of esotericism. What differentiates the witch from the occultist is that whereas in the case of traditional witchcraft it is necessary to infer these basic principles of magic from observed behaviour, the occult philosophers developed them quite consciously within the context of their theological system.⁶

Mauss's argument, that ‘on the whole it is the men who perform the magic while the women are accused of it’ ,⁷ may not be quite true in terms of who practised magic in early modern Europe, but it was certainly women who were most persecuted.⁸ Occult thinkers themselves seem to have been remarkably free from persecution. Some ended their days as martyrs for their faith, like the Behmenist poet Quirinus Kuhlmann, who met his death at the stake in Moscow in 1689. As late as 1795 we find Cagliostro dying in a Roman dungeon after falling foul of the Inquisition.⁹ Many, like Jacob Boehme, doubtlessly suffered from the petty harassment of their more orthodox neighbours. Boehme's case also shows the flip-side of the coin, since in his later days he was surrounded by admiring members of the petty nobility and the urban élite.¹⁰ Increasingly, however, the occult philosophers had little to fear except the ridicule of their contemporaries. The biting sarcasm of Butler and Swift may not have been pleasant, but it was surely preferable to the more savage wit of the hangman.¹¹

With Butler and Swift we are rapidly approaching the Enlightenment. That supposed Age of Reason may not have been as dedicated to the rational as is sometimes assumed, or indeed as the lumières themselves liked to pretend.¹² It is no coincidence that the centres of the German Enlightenment were also ones of Pietism, a religious movement thoroughly permeated by occult mentalities. Both the Pietists and the Aufklärer emphasised individualism, tolerance and the primacy of ethics over dogmatic theology.¹³ Despite the assumption that the magical worldview entered into terminal decline after the seventeenth century,¹⁴ the occult philosophy continued to exert its influence throughout the eighteenth century,¹⁵ and it was to enjoy a notable recovery in nineteenth-century Romanticism, which was largely ‘a revival and secularization of the earlier occult religious philosophy of the Renaissance’.¹⁶ But if the occult philosophy survived the Enlightenment intact, and even revitalised, it was not unscathed. Ridicule takes its toll, and the eighteenth century witnessed the beginning of the process whereby the occult philosophy came to be seen as marginal to mainstream culture. Since the nineteenth century, its marginality may in fact have constituted its most important social feature for both its adherents and its opponents, transforming it into a protest against the hegemonic culture. In the early modern period, however, the occult philosophy was a central expression of both élite and popular mentalities. It was not without its opponents, who certainly carried the day as far as history is concerned. Nevertheless, it has left a lasting imprint on our own culture, so much so that it can be regarded as one of the major sources of modern understandings of what it means to be human.

This assertion is most obviously true in a purely negative sense. Any group of people gains its sense of identity and coherence not merely by asserting its own positive values and assumptions, but also by defining itself in terms of what it is not. We might say the same of the Other as Voltaire said of God: if it did not already exist, a culture would have to invent it. Mainstream Christianity in early modern Europe was constituted partly by constructing others (including occultist illuminés) as heretical. Similarly, the accreditation of Enlightenment rationalism was achieved in part through its distance from supernaturalism and superstition; the philosophe was a lumière because he was not an illuminé. This argument can be broadened to encompass the intellectual origins of Western Christian civilisation as a whole. After all, Christian orthodoxy and the canon of books that legitimated it were established in contradistinction to Gnosticism,¹⁷ a world-view which happens to be one of the more important ancestors of early modern occult philosophy.

This does not mean that there was a direct influence of Gnosticism on early modern occultism. The ancient Gnostic texts had been successfully suppressed after the Emperor Theodosius I established the spiritual monopoly of Christian orthodoxy in AD 381.¹⁸ Gnostic texts were known to the occultists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries through the fragments preserved by heresiographers like Irenaeus, but this context in itself made it difficult for purely Gnostic thought to be adopted openly. The taint of heresy was less pronounced in relation to a related body of pagan writings, those attributed to Hermes Trismegistus.¹⁹ Composed mostly in Greek between the second and third centuries of our era, the Hermetic writings incorporated both Gnostic and Neoplatonic elements. The Hermetic texts were recovered for use in the West by Marsilio Ficino in the 1460s, and they were henceforth to be one of the major sources of European occultism.²⁰ By this time, another offspring of ancient Gnosticism was beginning to exert its influence on Christian intellectuals: the Jewish Cabala. Christian interest in Cabalism can be found from the thirteenth century onwards, in the writings of men like Joachim of Fiore and Alfonso Sabio, but it was really Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in the 1490s and subsequently Johann Reuchlin who introduced a thoroughgoing Christian Cabalism.²¹ Throughout the early modern period, it has been argued, ‘some knowledge of cabala was part of the equipment of every scholar in every part of Europe’.²² Another means of transmission of Gnostic thought can be found in alchemy. From its first appearance in Egypt onwards, alchemy involved mystical elements alongside the attempt to transmute base metals into gold. Much of the ancient Greek alchemical tradition was lost to early Western Christendom, but it was preserved and developed by Arabic alchemists like Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber). From the twelfth century, Arabic alchemical works began to be translated into Latin, and there was a consequent revival of alchemy in Western Europe.²³ Despite Titus Burckhardt's opinion that alchemy after the Renaissance ‘had a fragmented character’ and that ‘as a spiritual art, the metaphysical background was lacking’,²⁴ from the sixteenth century the mystical aspects of alchemy became more pronounced, and a purely spiritual alchemy evolved.²⁵

