Published in the Nouvel Observateur Hebdo 2/12/2004 —
Nouvel Observateur: The dazzling success of Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code, which has sold a million copies in France and to which you have just dedicated a book ("The Da Vinci Code: The Investigation" by Robert Laffont (1)), like the growing interest in Kabbalah, astrology, numerology, or even the public's fascination with Freemasonry and secret societies, reveal a fantastic craze for esotericism. But what exactly do we place under this generic term and what is the origin of this somewhat enigmatic word?
Frédéric Lenoir : The word esotericism is indeed a catch-all word that covers very disparate things. We must begin by distinguishing the adjective "esoteric" from the noun "esoterism." The adjective predates it and comes from the Greek "esôtirokos," which means "to go inward." It is the opposite of "exoterikos," "toward the outside." We already find this dual notion in the Greek schools of wisdom, notably in Aristotle, where a distinction is made between the "inner" teaching given to advanced disciples and the "outer" teaching transmitted to the crowd. Esoteric teaching is therefore aimed at the "initiated." All religions will thus develop teachings for the masses and teachings for elites. Bergson speaks in this regard of a "static religion" and a "dynamic religion." Static religion is linked to dogma, morality, and ritual. It is aimed at the mass of the faithful. Dynamic religion is mysticism, the impulse that carries certain individuals toward the divine. In this sense, we can say that mysticism is the inner path, the esoteric dimension of the great religious traditions. It is Kabbalah in Judaism, Sufism in Islam, the great Christian mysticism of Teresa of Avila or Meister Eckhart, etc. (see boxes on p. 10).
And what about the word “esotericism” itself?
The noun "esotericism" was only invented in the 19th century. It appeared in 1828 under the pen of an Alsatian Lutheran scholar, Jacques Matter, in his Critical History of Gnosticism, and designates a current of thought located outside of a specific religion. Esotericism becomes a world in itself, a nebula. There have been a thousand definitions of esotericism. Specialists like Antoine Faivre or Jean-Pierre Laurant rightly speak of esotericism as a "view" rather than a doctrine and attempt to identify its main characteristics. We can identify four or five. Esotericism aims first of all to reunify knowledge present in all philosophical and religious traditions, with the idea that, behind them, lies a primordial religion of humanity. Esotericism thus almost always refers to a golden age where human beings possessed knowledge that was then diffracted through the different religious currents. Another fundamental trait: the doctrine of correspondences. This doctrine affirms the existence of a continuum between all parts of the universe, in the plurality of its levels of reality, visible and invisible, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large. It is this idea that founds the practice of Alchemy (see insert). It starts from the postulate that Nature is a large living organism traversed by a flow, a spiritual energy that gives it its beauty and its unity. However, only magical and esoteric thought can elucidate the mysteries of this enchanted Nature. Finally, the last element is the central place of imagination as a mediation between man and the world. More than through his rational intelligence, it is through his imagination and symbolic thought that human beings will connect to the depths of reality. This is why symbols are at the very foundation of esotericism.
But religions are full of symbols, so why look for them elsewhere?
Because in the West, religions have gradually lost their symbolic dimension! They have favored logical thought, dogma, and norms over symbols and mystical experience. In the history of Christianity, the 16th century marks a fundamental break with, on the one hand, the birth of the Protestant Reformation, which constitutes a critique of mythical thought, and on the other, the response of Catholicism with the Counter-Reformation, implemented at the Council of Trent, which developed a catechism, that is, a set of definitions of what must be believed. It is an extraordinary theological lock that no longer leaves room for mystery, experience, or the imagination, but intends to explain and define everything based on Thomistic scholasticism. At present, we are still not out of religion/catechism. For most people, Christianity is first and foremost what one must believe and not believe, what one must do and not do. We are very far from the Gospel and the sacred. This is why some seek the sacred within religions in mystical-esoteric movements, or outside of them, in esotericism, that is to say, in parallel currents that emphasize symbolic thought. Today, we are witnessing, at very different levels, a public interest in these two types of spiritual paths.
