Embed Notice

@sun @theorytoe That's a nice idea but it's not really true in the iterations that have actually existed for two thousand years.

In the early Church, there were a dozen esoteric cults where different types of secret knowledge are required, all fighting each other, then these get written out of the history in the 5th Century or so.

In the medieval church, the lineage that survives breaks into its own schools, all with secret teachings you have to accept, and if you deviate, we have to gather every bishop in the damn empire so we can figure out who to kick out of the club.

The esotericism at this point is in the monasteries, where orthodoxy is often entirely forgotten. and you has people positing things like a 4th God (and example from the remote hesychasts.) In Ethiopia, they're still in this phase. Externally, they teach monophysite Christianity, but each monastery has its own esoteric insight separate from the public teaching. (This also roughly mirrors how Buddhism worked before the modern period.)

Then you get to the Reformation and the rise of (Classical) Humanism, people try to justify a homogenous public doctrine from the oldest sources, which they do relatively well, although now everyone is bound to an unholy bloated bookcel canon that none but a few remarkable autists can possibly disentangle, but this new Christendom is dry, boring, and useless for the average man. No one really believes it except academics and low level priests, and even the academics wind up getting bored and deconstructing the whole thing.

Meanwhile the Renaissance and the Enlightenment happen, we have access to older wisdom from Greece and Egypt again, and yet another esoteric current is born underneath the "basic" Christianity at the same time, based on a mix of authentic and fake writings from Plato, Hermes, and other philosopher mystics, which becomes the occult/left hand path: Rosicrucianism, Masonry, Golden Dawn, Perennialism, and you get another mini-Enlightenment later on with Europe's discovery of Germanic and Indian religion, and those all syncretize with the 20th century esoteric Christian movements to create things like Spiritism, New Age, Thelema, Satanism etc.