Published in Le Nouvel Observateur Hebdo 2/12/2004 —
Nouvel Observateur: The runaway 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" published by Robert Laffont (1)), as well as the growing interest in Kabbalah, astrology, numerology, and the public's fascination with Freemasonry and secret societies, reveal a fantastic enthusiasm for esotericism. But what exactly do we include under this generic term, and what is the origin of this somewhat enigmatic word?
Frédéric Lenoir : The word esotericism is indeed a catch-all term that encompasses very disparate things. We must begin by distinguishing the adjective "esoteric" from the noun "esotericism." The adjective predates the noun and comes from the Greek "esôtirokos," which means "to go inward." It is opposed to "exoterikos," "outward." We already find this dual notion in the Greek schools of wisdom, particularly in Aristotle, where a distinction is made between "inner" teaching given to advanced disciples and "outer" teaching transmitted to the masses. Esoteric teaching is therefore addressed to 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 addressed to the mass of believers. Dynamic religion is mysticism, that impulse that draws 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 a Teresa of Avila or a Meister Eckhart, etc. (see boxes on p.).
And what about the word "esotericism" itself?
The noun "esotericism" was only coined in the 19th century. It appeared in 1828 in the writings of an Alsatian Lutheran scholar, Jacques Matter, in his *Histoire critique du gnosticisme* (Critical History of Gnosticism), and designates a current of thought situated outside of any specific religion. Esotericism becomes a world unto itself, a nebulous entity. Indeed, there have been countless definitions of esotericism. Specialists like Antoine Faivre and Jean-Pierre Laurant rightly speak of esotericism as a "perspective" rather than a doctrine and attempt to identify its main characteristics. Four or five can be highlighted. Esotericism aims, first and foremost, 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 when humankind possessed knowledge that was subsequently disseminated through various religious currents. Another fundamental characteristic is 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. This idea underlies the practice of Alchemy (see inset). It starts from the premise that Nature is a vast living organism traversed by a flow, a spiritual energy that gives it its beauty and unity. Only magical and esoteric thought can elucidate the mysteries of this enchanted Nature. Finally, the last element is the central role of the imagination as a mediation between humankind and the world. More than through rational intelligence, it is through the imagination and symbolic thought that human beings connect with 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 prioritized 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 Catholic response with the Counter-Reformation, implemented at the Council of Trent, which developed a catechism—that is, a set of definitions of what one must believe. This is an extraordinary theological lock that leaves no room for mystery, experience, or imagination, but seeks to explain and define everything based on Thomistic scholasticism. Even today, we are still trapped in this religion/catechism framework. For most people, Christianity is primarily about what to believe and not to believe, what to do and not to do. We are very far removed 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, to varying degrees, a growing public interest in both of these types of spiritual paths.
Can we say that one is more "noble" than the other?
Because it exists outside of established traditions, esotericism has been able to generate, alongside profound thoughts, sectarian delusions and all sorts of fantasies. This is why esotericism has a bad reputation among the intellectual community. The esoteric character of religions, on the other hand, is much less discredited, because it concerns an "elite" supposedly interested in the deepest, innermost, 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 watered-down—but sometimes very expensive—spirituality that panders to individuals' most narcissistic tendencies under the guise of high-end spirituality.
Although the word dates from the 19th century, Pythagoras is often said to be the founder of esotericism. How far back can we trace the history of esotericism?
Pythagoras was the first to conceptualize the idea of a universal harmony and a 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 result of an original fall, and only knowledge (gnosis), transmitted through initiation, will allow humankind to become aware of its divine nature. Hermeticism, for its part, affirms that "as above, so below," 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, posits that there is a correlation between human events and cosmic events (comets, eclipses) or the movement of the planets, and offers a symbolic interpretation of it.
These are theories which, even today, have experienced many resurgences.
Because the history of esotericism unfolds in successive waves. During the Renaissance, Gnosticism and Hermeticism were rediscovered. The rediscovery of ancient Greek texts, and in particular the Poimandres text in the Corpus Hermeticum, translated by Marsilio Ficino in 1471 at the request of Cosimo de' Medici, caused an incredible shock. This text constitutes a true synthesis of ancient thought, from Pythagoreanism to Neoplatonism. Renaissance thinkers believed it to predate all these schools of wisdom, even Moses himself. They therefore interpreted it as proof of the existence of a primordial tradition that unified all the knowledge subsequently dispersed. This tradition was traced back to Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary figure supposedly linked to the Egyptian god Thoth. It would be discovered a century later that the Corpus Hermeticum actually dated from the end of Antiquity.
