Reddit reviews The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction

http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/

Secret Teaching of All Ages (1928)

Fair warning, this is from an esoteric philosopher so there is no academic distance. As for a more of a balanced introduction with less content.

The Western Esoteric Tradition

>The noise, industrial, and esoteric circles are filled with people who have pretensions of knowing things about history, sociology, religion, philosophy, etc. But all they know is tiny smattering of fringe trivia. Robust knowledge on any of the topics they claim interest in is rare, and they have a stripped down cartoon view of history shorn of any and all context. It can be useful and enlightening to examine the fringes and the extremes and learn things about society from those, but a lot of people seem to ONLY be interested in the fringes and the extremes. To the point that they have no idea how it interacts with the larger social conversation or its place in this historical dialectic.

I would definitely agree here. The problem I think is not just that focus on the extremes; you can make good art out of the extremities of human experience, it's more the lack of depth, of any sort of intellectually serious engagement. I mean, there's two types of people interested in the occult and it's history; there's people who read books like this and this, and there's people who read books like this and this. The same with any 'dark' topic; murder, sexual fetishism, war and genocide, and so on and so on; the lurid and extreme attracts lurid and extreme writing, often penned by Garth Marenghi like characters who've 'written more books than they've read'. You need to be able to hack through the bullshit, and a lot of that comes, as you say, from having a knowledge of the broader history. I mean, I say this as someone who has made art books about true crime and the occult, for full disclosure.

> (and one single in particular, and you might know which one I mean) have REALLY put me on edge.

As you're American, I'm going to guess Klan Kountry, which I haven't heard actually. I only have a couple of their albums; unfortunately not only are they obviously either fascists or tasteless, they're not actually very good. Anenzephalia is a little better. Actually, looking at the details of that release, I can definitely see why you'd steer clear. In fact, most of the stuff on Tesco Organisation is kind of second rate, and I've heard bad things about the label generally. As for Deutsch Nepal, I'm really not sure; I've never read much about them, but the name seems to be a possible nod to Nazi mysticism, plus there's the use of swastika-like imagery on the covers of A Silent Siege and Erotikon. It's not that much, compared to some of the others, but enough perhaps.

> He would probably find it even more strange that he's so admired by a person like me who does My Little Pony fanart.

Now that, I'm sure s/he'd get completely; GPO knows the ins and outs of fannish obsession with h/er Brian Jones thing. Read the liner notes to Godstar: Thee Director's Cut sometime if you get a chance.

>I so agree. Coil...I used to be obsessed with them, and from 1999-2001 tried to gather up as much of their discography as I could. I think most of it is in my closet right now since our apartment doesn't have a lot of places to store cd's. One of my goals is to eventually go back and get as much of their complete discography as I can. I've been fascinated with them ever since I was in high school and read an interview in Trent Reznor in which he discussed how much they influenced his music. Something about what he said intrigued me, and when I finally heard them I was entranced.

My obsession goes back a similiar way for me, though I'm a touch younger than you I think...I started listening to Coil just in time for Jhon's death, but not that I could actually get to see them, which I will probably always regret. The footage of those late gigs... and of course the recordings...can you imagine having been there in the audience during the recording of ...And The Ambulance Died in His Arms? Just thinking about it gives me chills. I think they were just a perfect musical duo; Christopherson had a very sophisticated and innovative approach to electronic music, and Balance just had that...intensity. I think that's something that so many of the pale imitators in industrial and related things miss. It's one thing that has always made the best Current 93 stuff stand out to me as well; especially listening to some of the best live recordings, it's clear that, whatever else you might think about Dave Tibet (nutter, crypto-fascist, can't sing, too Christian, not Christian enough) he's really not phoning it in. His performance is so utterly demented and broken at times (Black Ships Ate The Sky is a great example) that personally I can't help but be compelled. Maybe that's a bit of a trick, but I don't think so.