Can we say that one is more “noble” than the other?
Since it exists outside of traditions, esotericism has been able to generate, alongside very profound thoughts, sectarian delusions and phantasmagoria of all kinds. It is for this reason that esotericism has a bad reputation among the intellectual community. The esoteric character of religions is, on the other hand, much less discredited, because it concerns an "elite" supposedly interested in the deepest, most interior, and therefore most authentic aspects of religion. This does not prevent certain traditional movements, such as Kabbalah or Sufism, from having representatives today who resemble gurus and offer a cheap – but sometimes very expensive – spirituality that flatters the most narcissistic inclinations of individuals under the guise of high-end spirituality.
Although the word dates back to the 19th century, it is often said that Pythagoras was the founder of esotericism. How far back can we trace the history of esotericism?
Pythagoras was the first to conceptualize the idea that there is a universal harmony and sacred mathematics at work in the universe. He thus laid the foundations for esoteric thought. But it was around the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, at the end of Antiquity, that esotericism truly emerged, with Gnosticism and Hermeticism. According to the Gnostics (see box), earthly existence is a terrible punishment, the fruit of an original fall, and only knowledge (gnosis), transmitted by initiation, will allow man to become aware of his divine nature. Hermeticism, for its part, asserts that "as above, so below," and that there are laws of analogy between the part and the whole, between the microcosm and the macrocosm. Astrology is a good illustration of this. This art, as old as the first civilizations, postulates that there is a correlation between human events and cosmic events (comets, eclipses) or the movement of the planets and offers a symbolic interpretation.
These are theories which, until today, will experience many resurgences.
Because the history of esotericism operates in successive waves. During the Renaissance, gnosis and hermeticism were rediscovered. The rediscovery of ancient Greek texts, and in particular the text of Poimandres in the Corpus Hermeticum, translated by Marsilio Ficino in 1471 at the request of Cosimo de' Medici, caused an incredible shock. This text constitutes, in fact, a true synthesis of ancient thought, from Pythagoreanism to Neoplatonism. Renaissance thinkers believed it predated all these schools of wisdom, predated Moses himself. They therefore interpreted it as proof that there existed a primordial tradition that unified all the knowledge that was subsequently dispersed. This tradition was traced back to Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary figure who was said to be linked to the Egyptian god Thoth. It would be discovered a century later that, in fact, the Corpus Hermeticum dated from the end of Antiquity.
What a disappointment!
Huge! But this first moment of the Renaissance showed a desire on the part of the first humanists to bring together the great wisdoms of humanity, starting from the idea that they all stem from a primordial tradition that is generally located in Egypt. To cite just one name, Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) is this extraordinary figure who thought he could achieve universal knowledge by synthesizing the texts of antiquity, the Christian faith, and the Jewish Kabbalah.
But ultimately it was scientific thought and the philosophy of the Enlightenment that would prevail.
Absolutely. Esotericism will then become nothing more than a counter-current to dominant thought. The first modern thinkers still combine science and the sacred, reason and the imaginary, including Descartes, who claims to have received his famous method in a dream, which will constitute the paradigm of experimental science! But the West is embarking, including within religions, on a rationalist path and we end up compartmentalizing the domains of the sacred and reason. Imagination and symbolic thought no longer have their place: we are thus definitively breaking with the world of symbols inherited from the ancient world and the Middle Ages. More profoundly, Western man is definitively tearing himself away from Nature, which he no longer considers magical or enchanted, but as a world of observable and manipulable objects. He is no longer an "inhabitant of the world" as the Ancients understood it, but gradually becomes "master and possessor of nature," as Descartes proclaims in chapter 6 of his famous Discourse on Method. We are witnessing a sharp acceleration in the process of "disenchantment of the world," as Max Weber famously put it, which means that the world has lost "its magical aura" and has become a cold world of objects. Through the process of rationalization, man is gradually cutting himself off from nature and no longer considering it as a living organism whose flows he can manipulate through magic or alchemy.