What a disappointment!
Incredible! But this early phase of the Renaissance revealed a desire among the first humanists to reconcile the great wisdom traditions of humanity, based on the idea that they all stem from a primordial tradition generally located in Egypt. To name just one, Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was this extraordinary figure who believed he could attain universal knowledge by synthesizing the texts of antiquity, the Christian faith, and Jewish Kabbalah.
But ultimately, scientific thought and the philosophy of the Enlightenment prevailed.
Absolutely. Esotericism then became merely a counter-current to the dominant thought. The first modern thinkers still combined science and the sacred, reason and imagination, including Descartes, who claimed to have received his famous method in a dream—a method that would become the paradigm of experimental science! But the West, even within religions, embarked on a rationalist path, and the domains of the sacred and reason were ultimately compartmentalized. Imagination and symbolic thought no longer had a place: a definitive break was thus made with the world of symbols inherited from the ancient world and the Middle Ages. More profoundly, Western man definitively detached himself from Nature, which he no longer considered magical or enchanted, but rather a world of observable and manipulable objects. He was no longer an "inhabitant of the world" as the Ancients understood it, but gradually became "master and possessor of nature," as Descartes proclaimed in Chapter 6 of his famous Discourse on the Method. We are witnessing a sharp acceleration of the process of the "disenchantment of the world," to use Max Weber's famous phrase, meaning that the world has lost its "magical aura" and become a cold world of objects. Through the process of rationalization, humankind is gradually cutting itself off from nature and no longer considers it a living organism whose flows can be manipulated through magic or alchemy.
When does this process of rationalization and disenchantment of the world begin?
Weber doesn't say so, but in my book *The Metamorphoses of God* (2), I hypothesize that it begins with the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, when hunter-gatherer humans settled in villages. A whole series of stages then demonstrates this progressive detachment of humankind from nature, leading to its disenchantment. It's worth noting that the elaborate religion of Judeo-Christianity is already, in itself, a loss of magic. The priest replaces the magician; people no longer seek spiritual fluids in nature or attempt reconciliation with the spirits of trees and animals, but instead invent rituals and observe an ethical life to save their souls. This may seem absurd to a modern-day atheist, but religion is indeed already a process of rationalization, and this is why Marcel Gauchet supports the very pertinent thesis that Western modernity was born from the matrix of Christianity before turning against it.
What are the consequences of this takeover of reason and this separation of man from Nature…new surges of esotericism and magical thinking?
Yes, because the idea of a world completely devoid of magic, demythologized, is difficult for human beings to accept, given their formidable capacity for imagination. Humans are distinguished from animals by their ability to symbolize things, that is, to associate separate elements. This gave rise to art, writing, and religion. The simple act of seeing signs, the impression that there is no such thing as chance, the intrigue of synchronicities, corresponds to this fundamental need to introduce mystery into the world, to magic in the broadest sense of the term. In the 20th century, the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung and the anthropologist Gilbert Durand demonstrated that what is condescendingly called "the return of the irrational" is in fact a return of the repressed within contemporary man, who needs myths and symbols
How did this first wave of re-enchantment manifest itself in the Age of Enlightenment?
First, there was Illuminism, a movement founded by the Swedish scholar Emanuel Swedenborg based on his visions, which profoundly influenced many thinkers, including Enlightenment philosophers. It was a kind of emotional religiosity that stemmed not from textual analysis but from an inner feeling. Then there was the magnetism of Franz Mesmer. During scientific experiments with magnets, Mesmer observed that one could magnetize another person simply by touching them. He concluded that an invisible fluid pervades nature and that it could be manipulated to heal or move objects. Twenty years before the French Revolution, this theory achieved enormous success. And even today, healers, bone setters, magnetizers, and other practitioners are legion.
When did the secret societies that so excite the public's imagination originate?