>these guys actually knew a lot about art and music history, and understood a lot about modern art and why it was important. Even a guy as abrasive and intentionally silly and lo-fi as Monte Cazazza, I'm pretty sure, actually went to art school.

Yeah, Cazazza definitely went to art school; such an overlooked hero of early industrial for me. I love how damned entertaining he makes his cartoon misanthropy; If Thoughts Could Kill is a great song to listen to on the bus on a rainy morning. And of course, GPO and Cosey Fanni Tutti had been doing gallery shows and performance art as COUM Transmissions for years before TG was even a thing.

>In some way however my worry remains. Are these modern incarnations more 19th century spiritualism or new age woo woo? I can respect that these beliefs tap into an anti-ascetic desire in people and a genuine practice could result. But even new age religions like Wicca and paganism are often shallow at least compared to the complexities and depth that exists in well established age old religions. I speak as an atheist with no compassion for established beliefs, but when you give a traditional system thousands of years to parse out it's theology and practice it gains a depth unknown to recent reincarnations of religious belief. This isn't anyone's fault but it doesn't help that these beliefs are represented by some the more er floaty types in the west.

Well the New Age and 19th century Spiritualism are actually modern incarnations of far more ancient phenomena. I am referring to the field of study called "Western Esotericism" which covers ancient Hermeticism, Gnostic thought, Theosophy, Alchemy, Theosophy, Kabbalah, etc all the way down to the New Age, Spiritualism, and others. The New Age and Spiritualism are in fact rooted in this phenomenon, and cannot be properly understood without it. If you're interested the book New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought is the best book on the subject, and in it the author, a highly respected and influential scholar in the field, shows how New Age ideas are actually deeply rooted in Western Esoteric ideas, and are in fact just modern incarnations of the same. As for Wicca and Paganisn you're a little closer to the mark because there isn't much evidence for it before Gerald Gardner's creation of it (that he framed as merely a public revival of a long underground Pagan system, which historical evidence has a hard time backing up). While I understand your point that "established religions" have more time to parse out and elaborate a more consistent and rooted theology and practice, it's also true that no religion started in a vacuum, and in fact most of the time new religions just work with material already existing. We can see this with Christianity, in that it's more or less an offshoot of Judaism that adopted many Pagan beliefs involving the resurrection of god, and furthermore ancient Israelite thought owes much to the religion of the Ancient Near East as well. Buddhist thought cannot be understood outside of the shramana milieu surrounding its genesis on the fifth century BCE. My point in this is that none of these religions, even in their infancy, sprang out of thin air. Thousands of years later they're accepted as fully formed religions, but in their infancy they looked a bit more like modern day Wicca in the ways that they creatively worked with already existing material in the creation of a semi-novel worldview, in the absence of thousands of years of credibility-building. And modern Wicca and Neopaganism has the entire wealth of Europe's pagan past to work with as raw material for their own worldviews, and this chain of lineage is real for them, so as a scholar I have a commitment to study how these issues of legitimacy are dealt with in the creation of a worldview that is whole-heartedly believed in.

>My question to you since you study this is where does the occult even come from? I get that it's a combination of Kabbala, Gnosticism, and western mystical beliefs, but when did it arise and who lumped this disconnected series of beliefs together in the west? The evangelical Christian revival and romantic metaphysics movement seemed to occur at the same time in America, a time when people were furiously searching for meaning but surely someone had to "put it all together" into a practice no?

This is something I'm still trying to learn the complete history of, but reading some other books on Western Esotericism could help lay the foundation. This history is a great overview of Western Esotericism as a whole, and towards the end it discusses Kabbalah and the other components of modern day Occultism. We should keep in mind that the word "Occultism" is a word used to describe a various number of interrelated traditions, so take it with a grain of salt. Its development wasn't the work of any one person or innovator, but over the decades and centuries it subtly morphed, elaborated, and acquired new directions just like the history of Western Esotericism, and all religions for that matter. As for precise details that's something I'm working on understanding myself, but the books I mentioned should help for your general inquiries.