But esotericism in the emic sense, i.e. as perceived by esoteric writers, is a constructed tradition. All started with the hope that since the Bible is the word of God, the ‘kaballah’ must be God’s  ‘secret’ doctrine.  From here Renaissance scholars regarded kaballah as a “philosophia perennis” which comprised both pagan and Judeo-Christian teachings.

Or as Hakan Hakansson in “Seeing the Word”( 2001) nicely describes it on hand of John Dee and Renaissance Occultism: “Christian kabbalah quickly distanced itself from its Jewish origin, developing its own concepts into an increasingly complex body of beliefs.” (p.175)

Another important element of this development was the belief established in the scholastic tradition, that the Egyptian Hermes had anticipated key aspects of Christian doctrine, including the decline of paganism and the advent of the "son of God”.

Thus when the monk, Leonardo da Pistoia, brought a manuscript containing 14 Greek dialogues attributed to Hermes Trismegistus to Florence. He presented it to his patron, Cosimo de Medici (1389-­1464), who immediately ordered a translation from one of his favorite scholars, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). But the impact "imaginary Egypt" on Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and other Renaissance authors, who all assumed that Greek wisdom originated with the Egyptian priests and the Chaldean (Zoroastrian) magi did not make Hermetists from all of this as Frances A.Yates in the misleading presumptions of  a “Hermetic Tradition”.

For example Yates identified Pico della Mirandolla 's magia naturalis with Hermetism.

On closer look, in the Oration and Apology Pico provides us with a long list of magicians who might be reasonably viewed as the sources of this side of his thought. The only one  who is not listed as a magician is Hermes Trismegistus, and the one clear reference to Hermetic magic in Pico's early works is a negative one, in the Apology, where Pico repeats a complaint from William of Auvergne's concerning the Egyptians' use of illegal magic invoking demons. Going to Pico's source, we find that William's target was a famous passage on enticing demons into idols found in the Hermetic Asclepius-a text that Yates viewed as a central catalyst in the Renaissance magical revival.

Significantly, none of the ten conclusions that Pico attributes in his Theses to Mercury Trismegistus contains any of the astrological magic that Ficino associated with that figure. And, in Pico's posthumously published Disputations against Divinatory Astrology, magical works attributed "by some" to Hermes are treated with scorn.

Pico employed related esoteric methods that involved anagrammatic manipulations of Scriptures, drawn from Raymond Lull and Abraham Abulafia plus their commentators.

The Heptaplus implies that Pico's ars combinandi involved precise transformation rules, but in practice these reduced to more or less free permutations of letters if not indeed to automatic writing inspired by God. In effect, using these techniques any required reading could be gotten from any text.

Most important Pico syncretically fused gematria with other numerological techniques in his ‘way of numbers’ (via numerorum), leading "to the investigation and understanding of everything knowable."

Pico and Ficino both however were esotericists (in the sense described above) evidenced by  broader syntheses later popularized  magical handbooks like Agrippa von Nettesheim's .This phenomenon  was not dependent on the recovery of any privileged set of Hermetic  texts, as most recently has  been erroneously claimed in  “Talisman” by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval.

A lot of this is  illustrated  in Agrippa von Nettesheim's De occulta philosophia, a standard sixteenth-century handbook of magic that drew heavily on Pico's thought. In the ancient and medieval magical traditions, here the sympathies and antipathies of imitative magic were sometimes pictured as forces operating solely in the sublunary realm; sometimes as images of more powerful forces in the celestial, angelic, or intelligible worlds; or occasionally as reflections of still higher powers in the ideas in the mind of God. Thus Agrippa mentions  that  Zacharias writes to Mithridates, that "a great force and the fates of men he in the powers of stones and herbs. Thus the Academics with their Plato attribute these powers to the formative ideas of things, but Avicenna attributes operations of this sort to intelligences, Hermes to the stars, Albert to the specific forms in objects.  Although these authorities seem to contradict one another.

Rather an attempt will next be made to identify the connections between the thematically related, but historically separated, religious traditions that make up the so called "occult-esoteric".

For example different philosophical traditions found its most extravagant expression in Agrippa's De occulta philosophia, in which figures like Pythagoras, Plotinus, Aristotle, Solomon, Moses, Lull, Zoroaster, Hermes, Orpheus, Avicenna, Thomas Aquinas and Merlin (and for the first time also the Knights Templar) were invoked side by side as authorities on the magical arts

The changes that have taken place in ‘esotericism’ since then, continued to represent a massive adaptation to the requirements next, of the modern secular context.