When does this process of rationalization and disenchantment of the world begin?
Weber does not say so, but in my book The Metamorphoses of God(2), I put forward the hypothesis that it begins at the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, when hunter-gatherer man settled in villages. A whole series of stages then shows this progressive tearing of man from nature, which leads to his disenchantment. Let us note that the elaborate religion of Judeo-Christianity is already in itself a loss of magic. The priest replaces the magician, we no longer seek the fluids in nature or to be reconciled with the spirits of trees and animals, but we invent ritual and observe an ethical life to save our souls. This may seem insane to an atheist today, but religion is already a process of rationalization and this is why Marcel Gauchet will support the very pertinent thesis according to which Western modernity was born from the matrix of Christianity before turning against it.
What are the consequences of this seizure of the power of reason and this tearing of man away from Nature...of new surges of esotericism and magical thinking?
Yes, because the idea of a completely demaged, demythologized world is something difficult to assume for human beings who possess within them a formidable imaginative capacity. Man is distinguished from animals by his capacity to symbolize things, that is to say, to associate separate elements. This gave birth to art, writing, religion. The simple fact of seeing signs, the impression that there is no chance, of being disturbed by synchronicities, corresponds to this fundamental need to bring mystery into the world, magic in the broadest sense of the term. In the 20th century, the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and the anthropologist Gilbert Durand would show that what is condescendingly called "the return of the irrational" is in fact a return of the repressed in contemporary man who needs myths and symbols. …
How did this first wave of re-enchantment manifest itself in the Age of Enlightenment?
First, there is Illuminism, a movement founded by the Swedish scholar Emmanuel Swedenborg based on his visions and which profoundly influenced many thinkers, including philosophers of the Enlightenment. It was a kind of affective religiosity that did not start from an analysis of the text but from an inner emotion. And then there is Franz Mesmer's magnetism. During scientific experiments on magnets, Mesmer observed that someone else could be magnetized by touching them. He concluded that an invisible fluid inhabits nature and that it could be manipulated to heal or move objects. Twenty years before the French Revolution, the thesis achieved colossal success. And even today, touchurs, bonesetters, magnetizers, and other healers are legion.
When did the secret societies that so excite the public imagination begin?
From the beginning of the 17th century, a century earlier. They highlight the fundamental notion of initiation. The Rosicrucian Order is one of the first secret societies of the modern age, a precursor to Freemasonry. It is an anonymous text that mysteriously appeared in 1614 in the Habsburg kingdom that reveals the existence of a fraternity of followers, charged with transmitting the memory of an equally mysterious knight of the 14th century, Christian Rosenkreutz, whose mission was to unify all the wisdoms of humanity in preparation for the Last Judgment. The Rosicrucian myth is inspired by that of the Templars, this military and religious order founded for the Crusades and whose rule of life was written by Saint Bernard in 1129. He was persecuted by the King of France Philip the Fair with the support of the Pope. On Friday, October 13, 1307, one of the most incredible police operations of all time took place: all the Templars of France were arrested at dawn in their commandery, tortured, and massacred. Since the death at the stake of the last Grand Master of the Order, Jacques de Mollay, in 1314, the Western imagination has been haunted by this belief in the knowledge and occult powers of the Templars.
Isn't Freemasonry in fact inspired by the Templars?
Freemasonry is undoubtedly more directly inspired by the Rosicrucians. But its history is little known. In the Middle Ages, the masons who built cathedrals were those who possessed knowledge of symbols, and therefore of the esoteric dimension of Christianity. From the beginning of the 18th century, cathedrals were no longer built, Christianity became more rationalized, and esoteric knowledge began to be lost. The transmission of knowledge then began to be organized in circles of initiates, and in 1717, the first Grand Lodge of London was created. A few decades later, Freemasonry would give itself a very ancient legitimacy and trace its roots back to the Temple of Solomon via the Templars... who would have become the heirs of this ancient wisdom during their stay in Jerusalem.
So secret societies and Freemasonry are the great reactionary movements against the progress of rationalism and a materialist vision of the world?
