To speak of the marginalisation of occultism during the 20th century in Western culture is not to suggest that it was insignificant. For example Occult mentalities definitely permeated New Age spirituality. Admittedly, those who frequented New Age circles were more likely to hear talk of karma and kundalini than of Boehme's Three Principles or his seven fountain-spirits. What passes for native American and Celtic spiritualities was also popular in such circles. When these cultural forms are examined closely, however, it can be seen that they embody a similar structure of ideas to traditional esotericism.

This came also with specific forms of ‘Christology’ an example of which is The Da Vinci Code.

Occultism started with the belief there was a "hidden" side to the Bible plus the belief they could recover the language of paradise, Adam’ prelapsarium Natursprache, the "Catholique language" in which there was no disjunction between sign and thing signified. Often, this involved little more than the splendidly Gothic gobble­degook of pseudo-Cabalism and Gematria, the hidden "code" of the Bible.

In line with these esoteric numbers of the Renaissance, today we have for example Michael Drosnin who, in his Bible Code books, claims that "details of today's world are encoded in a text that has been set in stone for hundreds of years, and that has existed for thousands of years. Drosnin argues that what he calls the "plain text"-the ordinary, historically grounded meaning of the Bible-actually points to the deeper meaning hidden in code, the secret revelation found in the plain text of the Bible. The specific insights of such ‘Esoteric Science’ again contradict those of the Revealed Word.
 

Renaissance scholars in the Esoteric-Hermetic tradition hoped to discover the common core of all religious experience. The goal of their researches into the ‘occult traditions of the ancients’ was a single world religion centered on mystical experience, guided by secret teaching and led by a priesthood of magi or spiritual masters. Or as John G. Burke, has written of the Dominican monk Giordano Bruno shared the feelings of his contemporary esotericists that there should be one universal religion, but it was not a reformed Christendom that he desired. Instead, it was a return to the worship of an imagined ancient Egypt as described in  Hermetic literature.

In the 20th century Frithjof Schuon and Huston Smith have claimed the presence of an esoteric and mystical core at the heart of all faiths. Carl G. Jung and Joseph Campbell, in apparent agreement, call to affirm the centrality of a direct experience of the spiritual realm to the world's great faiths. Even Marcus Borg makes Jesus a "spirit person," an individual with a peculiar capacity for encountering that realm, as also does "A Course in Miracles": Case Study 1.

Revealed Word proponents have long argued that history provides their perspective with an objective foundation that serves to ground spiritual claims in verifiable events, a commitment that also serves to limit theological speculation.

The postmodernist New Age position , in turn is again that  of an Esoteric-Gnostic Synthesis, away from history and toward myth, away from physical events and toward  symbols, away from verifiable occurrences and toward imaginative narratives.

But clearly, spiritual books sell, as do spiritually oriented seminars, movies and an ordinary array of personal spiritual products ranging from clothing to candles: Case study 2.

This originated with a magical worldview Neo-Platonic/Hermetic/Occult thought. The cosmos was secretly coded and would reveal its secrets only to the diligent seeker after truth. Numbers, sometimes revealed by spirits or daemons, were the cosmic encryption method that needed to be broken. Thus, the Neo-Platonic esoteric philosopher held to a "mystical reverence for numbers, not a wholesome respect for practical mathematical techniques.

Neo-Platonist Hermetic occultists, selected objects of study on the basis of their potential for yielding personal power. This view encouraged secrecy and an interest in the occult for its own sake by which a work of art was seen as a magical emblem or a coded message for the initiate.

And here "scholar­ship" became a secret enterprise to benefit a privileged elite. Drawing on an ancient Pythagorean principle, the Platonic (an actual school that existed in Florence) academy's goal was to preserve its secrets for the favored few.

Neo-Platonism held that the human soul was spirit held captive in matter. Historians  R. G. Collingwood and Eric Voeghelin in turn, interprets the rise of fascism and National Socialism in the twentieth century as the direct result of the popularity of the neopaganism in the late 1800s that worshipped the power of the human will and that, in turn, arose to fill a spiritual vacuum created by this very eclipse of faith in orthodox Christianity.

It is therefore not surprising that the two first reactions to The Da Vinci Code below, are written from a "Christian"  revealed religion, point of view.

Millenarianism was a virtually universal characteristic of esotericism, although not all occultists were inclined to see themselves as actually living in the Last Days. It was  typical of the occult milieu, to regard the millennium as being imminent. Jacob Boehme made several prophecies intimating the imminence of the Last Days, and in 1697 one of the Philadelphians estimated that the millennium would occur about 1700. Such expectations were premature, but, despite a long history of disappointment, occultists never wearied of examining the signs of the times and concluding that "The judgements of God" on a perverted and corrupt world have begun.

Other observers of Western culture have warned against the advent of spiritual systems that. jettison a sovereign God and elevate a divine man or race a look towards Ubermensch or Superman.

Spiritual elitism, then, is an essential aspect of the Esoteric-gnostic impulse. L. Ron Hubbard wrote that humans are embodied alien beings called Thetans who were banished to earth 75 million years ago by a cosmic tyrant known Xenu. Once this hidden truth about our nature is recognized, a process known as "auditing" can begin to undo the damage done by the Thetans within. In Hubbard, ideas first expressed in science fiction are seamlessly transformed into a worldwide religion with affinities to Esoteric-Gnosticism, not unlike "Star Wars" and "The Matrix."

In the 1960s Carlos Castaneda described his apprenticeship with a Yaqui Indian shaman named don Juan in an enormously popular series of books that were read by hundreds of thousands of university students.  Castaneda's training involved in part the use of the hallucinogen peyote and techniques for conjuring spirits. Case study 3.