Thus if anything can be said with certainty, it is that esoteric texts appear as the result of ongoing de- and re-contextualizations (that allow new synthesis between different notions to take place) Today this occult potpourri or “cultic milieu” has provided a perennial source for Western alternative religious inspiration, including both contemporary Western paganism and New Age spiritualities.

As evidenced by the Da Vinci Code, there has been a  tendency of this emic historiography to become  intimately linked with  geographical locations. First  there where Pyramids, later  sites like Stonehenge and Glastonbury in England, Mt. Shasta in northern California, or even Sedona, Arizona. And  in the  Da Vinci Code  smaller places like Rosslyn Chapel or Rennes le Chateau start taking on major roles. Other books on these places even  interlinked them with ley lines, UFO’s flying overhead (Rennes le Chateau is said by author van Buren, to have a special UFO landing site), and today attract large numbers of New Age ‘seekers’ that will only get more once the Da Vinci movie is out.

As a little case study for pattern recognition and sacred archeology, Katherine Maltwood was deeply interested in the symbolism contained within the Holy Grail In particular she was intrigued by the French medieval story known as the High History of the Holy Grail (or Perlesvaus). Its author claimed he had copied it from a Latin book kept in the "holy house of religion" on the island of Avalon, where King Arthur and Queen Guinevere were buried. This had to mean Glastonbury, as it was here in A.D. 1190 that the monks claimed to have uncovered Arthur's and Guinevere's bones . And if Avalon were Glastonbury, Maltwood wondered, could the adventures of Arthur's knights on the quest for the Holy Grail be traced through the hills and marshes of the Somerset countryside?

One foe encountered by the Grail-questing knights was a ferocious lion, so Maltwood was intrigued to notice on a modern map of the area that the twisting course of the Cary River (south of Glastonbury, near her summer home) resembled the underside of a lion seen in outline, from its ribs to the front part of the hind leg and foot. Smaller streams running into the Cary River seemed to supply more of the lion's shape, such as nose, mane, and tail, with the details of the face being suggested by ancient trackways and earthworks. Looking at the map with new eyes, she was soon able to see a whole series of figures in the courses of rivers and streams, tracks, and field boundaries.

After further study of both maps and aerial photographs, Mrs. Maltwood was able to make out a dozen giant zodiacal figures up to 6,000 feet in length (with some extra symbols) laid out in the hills, rivers, and fields to the south and east of Glastonbury. These she compared in terms of their scale to the giant effigy mounds of the United States (see Introduction to this chapter). There was even a pattern in the layout of the figures-the cold winter signs fell in the northern half of the layout and the warm summer signs in the southern half, with ten of the signs in the correct zodiacal order. It has been argued by Maltwood's followers that the likelihood of this arrangement arising by chance is an impressive 1 in 149 mi'llion, or even an incredible 1 in 479 million.

Beyond the circle of zodiacal figures itself was an additional figure that Mrs. Maltwood dubbed the "Great Dog of Langport" and interpreted as a guardian effigy for the whole vast undertaking. Here, as with other figures, place-names provided a measure of support for the identifications. For example, a number of places around the Great Dog contain the word cur, including the Curry River, North Curry, and Curland.

The scale of the work involved in creating the figures seems even more remarkable given the early date that Maltwood arrived at for the Somerset Zodiac. She used astronomical alignments apparently incorporated in the figures to date her "Temple of the Stars" to either 2, or 2000 B.C., back in the Neolithic (New Stone Age). On linguisr. grounds she identified its builders as metal prospectors from the gre,.urban civilization of Sumer in southern Mesopotamia (Iraq), %%+ named their new country Somerset in memory of their homeland. Thousands of years later, Maltwood believed, the Somerset Zodi became known as "King Arthur's Pound Table." This link comes from another medieval French Grail romance, the Queste de Saint Graal, written around A.D. 1200, which says that Merlin created the Round Table to symbolize the stars and planets.

Katherine Maltwood's insights concerning this lost history of the Somerset landscape were not widely believed outside esoteric circles, even though she published several short books on the subject. After she emigrated with her husband, a wealthy businessman, to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in Canada, her theory was largely forgotten.