Only the beginnings. The real revolt would come later, with the formidable intellectual, literary, and artistic ferment of German Romanticism, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Romanticism, born from the posterity of Sturm und Drang, was the first great collective movement to re-enchant the world, a full-scale challenge to the materialistic, mechanistic, and disenchanted conception that prevailed in modern Western civilization. "Poetry is absolute reality," says Novalis. That is to say, the more poetic something is, the more true it is. It's an extraordinary vision of the world! According to the Romantics, in fact, man, the cosmos, and the divine are in close relationship and constitute a harmony, an infinite totality. Man's quest is to achieve this unity by experiencing the intensity of these relationships internally and socially. In this sense, poetic activity and sensitivity contribute to the re-enchantment of a world deprived of its charms by a commercial modernity. The Romantics will rehabilitate myths and folk tales (the Brothers Grimm) and the idea of the Soul of the World, the anima mundi of the Ancients, inventing a science of Nature, Naturphilosophie, which aims to be an alternative to experimental science which is based on a univocal conception of reality: there is only one level of reality, the one that can be observed and manipulated. We find this philosophy of nature echoed in many poets up to Baudelaire: "nature is a temple where living pillars..." (Correspondences). The first Romantics were part of secret societies. Then they turned to the East, whose religious and philosophical depths were beginning to be discovered in Europe. In 1800, Friedrich Schlegel stated: "It is in the East that we must seek supreme Romanticism." » The same scenario as during the Renaissance is then reproduced: they idealize a mythical Orient whose sacred texts they believe date back several thousand years and are well before the Bible. The discovery of the Orient responds to the romantic dream of a golden age of humanity perpetuated to the present day in a civilization radically different from ours, wild, primitive and pure of all materialism. We will quickly become disillusioned as knowledge of the real Orient takes precedence over the orientalist dream and the romantics will lose their battle against rationalism, materialism and mechanization.
And then comes the second great wave of esotericism, in the 19th century, when the word itself appears.
The esotericism of the mid-19th century inherited from all previous esotericisms – esotericism of Antiquity, the Renaissance, the 18th century, the Romantics – but it stood out strongly from its predecessors by embracing the idea of progress and by wanting to reconcile religion and science in a single body of knowledge. This new esotericism would take several expressions. For example, that of occultism, of which the magician Eliphas Levi (1810-1875) was the great theoretician, and which intended to bring together all magical and divinatory practices by providing a pseudo-scientific explanation. It was also the birth of Spiritism, in 1848, in a small village in the United States, with the Fox sisters who conducted experiments of contact with the dead that were intended to be quasi-scientific. In Europe, the French medium Allan Kardec played a decisive role by codifying the practices of Spiritism in "The Book of Spirits." It was he who also introduced the idea of reincarnation to the West, according to the modern idea of progress: Spirits reincarnate from body to body according to a universal law of evolution of all creation. Thus, curiously, in the second half of the 19th century, which marked the triumph of scientism, most of the great creators, from Victor Hugo to Claude Debussy, including Verlaine and Oscar Wilde, turned the tables to get in touch with the dead or indulged in occult practices.
Another expression of this "modern" esotericism will be the Theosophical Society. On September 8, 1875, in New York, a woman from the Russian nobility, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), founded the Theosophical Society with Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907). A medium, she claimed to draw her teachings from spiritual masters she had met in Tibet, which is absolutely false since it has been proven that she had never been to the Land of Snows. But by evoking the masters of Tibet as the last custodians of humanity's primordial religion, she gave rise to the myth of "magical Tibet," populated by lamas with supernatural powers. Theosophist Rudolf Steiner, in 1912, left the Society and founded his own movement, Anthroposophy, which would help to energize the universe of this esoteric counterculture. For anthroposophy, the world and man respond to each other through a play of subtle correspondences. Steiner's genius was to give practical applications to his thinking, in medicine, economics, education... For example, he developed biodynamic agriculture.
From the First World War onwards, esoteric societies seemed to disintegrate?