Another proponent of  Neo-Platonist Esotericism, Gary Zukav, while simultaneously confirming Eastern religious thought.  writes, "the study of complementarity, the uncertainty principle, 'quantum field' theory, and the 'Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics' produces insights into the nature of reality very similar to those produced by the study of  eastern philosophy."

Frequent Oprah Winfrey Show guest Gary Zukav takes for granted the existence of "nonphysical Teachers" who come to us from "levels of Light" that are beyond our immediate perception.'' These "impersonal consciousnesses" are often involved in instructing human beings in the higher spiritual truths, such as the evolutive nature of the cosmos and the fundamental unity of all things. In other words, these spirit beings accept some of the basic tenets of the New Religious Synthesis and are here to reach them to us. "This is not their home, so to speak. They are teachers to our plane. They are free to reach in our plane without being of our plane." That these Teachers can come to us in our plane without becoming one with our plane is a result of their having transcended duality altogether. They live in the plane of the ultimate unity of all things, and this "is simply the natural dynamic of evolution." Zukav assures his readers that "as you evolve beyond duality, and also when you leave your physical body and journey home to your nonphysical plane of reality.

Regarding the Esoteric-Gnosticism  mentioned in The Da Vinci Code as a religious subculture one could say that Western esotericism has often been perceived as a semi-autonomous and more or less coherent movement or subculture; and as such, it has often been presented as distinct from, or opposed to, Christianity or Modernity.

Suffice it to say, the occult believer is ready to leap into the deep past to find truth, trusting in the dictum that first is best. The very old cultures, such as Stonehenge and Egypt, are felt to be hoary with wisdom. Even the people who built Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid may have had motives other than those assigned by modern occultists. With practices such as astrology, alchemy, and theosophy, one can rely on practitioners who self-consciously embrace recognizably occult principles, but is it proper to identify ancient Egypt as an occult culture simply because it attracts modern occultists? The answer, of course, is no. Better to try to understand it on its own terms, insofar as we can grasp them. Surprisingly, however, some of those terms have an occult quality. This is not to agree with modern New Agers who argue, for example, that pyramids focus cosmic energy. The similarities or connections are to be found instead at the assumptive level, which most New Agers miss completely because they little appreciate the broad shifts in thought introduced by modern science.

After the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, the occult started in many instances to incorporate the discourse of science, hypnotism, spiritualism and theosophy adapted a scientific posture.

Spokespersons of The Da Vinci Code tradition, frequently refer to their teachings as a modern manifestation of a tradition dating back to renaissance hermeticism, or reaching back still further to a supposed Gnosticism, or  pythagoreanism and orphicism. Links to premodern epochs however are in fact very  tenuous, due to a radical modernization of these earlier traditions.

Specific aspects of the post-Enlightenment religion in the West will be directly or indirectly marked by the Enlightenment project making. Thus Judaism has had its haskalah and its split into orthodox, conservative and liberal groups. There are Muslim modernisms. Even Mormonism, that representative of a stern literal belief in revealed teachings, bears the unmistakable stamp of Enlightenment thought. In their encounters with potential converts, Mormon missionaries will typically point to a scriptural rationale for belief. One is urged to read the Book of Mormon, "and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost". An elite group of Mormon, intellectuals, thus, discusses issues such as the archaeological and linguistic evidence supporting the Book of Mormon. Similarly, the esoteric current (esotericism), as Antoine Faivre termed it thirty years ago, has its von Daenicken’s (amusement park) commonly taking the context of the post-Enlightenment for granted.

So although esoteric texts mainly appear as the result of ongoing de- and re-contextualizations (that allow new synthesis between different notions to take place) substituting traditional religious concepts of ‘belief’, with claims of "well documented facts" (example The Da Vinci Code). In spite of the occult-esoteric disregard for critical rationalism, the epistemological roots of what today is also called “New Age spirituality”, that in spite of a kind of  cultural critique against modernism,  came to express itself in the style and strategy of  modernism.

However its central epistemological conceptualizations  of  tradition, (pseudo-)science, and ‘experience’, in fact  coincides with those of Romanticism (see  Introduction).

Mistakenly formulated by Francis A. Yates as ‘a tradition’ but graduating academics currently researching this new subject, emphasize that the changes that have taken place in ‘esotericism’ during the last two centuries, represent a massive adaptation to the requirements of the modern secular context.

To exemplify this, I will  present the first ever overall, study of the occult revival at the cusp of the 20th century of  not only in England, but also in Germany and France.

Via the ‘Matrix’ that will be explained further down then, it becomes possible to identify the connections between the thematically related, but historically separated, religious traditions that make up the so called "occult-esoteric", one of the aspect of which of course is also syncretism.

One of the most read esoteric books the previous 115 years no doubt was “The Secret Doctrine” (available for free on the internet) studded with snide remarks against Judaism as well as Christianity. It however, left a small opening in the generally unfavorable review of the Christian faith. Before his teachings were corrupted by the church, Jesus had included elements of the perennial philosophy in what Blavatsky described as his secret teachings. The "real" Christ was thus distinguished from the figure of the Bible.

Few Esoteric writers are unproblematically positive towards Christianity. Edgar Cayce springs to mind as a prime example of a person who combined faith in Biblical inerrancy with the propagation of  unorthodox beliefs.  Cayce's professed belief in a variety of esoteric topics is analyzed in a case study further down this web site.

These transformations from etic to emic history takes place despite the existence of readily available information from non-esoteric sources. And two mechanisms  represent plausible factors in this process. Firstly, a strongly held conviction is a powerful filter against unwanted information. Secondly, emic historiography is often constructed and accepted in the context of what might be called peripheral religion, evidenced by The Da Vinci Code.