From the early 17th century, a century earlier. They revived the fundamental notion of initiation. The Rosicrucian Order is one of the first secret societies of the modern age, a precursor to Freemasonry. An anonymous text, mysteriously appearing in 1614 in the Habsburg kingdom, revealed the existence of a fraternity of adepts tasked with transmitting the memory of an equally mysterious 14th-century knight, Christian Rosenkreutz, whose mission was to unify all the wisdom of humanity in preparation for the Last Judgment. The Rosicrucian myth draws inspiration from that of the Templars, the military and religious order founded for the Crusades, whose rule of life was written by Saint Bernard in 1129. It was persecuted by King Philip the Fair of France 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 in 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 Templars' knowledge and occult powers.
Isn't Freemasonry in fact inspired by the Templars?
Freemasonry is undoubtedly initially more directly inspired by Rosicrucianism. But its history is poorly understood. In the Middle Ages, the masons who built cathedrals were those who possessed knowledge of the symbols, and therefore of the esoteric dimension of Christianity. From the beginning of the 18th century, cathedral construction ceased, Christianity became more rationalized, and esoteric knowledge began to be lost. The transmission of knowledge then became organized within circles of initiates, and in 1717, the first Grand Lodge of London was established. A few decades later, Freemasonry claimed a very ancient legitimacy and traced its roots back to the Temple of Solomon via the Templars… who supposedly became the heirs of this ancient wisdom during their time in Jerusalem.
Are secret societies and Freemasonry therefore the major reactionary movements against the progress of rationalism and a materialistic vision of the world?
These were just the beginnings. The true 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 legacy of Sturm und Drang, was the first great collective movement to re-enchant the world, a full-fledged challenge to the materialistic, mechanistic, and disenchanted conception that prevailed in modern Western civilization. "Poetry is absolute reality," said Novalis. That is to say, the more poetic something is, the truer it is. What an extraordinary worldview! According to the Romantics, humanity, the cosmos, and the divine are closely intertwined and constitute a harmony, an infinite totality. Humanity's quest is to achieve this unity by experiencing the intensity of these relationships both internally and socially. In this sense, poetic activity and sensibility contribute to the re-enchantment of a world stripped of its charms by a commercialized modernity. The Romantics rehabilitated myths and folk tales (the Brothers Grimm) and the idea of the World Soul, the anima mundi of the Ancients, inventing a science of Nature, Naturphilosophie, which aimed to be an alternative to experimental science, which, according to this view, rests on a univocal conception of reality: there is only one level of reality, that which can be observed and manipulated. This philosophy of nature resonates with many poets, up to Baudelaire: "nature is a temple where living pillars..." (Correspondences). The early Romantics belonged to secret societies. Then they turned to the Orient, whose religious and philosophical depth was beginning to be discovered in Europe. In 1800, Friedrich Schlegel declared: "It is in the Orient that we must seek supreme Romanticism." The same scenario then unfolds as in the Renaissance: they idealize a mythical Orient whose sacred texts they believe date back thousands of years and predate the Bible. The discovery of the Orient fulfills the romantic dream of a golden age of humanity, perpetuated to this day in a civilization radically different from our own—wild, primitive, and devoid of all materialism. This illusion will soon be shattered 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 came the second great wave of esotericism, in the 19th century, when the word itself appeared.
Mid-19th-century esotericism inherited from all previous forms of esotericism—those of Antiquity, the Renaissance, the 18th century, and the Romantics—but it distinguished itself sharply from its predecessors by embracing the idea of progress and seeking to reconcile religion and science into a single body of knowledge. This new esotericism took several forms. One example is occultism, whose great theorist was the magician Eliphas Levi (1810–1875), which aimed to encompass all magical and divinatory practices by providing a pseudo-scientific explanation. It also saw the birth of Spiritism in 1848 in a small village in the United States, with the Fox sisters conducting experiments in contact with the dead that purported to be almost scientific. In Europe, the French medium Allan Kardec played a decisive role by codifying Spiritist practices in "The Spirits' Book." He was also the one who introduced the idea of reincarnation to the West, based on the modern concept of progress: spirits reincarnate from body to body according to a universal law of evolution governing all of creation. Thus, curiously, in the second half of the 19th century, which marked the triumph of scientism, most of the great creative minds, from Victor Hugo to Claude Debussy, including Verlaine and Oscar Wilde, turned tables to contact the dead or indulged in occult practices.