The first half of the 20th century was so deadly that all these parallel spirituality movements were crushed. It was not until the 1960s that a new attempt to re-enchant the world emerged. This is what has been called the New Age wave, which took off in California and intended to unite Western psychology with Eastern spirituality by seeking to connect man to the cosmos. But like the esotericisms that preceded it, this new alternative religiosity is more turned towards the future than towards the past and the myth of the lost Eden: it announces the entry into the New Age of Aquarius, the only astrological sign representing a man and not an animal and which symbolizes the advent of a universal humanist religion. What is remarkable about the New Age is that in the era of mass media, it spreads, well beyond the circles of initiates, the ideas of esotericism in global society: the divine is no longer personal but identified with a sort of "soul of the world", an energy, the famous "force" of Star Wars; there is a transcendent unity of religions which are more or less equal; the essential thing is to experience the divine in oneself; there are universal correspondences and intermediary beings, such as angels or the fundamental spirits of nature etc.
These are powerful ideas that are still appealing today and have recently been taken up by cinema and literature.
And with what success! Why do you think Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist" has sold in more than 140 countries? Because it reformulates the old concept of the world soul by linking it to modern individualism. The book's leitmotif is that "the universe conspires to realize our personal legend," that is, our dearest wishes. Most of the great contemporary bestsellers are in the esoteric vein: The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or The Da Vinci Code, which synthesizes all the theses we have just mentioned! Dan Brown's book is captivating. But it is also typical of works that present the best and worst of esotericism. The best, because it inspires dreams and restores a symbolic dimension to religion, the worst because it sometimes distorts symbols from their true meaning and gives completely erroneous information, as we show in our book.
Dan Brown directs us towards a somewhat adulterated esotericism and, in addition, he instills doubt in his reader to awaken his old paranoid reflexes, of the type "the truth is being hidden from us"...
It actually plays on an old spring of esotericism which is the conspiracy theory. Esotericism, as I said, was formed on the fringes of the Churches, which have always fought it because of its subversive power. To counter the attacks of the official Churches, esotericists have built a defensive position which consists of saying: religions seek to stifle us because we hold a secret truth that they do not want to reveal to you. The argument is seductive, very demagogic, and it was certainly one of the keys to the success of The Da Vinci Code. But let's not be too harsh, there are also some very true things in the book, such as for example Christianity's repression of the sacred feminine. And I think that we must also give thanks to esotericism in general for having brought an element of feminization of the divine. For the esoteric ideas of the world soul, of the immanence of the divine or of its emanations are typically feminine archetypes.
This is indeed a salutary work, but do not these conspiratorial and irrational theories contain the seeds of real dangers?
Of course, some of them lead straight to a typically sectarian ideology: we are the chosen ones, the small circle of initiates who possess the only truth while all the rest of humanity wanders in ignorance. Others, which insist on the idea of a primordial tradition and criticize all modern progress, often have far-right flavors. All are threatened by serious irrational excesses. In the sect of the Order of the Solar Temple, for example, the murderous excess was legitimized in the name of the "invisible masters" of the Templars! For weak minds, there is a real risk of disconnection from reality. Umberto Eco, as a good semiologist, has made in his first two novels the best critique I know of interpretive delirium. In The Name of the Rose he denounces the interpretative delirium of a religious nature: the monks interpret the crimes committed in their monastery as a fulfillment of the prophecies of the Apocalypse. In Foucauld's Pendulum, he portrays esoteric madness.
We can therefore see the return (or rather the permanence) of esotericism in our modern societies as a worrying sign of the need for magic and the irrational. We can also see it as an attempt to rebalance in modern Western man his imaginative and rational functions, the logical and intuitive polarities of his brain. Should we not admit once and for all, as Edgar Morin has been constantly reminding us for forty years, that the human being is both sapiens and demens? That he needs, to live a fully human life, reason as much as love and emotion, scientific knowledge as myths? In short, to lead a poetic existence.
Interview by Marie Lemonnier