This volume introduces what has sometimes been called "the third
component of western culture". It traces the historical development
of those religious traditions which have rejected a world view
based on the primacy of pure rationality or doctrinal faith,
emphasizing instead the importance of inner enlightenment or
gnosis: a revelatory experience which was typically believed to
entail an encounter with one's true self as well as with the ground
of being, God.
The contributors to this book demonstrate this perspective as
fundamental to a variety of interconnected traditions. In
Antiquity, one finds the gnostics and hermetics; in the Middle Ages
several Christian sects. The medieval Cathars can, to a certain
extent, be considered part of the same tradition. Starting with the
Italian humanist Renaissance, hermetic philosophy became of central
importance to a new religious synthesis that can be referred to as
Western Esotericism. The development of this tradition is described
from Renaissance hermeticists and practitioners of spiritual
alchemy to the emergence of Rosicrucianism and Christian theosophy
in the seventeenth century, and from post-enlightenment aspects of
Romanticism and occultism to the present-day New Age movement.
General
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