Another source of early modern occultism can be found in the Christian Neoplatonic tradition, especially in the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius.²⁶ Platonism was a vital aspect of much Christian thought throughout the early Middle Ages, and later esoteric thought has much in common with writers like John Scotus Eriugena.²⁷ Apart from his own writings, Eriugena can be credited with the Latin translation of the works of the pseudo-Dionysius, making them accessible to later Western thinkers.²⁸ This Platonic Christianity suffered something of a set-back after the recovery of Aristotle's works in the twelfth century, but elements of the earlier outlook were preserved in the writings of Albert the Great. After Albert, this tradition was reinforced in the thought of Johannes Eckhardt.²⁹ Although Eckhardt was condemned as heterodox, his work was continued by other Rhenish mystics, notably by Heinrich Suso, Johannes Tauler and the unknown author of the Theologia Germanica. This mystical tradition underwent a revival during the Reformation. Luther himself published an edition of the Theologia Germanica, and this was to become a major text in sixteenth-century Protestant spirituality.³⁰

Christian Neoplatonism takes us back to a final set of influences on occult thought: ancient Greek philosophy.³¹ Plato has an obvious importance here, especially Plato seen through the eyes of Plotinus.³² The Presocratic thinkers were also of some significance. Empedocles bequeathed the idea of the four elements to Western culture as a whole; more particularly, his notion of the cosmos as an eternal process of constitution, dissolution and reconstitution, governed by the opposing forces of Aphrodite (love) and Ares (strife), finds echoes in esoteric thought.³³ This aspect of Empedoclean thought harmonises with Heraclitus's concept of reality as flux, an idea which also found an afterlife in the occult philosophy.³⁴ In Parmenides the occult philosopher could find the counterbalancing doctrine of the One as the only true reality.³⁵ Of the Presocratics it was Pythagoras who had most impact on esoteric thought.³⁶ Reuchlin's De arte cabalistica, after all, is as concerned with recuperating Pythagoreanism for Christianity as it is with developing a Christian Cabala.

These Presocratic thinkers expounded different and contradictory systems, but the illuminists tended to regard them as complementary. Occultists took a thoroughly eclectic attitude to their sources, constructing their own philosophies with the debris of ancient thought. It was without any apparent embarrassment that Reuchlin wrote about the Cabala in order ‘to make Pythagorean doctrine better known to scholars’.³⁷ It has been argued that ‘when Hermeticism is used to mean a particular attitude of mind towards nature or a particular intellectual sensibility, it is just too vague a term with which to come to grips’.³⁸ The objection would seem to be all the greater when talking about an ‘occult philosophy’ which somehow embraces not only Hermeticism, but also Neoplatonism, alchemy, Cabala and so on. Offensive as this might be to those with tidily organised minds, the fact is that there was such a philosophy, and its untidiness and vagueness are not a licence for supposing it out of existence. What has been called (in reference to Giordano Bruno) ‘an apparently haphazard eclecticism’³⁹ is part of the data to be analysed, not a reason for refusing analysis.

These, then, are the major sources of early modern occultism. It is, however, slightly misleading to speak of a single occult philosophy in early modern Europe. We can (in principle at least) distinguish traditional alchemy from Hermeticism, or Cabalism from Neoplatonism, even if these jumbled themselves together in most occultists’ minds. The occult philosophy had a distinct Northern and Southern inflection, and had a different character in Eastern Europe than it did in the West. It inevitably assumed a slightly different complexion under the hands of a Lutheran, a Calvinist or a Catholic. Sometimes we find the sages toadying in the courts of emperors, and a stone's throw away discover them busily turning the world upside down. The occult philosophy, moreover, undoubtedly changed over time. William Blake's thought was not identical to Jacob Boehme’s, nor Boehme's to that of Paracelsus, however much the three men may have had in common. This is true even if we confine ourselves to a single writer. The Boehme of 1624 is not quite the same man as the youth who, a quarter of a century earlier, apprehended God in the shimmeri...