Then, in the 1960s, Maltwood's zodiac was revived along with many other alternative archaeological ideas. Ganda!f~ Garden, a magazine named after the wizard in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, contained an article by Mary Caine that brought the Somerset figures to the attention of a wider public, and one more receptive to unconventional thinking. Since then the Somerset Zodiac has become firmly established in alternative archaeological circles as a topic worthy of discussion. Indeed, other giant zodiacs have subsequently been identified at some twenty sites in Britain, including Winchester and Kingston field, while the eye of Capricorn was simply a haystack.

This explains why these features later disappeared from view. Occasional elements making up the Somerset Zodiac figures seem to exist only at certain times of the year, such as the shadow made by the hill of Glastonbury Tor in the depths of winter, which shows up very clearly on aerial photographs and has been incorporated within the zodiac as the throat of the Aquarius "phoenix "

More worrying are the many lines in the figures that are formed by field boundaries, drainage ditches, and roads dated to the last few hundred years. While followers of the zodiac theory argue that these features all perpetuate significant points in the landscape, this seems hard to believe in many cases: the western wing of the Aquarius phoenix was created from a new road laid after 1782 to run around the town of Glastonbury (older maps dating back as far is the 1620s showing that this road had no predecessors); the front leg of Leo is formed by a road diverted during the construction of a new railway line in 1905; the Cancer boat is made up of a network of straight paths and drainage ditches created in the late eighteenth century after a large area of wetland was drained.

Looking at the general landscape of this area in the Neolithic, to which the Somerset Zodiac has been dated, we know from the remains of plants and animals preserved in local peat deposits that the environment of this largely low-lying area was, from 3000 B.C. onward, dominated by a treeless bog of stagnant pools separated by areas of moss, cotton grass, and heather. There were occasional wooden trackways, fragments of which miraculously still survive in the peat, snaking through the bog, avoiding the pools, but none of the known Neolithic tracks match up with the lines of the zodiac figures. Had the deep, straight drainage ditches marking the figures existed back in the Stone Age, then there would have been no bog or trackways. Nor could there have been an Isle of Avalon at Glastonbury set among the wetland, as it was in medieval times. The landscape was completely transformed by the drainage ditches dug in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Ironically, it was Mary Caine's own work in reviving the Somerset Zodiac in 1969 that most clearly showed the fundamental weakness of the whole theory. In her improvements to the zodiac she turned Scorpio upside down, added a monk into Gemini and altered the outlines of Capricorn, Libra, and Leo. While these were sincere efforts at refining a scheme she felt to be basically correct, it shows how little there is to prevent wholesale changes to Maltwood's original vision.

The Somerset Zodiac thus appears to be a classic product of wishful thinking. Certain lines on the landscape have been joined together to make figures not because there is anything special about those lines, but because they fit into a pattern that the interpreter sees there. Rather like the inkblot tests once so popular among psychiatrists, anything can be read into the lines on a map, the result depending on the observer rather than on the landscape itself.

In conclusion to the previous, one,i t is not apparent to suppose that anyone in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries was a pagan, in the sense of rejecting Christianity and adopting a pre-Christian religion. Or as Lucien Febvre in “The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century”  put it, after 400 pages of irrefutable argument, "It is absurd and puerile, therefore, to think that the unbelief of men in the sixteenth century, insofar as it was a reality, was in any way comparable to our own. It is absurd, and it is anachronistic."(p.460). Rather people then and now, "dreamed" (then, by placing  fashionable statues in their gardens) of a ‘cosmetic’ paganism.

And it is also not surprising that we find for example images of “Hermes Trismegistus” also in Churches as is the case with the following pictures taken in the Netherlands

But while nurturing a longing for the world of antiquity and a subconscious affinity for the divinities, the fact was that there was no such thing  as a  ‘secret faith’ or a esoteric or/and occult ‘tradition’ (initiates) or as understood in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church of an ongoing, succession of  bishops and priests. This in spite of the fact that also the ‘esoteric’ has its ‘traditionalists’ like for example Rene Geunon. And also the esoteric three such examples of occult churches found in France during the 19th century are given further down this Da Vinci Matrix page.

But there is no direct succession, from for example from the Knights Templar among any, Freemasonic or esoteric groups. Central to all of these stories is  the ‘occult revival’ at the beginning of the 20th century.