Another expression of this "modern" esotericism was the Theosophical Society. On September 8, 1875, in New York, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), a woman of Russian nobility, founded the Theosophical Society with Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907). A medium, she claimed to have received her teachings from spiritual masters she had supposedly 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. In 1912, the Theosophist Rudolf Steiner left the Society and founded his own movement, Anthroposophy, which would contribute to energizing the world of this esoteric counterculture. For anthroposophy, the world and humankind interact through a subtle interplay of correspondences. Steiner's genius lay in finding practical applications for his philosophy in medicine, economics, education, and other fields. For example, he developed biodynamic agriculture.
Do esoteric societies seem to have been disintegrating since the First World War?
The first half of the 20th century was so tumultuous that all these alternative spiritual movements were crushed. It wasn't until the 1960s that a new attempt to re-enchant the world emerged. This became known as the New Age movement, which originated in California and aimed to unite Western psychology with Eastern spirituality by seeking to connect humanity to the cosmos. But like the esotericisms that preceded it, this new alternative religiosity was more future-oriented than it was focused on the past and the myth of the lost Eden: it heralded the dawn of the New Age of Aquarius, the only astrological sign representing a human being and not an animal, and which symbolized the advent of a universal, humanist religion. What is remarkable about the New Age is that, in the age of mass media, it spreads the ideas of esotericism far beyond circles of initiates into global society: the divine is no longer personal but identified with a kind of "world soul", 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 within oneself; there are universal correspondences and intermediary beings, such as angels or the fundamental spirits of nature, etc.
These are powerful ideas that still appeal today and have recently been embraced by cinema and literature.
And with what success! Why do you think Paulo Coelho's "The Alchemist" has sold in over 140 countries? Because it reinterprets the ancient concept of the world soul, linking it to modern individualism. The book's leitmotif is that "the universe conspires to fulfill our personal legend," meaning our deepest desires. Most of today's major bestsellers fall into the esoteric category: The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or The Da Vinci Code, which synthesizes all the theories we've just discussed! Dan Brown's book is captivating. But it's 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 provides completely erroneous information, as we demonstrate in our book.
Dan Brown steers us towards a somewhat dubious esotericism and, moreover, he instills doubt in his reader to awaken their old paranoid reflexes, of the type "the truth is being hidden from us"..
He does indeed play on an old trope of esotericism, namely conspiracy theory. Esotericism, as I've said, developed 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, claiming that religions are trying to stifle us because we possess a secret truth they don't want to reveal. 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 valid points in the book, such as Christianity's repression of the sacred feminine. And I think we should also give credit to esotericism in general for having contributed an element of feminizing the divine. Because the esoteric ideas of the soul of the world, the immanence of the divine or its emanations are typically feminine archetypes.
It is indeed a beneficial endeavor, but do these conspiratorial and irrational theories not contain the seeds of real dangers?
Of course, some of these ideologies lead directly to a typically sectarian ideology: we are the chosen ones, the small circle of initiates who possess the sole truth while the rest of humanity wanders in ignorance. Others, which insist on the idea of a primordial tradition and criticize all modern progress, often have a far-right flavor. All are fraught with the risk of serious irrational excesses. In the sect of the Order of the Solar Temple, for example, murderous practices were legitimized in the name of the Templar "invisible masters"! For weak minds, there is a real risk of losing touch with reality. Umberto Eco, a skilled semiotician, offered in his first two novels the best critique I know of interpretive delusion. In The Name of the Rose, he denounces the interpretive delusion 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.
The return (or rather, the enduring presence) of esotericism in our modern societies can therefore be seen as a worrying sign of the need for magic and the irrational. It can also be seen as an attempt by modern Westerners to rebalance their imaginative and rational functions, the logical and intuitive polarities of their brains. Shouldn't we finally acknowledge, as Edgar Morin has been tirelessly reminding us for forty years, that human beings are both sapiens and demens? That they need reason as much as love and emotion, scientific knowledge as much as myths, to live a fully human life? In short, to lead a poetic existence.
Interview by Marie Lemonnier